tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-368859652024-02-18T17:52:50.418-08:00Digital NarrativesThis is a blog for exploring the many ways that digital media are transforming narratives, for example hypertexts, gaming, fanfiction, online archives, mash ups, digital storytelling, performance art on the web, blogging and more.Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.comBlogger110125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-16689514558759084102014-11-04T06:52:00.002-08:002014-11-04T06:52:39.557-08:00Birmingham Meet-up for the BAAL Language and New Media Special Interest Group<div class="MsoNormal">
On Thursday, 30 November, four members of the <a href="http://www.baal.org.uk/sig_lnm.html" target="_blank">Language and New Media SIG </a>gathered for the first local meet up for those of us based in the West
Midlands area. Based on the principles of Adam Grant’s <a href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/08/28/the-reciprocity-ring-a-new-take-on-giving/">Reciprocity
Ring</a>, I’d invited everyone who attended to share a little about their work
and one research-related need they would like the others in the group to help
with.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
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The discussions about our work reminded us again that as
linguists working with online data, the methods of preparing and analysing
materials are still very much in flux.
Each of us used a different tool for analysing their material. Jai
MacKenzie has been using NVivo in combination with a grounded theory approach
to identify themes in her Mumsnet data. Caroline Tagg has been using the XML
tagger developed by Matt Gee at Birmingham City University to code her corpus
of text messages. Erika Darics used
bespoke tools (developed by her husband) to sort and prepare the messages she
analysed in her PhD thesis. And I’ve
been using Excel sheets and pivot tables to sort my way through a 1.6 million
Tweet data set which I’m working on at the minute.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It seems that there is still a long way to go in finding
appropriate ways to deal with the complexity of the materials that ‘language
and new media’ open up to scrutiny.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s clear that we need to work collaboratively in order to
explore the multifaceted nature of these materials. For example, in my data, I need to be able to
examine image as well as text, and I want to be able to model the interactional
patterns that the meta-data of posts bring to light (as tools like Gephi
do). In other cases, it might be useful
to bring together ethnographic and corpus-based techniques. One of the aims of our SIG is to help people
make connections and develop models of good practice for mixed methods of
analysis. So if you have expertise you
would like to share, or need some help with working out which methods might
work for your project, please join our group and join the discussions on our
mailing list and Facebook page. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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You can email our SIG Communications Officer (<a href="mailto:bettina.beinhoff@anglia.ac.uk" target="_blank">Bettina Beinhof</a>) who can
add you to the list if you’d like to join us!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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In terms of helping each other resolve particular research
challenges, we were able to offer Jai some suggestions about how she could
refine her methods for coding data. And
we offered to read a draft of a chapter that Erika is working on. We couldn’t between us teach me how to use
Gephi <span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">J</span>
but I have some suggestions of people to contact for further advice.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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If you’d like to join us for the next meet up in Birmingham, watch out for more dates in the New Year or feel free to organise your own local meet up. <o:p></o:p></div>
Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-5997764291046200322014-02-11T13:30:00.002-08:002014-02-11T13:30:43.481-08:00Wikipedia, News and the Murder of Meredith Kercher case<div class="MsoNormal">
As some of you might know, I’ve become interested in the ways
that the Wikipedian archives can be analysed to show how the reporting of
particular events evolves over time. My essay which compared the English and
Italian Wikipedia articles for the Murder of Meredith Kercher was <a href="http://lal.sagepub.com/content/23/1/61.abstract">published in <i>Language and Literature</i></a> last week. <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/counter-narratives-controversial/id603518576?i=229869403">You
can listen to a presentation of that research as a work-in-progress</a> which
is available on iTunesU.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the points I made in that essay is that Wikipedia
makes it very easy to see how the knowledge presented in their articles is
constructed. As <a href="https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Expert_outreach/Jisc_Ambassador">Martin
Poulter (the JISC ambassador for Wikimedia</a>) put it at the EduWikimedia
conference in Cardiff last year, looking at the archives of Wikipedia is like
opening the bonnet of the car: it can help you understand how the car works. In the case of the Murder of Meredith Kercher
article, there are differences in how the events in this very controversial
case were represented over time and which varied between the different language
Wikipedias.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the ways in which the articles varied was in how they
prioritised citations from different news sources as sources for verifiability.
