Negotiation and Perception of concepts of 'Standardness' in the Context of Socio-Political Discourses in Austria

As part of my dissertation project, I am analysing the different conceptualisation and perception of ‘standard german’ or ‘standardness’ in general, as it can be traced over roughly two centuries of (written) news media in Austria. To accomplish this, I am working with two large corpora of Austrian newspapers, AustriaN Newspapers Online (ANNO) for the period of the early 19th century to the middle of the 20th century and the Austrian Media Corpus (AMC) for the last couple decades I will also include online user commentary embedded in web-articles of big Austrian newspapers in my study.
Seeing as the project is still in its early stages, my poster will focus on the aspects of data acquisition in the ANNO corpus, especially the selection of optimal keywords and specific newspapers best suited to answer the research questions of the dissertation. I will discuss challenges involved in working with a corpus, whose data has mostly been generated by using OCR Software on old newspaper texts, making the searchable corpus data unreliable at best.
I will also show some early results from to demonstrate, how the study of historical newspapers with discourse analytic and corpus linguistic methods can unearth insight into the language perception of a certain time.