Sociolinguistics and CMC

So, a professor sent the department some sort of Discovery report about 'languages bursting forth', and in 'related articles', I noticed this:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/01/22/im-language.html

I'll see if I can find the actual research this story's about, but for the time being, it looks pretty basic (and more or less unsurprising.)
So, who wants their corpus? I know I do!

Having browsed the abstract submissions to SALSA this year, I see that we're pretty impoverished wrt sociocmc submissions. Seeing as how I'm chairing it this year, I was hoping that we'd be a little better represented. The deadline has passed, but if you're still interested, shoot me an email (joshiorio [-AT-] mail.utexas.edu) and we can work something out. The conference provides housing, transportation to the venue (and to the parties), and a couple meals... AND it only costs about 30 bucks.

http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/salsa/

Hi All,

I'm new to this blog, but I wanted to contribute some findings. I wrote a squib about the role of leet in CoPs, in light of David Heineman's paper Gleaning Meaning from Leetspeak that was presented at the 2004 NCA convention in Chicago. If I knew how to upload it, I would as a resource. I don't know how to do that...

First, I was surprised that there are so few articles addressing the use of blogs and the CoPs that work within them. But I was even more surprised that this (Heineman) paper was the only thing close to scholarly research on leetspeak. If you know of anything else, let me know.

Heineman's article was incredibly difficult to find. Why? The title was written in leet. Here's the link to the paper (try finding it without this link first for fun): http://convention.allacademic.com/nca2004/NCA_papers/NCA_2_12968a.PDF

Basically, this article addressed directly how "leetspeak" merits discussion in the field and how it is constantly changing to maintain shifts in particular identities. Just thought I'd share the link to this paper, since it was a real pain to track down...Let me know what you think, and I'd be glad to share my paper with anyone interested.

[crossposted at PC]

Mark Liberman's already covered it (in fact: hat tip), but there is this WSJ article about leetspeak, focusing on how to pronounce some internet-emergent words/spellings/phrases. Nothing's really surprising, except when I got to this sentence I nearly snarfed my coffee:

The words' growing offline popularity has stoked the ire of linguists, parents and others who denounce them as part of a broader debasement of the English language.

Ack! Mark doesn't mention this (hopefully) misguided attribution. Thankfully someone thought to ask someone who studies the most treasured English language user of all time what Shakespeare would think of all this, and this puts our minds at ease:

Gail Kern Paster, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has reason to believe that a certain English poet and playwright would cheer the latest linguistic leap. Just as the rise of the printed word and the theater spurred many new expressions during Shakespeare's time, the computer revolution, she notes, has necessitated its own vocabulary -- like "logging in" and "Web site."

"The issue of correctness didn't bother him," says Ms. Paster. "He loved to play with language." As for leet, "He would say, 'Bring it on,' absolutely."

If it's good enough for Shakespeare... The author also mentions some work on leet by Katherine Blashki, a new media studies professor in Australia. I am glad to hear of her work because I hadn't before, but check out how it's discussed:

Her subsequent, semester-long research on the subject found their use of leetspeak stemmed partly from wanting to find faster ways to express themselves online. As with other forms of jargon, it also enhanced a sense of belonging to a community, she says.

"It's ultimately about creating a secret language that can differentiate them from others, like parents," says Ms. Blashki. "That's part of being a teenager."

She presented her work at a conference in Spain and has since written nearly a dozen research papers on the topic. She admits she hasn't received much grant funding for her work. "My peers were aghast," she says.

I am confused about why they were aghast - aren't they media studies people? I think the author is trying to suggest that **even the uber-liberal relativistic academics are freaked out by leet**. And I honestly doubt that's the case - though if it is, it would be something good for me to learn now. I don't know about the media studies field, but in linguistics, people might be aghast at such study just because it's looking at writing and not speaking, and therefore studying something that lots of people still don't see as worthwhile to study. But it's not because they think that leet is awful or annoying or a sign of the downfall of society or language. No no.

Labels: leet, leetspeak, media, WSJ

omg! wtf?

Hi all,

I just started a wiki over at wetpaint for my (and your?) purposes: it's here. I have been meaning for forever to update my now-very-outdated CMC Bibliography page, but I think the best way to maintain something like this (and be driven to update it on a somewhat regular basis) is to have a collaborative, easily-editable format, which a wiki (I think, but we'll see) provides.

I am hoping to make it a place where we can maintain not only bibliographies, but links to relevant blogs, the websites of people who are doing relevant work, maybe stuff like book reviews?, and popular press articles and whatnot. Basically I always want to have an aggregate of all of this information but have never been un-lazy enough to make it happen. Maybe with other people's help it will...um...help.

So, if you feel like adding some content, please do so! And suggestions on the way pages are categorized and wahtnot are totally welcome - I just added some content-less pages to get stuff started, but it'll be a work in progress.