I did the research on the Murder of Meredith Kercher article over a year ago.
Given that the verdicts from the retrial were announced 10 days ago, I wondered
whether the recent news interest in the case would also influence how the
article developed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s too early for a substantial piece of research on this,
but watching the article for the week following the verdict of the retrial, you
can see several things.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1. There is a marked increase in the number of page views of
the article as news interest in the verdict increased. The <a href="http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Murder_of_Meredith_Kercher">tool which
measures the page views of Wikipedia articles</a> shows the peak viewing for
the English language version on 31 Jan with 281,167 page views and 81,445 views
on the day preceding (30 Jan) and 88,165 views on the day after (1 Feb). This
is much higher than in the preceding three months (by comparison, the most
frequent views per day are only 6,071).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A similar pattern occurs in the <a href="http://stats.grok.se/it/latest30/Omicidio_di_Meredith_Kercher">page views
for the article</a> in the Italian Wikipedia,
though the peak viewing figures on 31 Jan is somewhat more modest at 19,821
page views.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2. There is an increase in editing activity for the week after
the verdict of the retrial was announced.
Although the article has been edited regularly since it was first in
November 2007 (see the <a href="http://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/articleinfo/index.php?article=Murder_of_Meredith_Kercher&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia">Page
History statistics for this article</a> in the English Wikipedia and the <a href="http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl?lang=it.wikipedia&page=Omicidio+di+Meredith+Kercher">Page
History statistics for the article</a> in the Italian Wikipedia), this has
peaked at particular times: (1) in December 2009 (when Knox and Sollecito were
first convicted) (2) in October 2011 (when Knox and Sollecito were acquitted)
and now again when Knox and Sollecito have been reconvicted.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s a much smaller scale comparison, but here is the
frequency of editing in the 10 days before and after the verdict of the retrial
in the English and Italian Wikipedias.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJG2tP8dJ4o_gjdOdLZ61SqFunknA2ucXO5ZkdiIeKT-xgdedkhz-4IL91gOFXDxk1MT-jFt4jF6xWXiLjPUtIAHA_OsuiH9F5yk0x9O7iKAXVdQ5H_E1Awam4HsrptxiTldL_/s1600/MoMK+revisions+11+Feb.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJG2tP8dJ4o_gjdOdLZ61SqFunknA2ucXO5ZkdiIeKT-xgdedkhz-4IL91gOFXDxk1MT-jFt4jF6xWXiLjPUtIAHA_OsuiH9F5yk0x9O7iKAXVdQ5H_E1Awam4HsrptxiTldL_/s1600/MoMK+revisions+11+Feb.JPG" height="192" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<br /><!--[endif]--></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
3. In the English language Wikipedia, the editing doesn’t
just include the addition of breaking news, but where it does, these are
supported with citations from news sources. The verdict itself is added with a
citation from the BBC News, reactions from the Knox family cited from the Daily
Telegraph, Sollecito’s reaction cited from Sky News, and Knox and Sollecito’s
plans for appeal cited from the Guardian Newspaper.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
4. Other changes include substantially re-ordering the
content of the material so that the first section which documents Prosecution
process for each of the original suspects is no longer Amanda Knox, but is Rudy
Guede. I’ve argued in the past that the structure
of the article had a particular focus on Knox (earlier this year the section
documenting her treatment in the Prosecution was six times longer than that of
Sollecito’s section or Guede’s section: this change seems to alter that
perspective).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I should say at this point that my analysis of the Wikipedia
article is not in any way making a judgement about the outcomes of the Meredith
Kercher case: that’s not my remit. I’m a linguist, not a forensic specialist or
a lawyer.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nor does my analysis stereotype Wikipedia as a poor source
of information. In fact, I think it is a very interesting source of
information: information about how contemporary events are collectively
documented in different cultural contexts and about where the editors of Wikipedia
get their source material. So when you next type a search term into google and
find yourself using Wikipedia as the first information source you find, don’t forget to ‘lift
the bonnet’ and find out which resources the Wikipedia editors are using to
support their points.</div>
Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-2541372779569083672013-12-26T06:45:00.001-08:002013-12-26T06:45:20.914-08:00Reflections on 2013<div class="MsoNormal">
