Corpus of political tweets UK-EU-DEBATE-20-21

The UK-EU-DEBATE-20-21 corpus was collected within the framework of the collaborative research project OLiNDiNUM (Observatoire LINguistique du DIscours NUMérique / Linguistic Observatory of Online Debate) to be part of a shared research archive of shared corpora and resources. 

The corpus was selected with a view to examining the UK-EU media debate on the COVID-19 vaccination campaign following a specific transformative moment: the signature of the Brexit withdrawal agreement by the UK and the EU at the end of January 2021.

The data were retrieved through the Application Programming Interface of the social networking site Twitter, using the accounts of key political actors in the UK government and EU institutions over a period of 14 months (1 February 2020–31 March 2021). The composition of the corpus is illustrated in the table.

Political Actor
Role
Account
Tweets

Boris Johnson
UK Prime Minister
@BorisJohnson
1186

Dominic R. Raab
UK Foreign Secretary
@DominicRaab
1468

Priti Patel
UK Home Secretary
@pritipatel
941

Ursula von der Leyen
President of the European Commission
@vonderleyen
1338

David Sassoli
President of the European Parliament
@EP_President
554

Charles Michel
President of the Council of the European Union
@eucopresident
675

The data are supplied in separate .csv files (tab-delimited format). Each row contains the text of the tweet (data__text) and the tweet identifier (data__id) as a header. The tweet identifier enables swift retrieval of the original tweet by searching https://twitter.com/anyuser/status/data__id.