Labels: Web2.0

Hey, an interesting article about Facebook: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6260210.stm

Labels: Are my online friends for real?

There's an interesting discussion of language and lolcatz waiting to happen on the linguistic anthropology blog, as reported right on icanhascheezburger, as mentioned on language log.

i love when companies appropriate cmc-lects in their advertisements-

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nIUcRJX9-o

the positioning of the girl's speech as a second language is also cute.

There is a most interesting post up at Masters of Media about the virtues of online (text-based) communication. It's not a direct comparison of online and F2F, but it's explicitly a "defense" of online ways of interacting. I leave it to your reading enjoyment, 'cause it's finals and I got papers to write.

I will note that the post immediately made me think of the article "Internet and face-to-face communication: Not functional alternatives." (Flaherty, L.M., Pearce, K.J., & Rubin, R.B. (1998), Communication Quarterly 46 (3), 250-268) I don't know why, but this title has always stuck with me as emblematic of CMC research.

Hi all, I am getting ready to design an experiment for a class project (perhaps something bigger, in the future), and I'm just wondering if anyone knows of a body of literature that's experimental in nature related to language and CMC, specifically (para?)linguistic features like punctuation (!?.), eye dialect (hangin'; skillz [ok that maybe doesn't count as eye dialect but you know what I'm saying), or visual representations of verbal cues (soooooooo gooooood). An example of the type of thing I'm looking for would be what Iorio once proposed doing, that's either testing the relationship (or perceived relationship) between written forms and phonetic ones, or the perceptions of speakers based on written linguistic cues.

Any leads are appreciated!

Also, SocioCMC is going to Vancouver (or at least several of us are)! Hooray!

I believe all of you are aware of the online journal 'languae@internet'. I find it quite interesting. I wonder if the link (http://www.languageatinternet.de/) may be added to the 'list of links' on our blog!

By the way, here is an interesting article (http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles/761) that may be of some interest to some of you. I believe we may now safely include text messaging (SMS) as part of CMC if we consider the following definition of CMC- computer-mediated communication (CMC) is defined as predominantly text-based human-human interaction mediated by networked computers or mobile telephony (Herring, 2007).

I've found a corpus of the enron emails that were made public after the trial. It's a huge download and I haven't successfully actually gotten in there so that i can see the emails, but it IS a corpus :)

link to corpus

Please let me know if yall can actually get access to the emails.

sony has launched a blog site about their psp system for the holidays, hiring outside help to write it as if it were a real blog in the voice of what i imagine is supposed to be your typical gamer? ideologies galore. examples of assumedly-strategically-placed yet strikingly-random-in-their-placement features:

alphanumeric homophone abbreviations ("hope u like.")
adoption of leet-esque speech features ("pwn it!!1!" "hav3...")
lack of final punctuation in single sentences ("start knitting" "iron on")
multiple punctuation ("too funky fresh???" "pwn it!!1!")
various non-standard orthography ("playa" "srsly")

and the excellent lack of capitalization that abruptly ends (styleshifts?) when sony reveals itself to be the author of the blog. in their own post they even admit that the language of the blog was probably a bit much. more sociocmc talk about language and the gaming industry here.

Hello, everyone! It looks like many of the folks who post and comment here are doing interesting language-focused CMC research. Some of you may even be writing papers on CMD as I type this. If you would like to publish your work, allow me to make two suggestions.

1) A book I am co-editing on the Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication (with Dieter Stein in Germany and Tuija Virtanen in Finland) has lost some contributions and is looking for a couple of good papers that focus on pragmatic issues in online discourse to fill the gaps. If you're working on something that you think might be appropriate and that could be ready by the end of December (this month), contact me with a brief description of your paper, or email a draft version.

2) The online journal language@internet, edited by Dieter Stein (with yours truly on the editorial board) is dedicated to linguistic CMC research, and needs good submissions. It has the advantage of being an open-access journal, which means that people around the world can access it freely and are therefore more likely to read and cite your article. It also has a shorter time from submission to publication than most print journals.

If you're looking for a more traditional (print) journal in which to publish CMD research, the Journal of Pragmatics and the Journal of Sociolinguistics are both receptive, albeit not open access. There is also a brand-new journal, Discourse and Communication, that will be launched in February 2007, that is dedicated to the intersection of linguistic discourse analysis and communications research, and which should be friendly to CMD research (also not open access, unfortunately).

Of course, there is also the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, which publishes on CMC broadly construed, and occasionally publishes language-focused studies. And is open access ... but more competitive to get a paper accepted in (last year's acceptance rate was 15-20% of submissions).

I mention all this because I see a lot of talent in this blog, and a lot of good ideas. They deserve to be published! I know everyone is busy this time of year, but ... I hope you will think about it.