This paper studies online petitioning through the analysis of data from the lapetition.be website, namely, more than 12,000 petitions having gathered 3.25 million signatures. The textual heterogeneity of the collected data has been understood both as traces of device constraints and traces of device appropriation. This heterogeneity is also characteristic of the act of petitioning and its plurality. The analysis of petitions’ texts reveals significant characteristics (form of address, lexical field, enunciation), and the analysis of petitions’ comments reveals the diversity of motives that lead someone to sign a petition. It brings to light the plurality of the act of petitioning.
- online petitionning
- web corpora
- textual data
- petitions’ text
- petitions’ comments