The end of the year is always a good time for
reflection. Looking back at 2013, my
working life has been characterised by collaboration, creativity,
community-building and connections. All
four aspects have been rewarding, challenging and enabled me to work with
people and complete projects I could never have done on my own. Being busy with all of these is one of the
reasons I don’t seem to have time to write on this blog! So here are a few highlights....</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Last January, I put in a proposal to the BAAL Executive committee
to start <a href="http://www.baal.org.uk/sig_lnm.html">a new special interest
group for scholars working in Language and New Media</a>. We held our first
colloquium in September at the BAAL annual meeting and <a href="http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/news/conferences/baal-special-interest-group/baal-special-interest-group-language-and-social-media-workshop">first
workshop in Leicester in November</a>. You can join our group by adding
yourself to our <a href="https://www.facebook.com/languageandnewmedia">Facebook
page</a> and emailing our communications officer Bettina Beinhof (Bettina.beinhof@anglia.ac.uk)
who will add you to the mailing list. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Part of that work of building the community of scholars in the
UK working on social media/computer mediated discourse has included
co-authoring a student textbook with David Barton, Johnny Unger and Michele
Zappavigna: <i><a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415842006/">Researching the
Language of Social Media</a></i>. It’s
been quite a challenge to pull that together in the timescales that Routledge
wanted, but we’ve done it and that textbook will be out next year. I know
considerably more about research methods now than I did 12 months ago. The book is much stronger because of the expertise that David, Michele and
Johnny have brought to the project: it’s all the better for the work they put
in.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The most creative aspects of collaborating with others have
been brought about by the work I’ve done on the <a href="http://transformingthresholds.weebly.com/">AHRC Research Network:
Transforming Thresholds</a>. We’ve got another
four months to run with that project. It’s
been one of the most energising, transforming experiences to work with the
brilliant network of academics, museum practitioners and commercial partners. I’m
especially thankful to Ross Parry and Alex Moseley who helped plan the events
and who make me think more creatively about how to collaborate effectively with
others, to Nathan Human of Citizen 598 who filmed everything, to the Digital
Hub at the University of Birmingham who have felt like a second home through
the first couple of events, and ‘Team Petrie’ (Giancarlo Amati from UCL, Tracy
Harwood from DMU’s Retail Lab, Jo Sivell from the University of Birmingham,
Angus Deuchars from Arup, Juan-Luis Sanchez and Maria Marot from Cosas
Industries) who helped put together the case study that I was most closely
involved in at the Petrie Museum. I’m always going to remember that baking hot
day in July when the images and soundscape were installed in the museum’s
stairwell!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m also incredibly grateful for the opportunities I’ve had
to talk about my work at a series of different events this year (15 of them),
and the connections that were created across academic communities and
countries. Landmark memories will be the super-smart and super-nice bunch of
graduate students who I worked with at the <a href="http://sins.au.dk/former-sins/sins-2013/">Summer Institute of Narrative
Studies for Aarhus University</a>, the equally super-smart and super-nice
scholars and museum partners from <a href="http://www.dream.dk/">Southern
Denmark’s DREAM project</a> (both of which gave me opportunities to visit
beautiful places in Denmark); speaking at the 4<sup>th</sup> international
Narrative Conference in Guangzhou (a privilege to see a remarkable city and to make
new friends); within the world of narrative studies, speaking at the
contemporary narrative panel at <a href="http://www2.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/conferences/international-conference-on-narrative/contemporary-narrative-theory-session-speakers/">the
ISSN Manchester Conference</a>, and at the feminist narratology symposium in
Cambridge; and in the somewhat newer-to-me world of Knowledge Exchange work I also very much enjoyed the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tkex/sets/">Creative Exchange’s Knowledge
Exchange conference in Lancaster</a>, especially singing an anthem of KE.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Looking back, I’ve much to be thankful for in 2013. I’ve met
and worked with amazing people, and learned as much from what has gone wrong as
well as the successes. </div>
Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-22088570973341237312013-03-05T03:31:00.003-08:002013-03-05T03:31:59.953-08:00Research ethics: Check list for regulatory ethicsAlong with Johnny Unger, David Barton and Michele Zappavigna, I'm writing a new student text book for Routledge: <i>Researching the Language of Social Media</i>.<br />
<br />
I'm in the process of writing the chapter on ethics. This feels like quite a responsibility to get right! Each section of the chapter will end with a series of questions which students can use to reflect on their decisions made at different parts of the research process.<br />
<br />
Here are the questions which I have drafted for the section on 'regulatory ethics'. Are there any other questions about regulations that I should include?<br />
<br />
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<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">·</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">Are you carrying out your work in a context which
requires your project to be approved by an institutional committee or review
board?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">·</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">Will you be collecting data which is subject to data
protection or copyright legislation?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">·</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">Have you consulted the best practice guidelines for
your discipline?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">·</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">What ethical decisions did other researchers make
about similar projects, and was this satisfactory?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">·</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">Is the material you want to study governed by site-specific
regulations? Do these regulations restrict how you represent yourself, interact
with others, collect or reuse data from the site?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">·</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-indent: -18pt;">Who are the people in your academic community with
whom you could discuss ethical decision-making?</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-22765395967141136242013-02-27T04:54:00.002-08:002013-02-27T09:09:12.188-08:00Teaching Creative Writing Using WikipediaThis morning I am teaching a class for our first year module: <a href="http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/undergraduate/optionsubjects/creative-writing" target="_blank">An Introduction to Writing Creatively</a>.<br />
<br />
We've been discussing how to write and publish material online, using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page" target="_blank">Wikipedia </a>as a case study. <br />
<br />
The students have chosen a controversial topic, written their own version, have compared this with Wikipedia's version of the same topic and are now editing each other's work.<br />
<br />
The topics they have chosen include: Sir Jimmy Savile, Same Sex Marriage in the UK, the Soham Murders, the Watergate Scandal, and Mormonism.<br />
<br />
We're using this experience to generate a list of top issues that emerge when (1) Writing about controversy and (2) Editing each other's work. Here is a summary of the topics they raised:<br />
<br />
<strong>Issues related to Writing about Controversy</strong>:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>How much can you rely on your reader's knowledge?</li>
<li>It's hard to stay neutral because the cases are very big and well publicised. This influences your opinion.</li>
<li>The reliability of 'experts' can be questionable.</li>
<li>It is difficult not to give undue weight to particular aspects of a case (in terms of focus and sidelining other material)</li>
<li>You need an explanation of key terms: jargon can exclude fair representation of a topic.</li>
<li>Repetition can be difficult to avoid - and repetition can be dangerous because you can obscure details and repetition can be used as a rhetorical effect which sways audience response.</li>
<li>The publication or use of controverisal material might have long term implications (e.g. what if Maxine Carr's child found they were studying the Wikipedia article for the Soham murder in class?)</li>
<li>If you are quoting newspapers, how you contextualise these can vary in terms of how biased the citation might appear.</li>
<li>It's difficult to provide enough information for your audience without overwhelming them with detail.</li>
</ul>
<br />
Tips for editing a non-fictional account of a controversial event:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Don't overload the lead section with detail: include the key facts first.</li>
<li>Be careful about how you structure giving information: think about how sections can be used to organise definitions and topics, and give focus to the subject matter.</li>
<li>Make sure that the information is logical and chronological: that it does not jump around too much.</li>
<li>Make sure that the opening sentence makes the topic clear from the outset.</li>
