Rest in Peace: Exploring digital condolence discourse on RIP.ie before, during, and after COVID-19 restrictions in Ireland

Abstract

This dissertation explores the transformative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mourning practices, focusing on digital condolences shared on RIP.ie, the leading digital condolence site in Ireland. Understanding sociocultural constructs and practices related to death and mourning is important for multiple reasons and will contribute to our understanding of how: • individuals express and cope with grief in a digital age; • individuals navigate the grieving process in a digital space; • how digital technology is shaping the ways in which we express our condolences and grief; and • digital mourning practices may affect traditional norms and culture associated with mourning. Specifically, the study examines how expressions of condolence have evolved since pandemic restrictions and seeks to uncover social, cultural, and linguistic shifts that may have occurred during these changes to traditional mourning practices. Adopting an interdisciplinary sociocultural approach and drawing on theories and methodologies from digital humanities, the study examines how language is used in digital mourning discourse in Ireland. This study utilises automated web scraping to create three corpora from data on RIP.ie and conduct textual analyses to identify any quantitative or qualitative changes before, during and after COVID-19 restrictions on in person mourning. Quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal distinct textual and thematic changes across the groups including usage statistics, relative frequency of words, formality, and sentiment. The study underscores the evolving nature of condolence expression in the digital age, catalysed by technology and punctuated by the pandemic. This evolution promises innovative digital mourning modes that reshape remembrance practices and the ways we commemorate the deceased.