SAWT: Developing A corpus of Saudi women's voices on sociopolitical reforms

With the expanded use of corpus linguistic methods to investigate various real-life issues, corpora of different types have recently become a core interest for researchers. Purpose-built corpora have contributed valuable insights and implications in applied linguistics. Among the significant areas that require corpora compiled with robust criteria is social media. Following this, this study presents the SAWT (Saudi Women's Tweets) corpus, a purpose-built social media corpus designed to investigate Saudi women's attitudes and evaluations regarding sociopolitical reforms. The corpus is expected to bridge the notable gap in the literature regarding Saudi women's discourse on reforms, specifically on the X platform (Formerly Twitter), as a relatively considerable body of research has addressed the matter, yet no specialised corpora on the topic are available. Therefore, this article represents an endeavour to provide an accessible and well-documented corpus about Saudi women's X discourse in the post-reform era. It outlines the complete methodological procedures, starting from raw data collection, cleaning and processing, and corpus compilation. The study also reports the first tests and use of the SAWT corpus, presenting the major initial results. By doing this, the study introduces the corpus to the broader research community as a replicable model for constructing social media corpora. Therefore, it opens new pathways for research into compiling digital corpora, gendered digital discourse, stance, and empowerment.