Reconstructing Kairos and Chronos Across Trump’s Twitter/X Corpus: Computational Methods + Rhetorical Critique

Atilla Hallsby, Dan Faltesek

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The collective force of ex-U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweets/Xs is palpable in American public culture, political discourse, and academic rhetorical criticism. Adopting a critical and computational approach, this essay offers a novel method for the rhetorical analysis of social media-based public address by shifting emphasis from memorable exemplars of Trump’s social media discourse to the flow dynamics between those tweets/Xs. Focused on loops of Tweets as recursive argument systems, we use a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Markov Chain analysis to offer insight into the kairotic and chronic patterning of Trump’s social media utterances to map more and less stable argument strategies across distinct periods of his first Twitter/X presidency.
Original languageEnglish (US)
JournalWestern Journal of Communication
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

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