The aim of this study is to explore the possibility of identifying speaker stance in discourse, provide an analytical resource for it and an evaluation of the level of agreement across speakers. We also explore to what extent language users agree about what kind of stances are expressed in natural language use or whether their interpretations diverge. In order to perform this task, a comprehensive cognitive-functional framework of ten stance categories was developed based on previous work on speaker stance in the literature. A corpus of opinionated texts was compiled, the Brexit Blog Corpus (BBC). An analytical protocol and interface (ALVA) for the annotations was set up and the data were independently annotated by two annotators. The annotation procedure, the annotation agreements and the co-occurrence of more than one stance in the utterances are described and discussed. The careful, analytical annotation process has returned satisfactory inter- and intra-annotation agreement scores, resulting in a gold standard corpus, the final version of the BBC. 

The use of interactive visualization techniques in Digital Humanities research can be a useful addition when traditional automated machine learning techniques face difficulties, as is often the case with the exploration of large volumes of dynamic—and in many cases, noisy and conflicting—textual data from social media. Recently, the field of stance analysis has been moving from a predominantly binary approach—either pro or con—to a multifaceted one, where each unit of text may be classified as one (or more) of multiple possible stance categories. This change adds more layers of complexity to an already hard problem, but also opens up new opportunities for obtaining richer and more relevant results from the analysis of stancetaking in social media. In this paper we propose StanceXplore, a new visualization for the interactive exploration of stance in social media. Our goal is to offer DH researchers the chance to explore stance-classified text corpora from different perspectives at the same time, using coordinated multiple views including user-defined topics, content similarity and dissimilarity, and geographical and temporal distribution. As a case study, we explore the activity of Twitter users in Sweden, analyzing their behavior in terms of topics discussed and the stances taken. Each textual unit (tweet) is labeled with one of eleven stance categories from a cognitive-functional stance framework based on recent work. We illustrate how StanceXplore can be used effectively to investigate multidimensional patterns and trends in stance-taking related to cultural events, their geographical distribution, and the confidence of the stance classifier.