Keeping up with the digital age: New data sources in research on languages for specific purposes

Abstract

Social media exchanges (for example, via Facebook or Twitter), blogs, and forums, amongst many other electronic genres, have come to be used as relatively bona fide testimonies of language use nowadays. The present paper discusses how such language data can be effectively employed in research carried out into languages for specific purposes. Particularly, it describes a project which aims to compile a representative number of texts (in this case, blog posts) in the Spanish fashion panorama in order explore the lexis occurring in the specialised language. It thus details the procedure and criteria followed to create the database, and it tackles some of the challenges which the reader/researcher may encounter in this enterprise