Using visual text analytics to examine broadcast interviewing

•Discursis can provide overviews of the topical interaction in broadcast interviews.•Expert manual coding matched Discursis visual features.•Computer-aided analysis can allow researchers to analyze more content.•Discursis is particularly useful for analyzing hybrid forms of broadcast interview.

Broadcast interview hosts are increasingly adopting hybrid forms of interview through the utilization of interview techniques from different genres within the one interview (Ekström and Kroon Lundell, 2011 and Montgomery, 2008). Methods that can visually represent interviews in their entirety have the potential to assist in tracking and tracing genre shifts within a single interview. In this paper we examine traditional genres and hybrid forms of broadcast interviewing using a visual text analytic software Discursis (Angus et al., 2013, Angus et al., 2012a and Angus et al., 2012b). Discursis provides visual representations of whole interviews at-a-glance as well as the ability to focus into particular sections for closer analysis. Drawing on a corpus of 101 interviews from a single television program, this study examines if Discursis can meaningfully visually represent forms of interviewing genres (Montgomery, 2008) and highlight where shifting techniques (Ekström and Kroon Lundell, 2011) are used within a single interview.