Abstract
Fact-checking information before publication has long been a core task for journalists, but recent times have seen the emergence of dedicated news items specifically aimed at fact-checking after publication. This relatively new form of fact-checking receives a fair amount of attention from academics, with current research focusing mostly on journalists’ motivations for publishing post-hoc fact-checks, the effects of fact-checking on the perceived accuracy of false claims, and the creation of computational tools for automatic fact-checking. In this paper, we propose to study fact-checks from a corpus linguistic perspective. This will enable us to gain insight in the scope and contents of fact-checks, to investigate what fact-checks can teach us about the way in which science appears (incorrectly) in the news, and to see how fact-checks behave in the science communication landscape. We report on the creation of FactCorp, a 1,16 million-word corpus containing 1,974 fact-checks from three major Dutch newspapers. We also present results of several exploratory analyses, including a rhetorical moves analysis, a qualitative content elements analysis, and keyword analyses. Through these analyses, we aim to demonstrate the wealth of possible applications that FactCorp allows, thereby stressing the importance of creating such resources.