<li>Use signposting judiciously to guide the reader</li>
</ul>
With thanks and acknowledgement to Rob, Jordan, Alyson, Lauren, Sarah and Charlotte.Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-86957401953586063532013-02-13T08:18:00.000-08:002013-02-13T08:18:39.321-08:00Article on Counter narratives and Wikipedia<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">So I have been hopelessly, shamefully bad at posting to my blog. I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, just really busy with lots of different things. Here's an abstract for an essay I've just finished writing and is under review for a special issue of 'Language and Literature'. If you'd like to read the full draft, please email me.</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Counter
narratives and controversial crimes: The Wikipedia article for the ‘Murder of
Meredith Kercher’<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Narrative theorists
have long recognised that narrative is a selective mode of representation. There
is always more than one way to tell a story, which may alter according to its
teller, audience and the social or historical context in which the story is
told. But multiple versions of the
‘same’ events are not always valued in the same way: some versions may become
established as dominant accounts, whilst others may be marginalised or resist
hegemony as counter narratives (Bamberg and Andrews, 2004). This essay explores the potential of
Wikipedia as a site for positioning counter and dominant narratives. Through the analysis of linearity and
tellership (Ochs and Capps, 2001) as exemplified through revisions of a
particular article (‘The Murder of Meredith Kercher’), I show how structural
choices (open versus closed sequences) and tellership (single versus multiple
narrators) function as mechanisms to prioritise different dominant narratives
over time and across different cultural contexts. The case study points to the dynamic and
relative nature of dominant and counter narratives. In the ‘Murder of Meredith Kercher’ the
counter narratives of the suspects’ guilt or innocence and their position as
villains or victims depended on national context, and changed over time. The changes in the macro-social narratives
are charted in the micro-linguistic analysis of structure, citations and quoted
speech in four selected versions of the article, taken from the English and
Italian Wikipedias. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I
argue that site architecture of Wikipedia is structured in such a way to
suppress or foreground narrative controversy in different ways. The article’s front page is default view for
readers where the dominant narrative is likely to be foregrounded and
controversy is obscured. In contrast, the
talk pages document a meta-narrative of conflict between contributors as they
negotiate which material might be included in the account. Between the front page and the talk pages is
a third, liminal narrative space: the revision pages of the article. As the prior, but less visible versions of
the ongoing narrative-in-progress, the archive allows the recovery of previous
retellings, but always subordinates the polyphonic controversy of earlier
retellings to the pages hidden behind the hegemonic, superficially unified
narrative which is given precedence on the article’s main front page. In this
way, Wikipedia is able to manage the tensions of controversial narration,
simultaneously acknowledging that no single version of events can tell the
‘whole story’ of these controversial crimes (by allowing access to previous
versions of the article), but giving primary position to the version of events
most in keeping with Wikipedia’s own values of ‘Neutral Point of View’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-37918495237710002212012-02-15T01:33:00.000-08:002012-02-15T01:33:50.701-08:00Google Plus and Student Feeback<div class="MsoNormal">Following in the footsteps of my colleague <a href="http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Alan Cann</a>, we’ve been piloting the use of Google Plus to support our first year undergraduate module (History of English) at the <a href="http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/about" target="_blank">University of Leicester</a>.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One of the ways we have used the stream is to encourage student feedback on the module on a week-by-week basis.<span> </span>Traditionally, module feedback is taken once the teaching has finished and used to feed forward into the redesign of the module for the coming year.<span> </span>We have not found a satisfactory way of allowing students to see what we do with their feedback, and only a small sample of students (10% of the cohort) usually completes the surveys.<span> </span>But we know that feedback is vital, should be formative, rapid and dialogic.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Last week we posted our first ‘#Fridayreflection’ question, asking students to reflect on the role of Powerpoint presentations in lectures as part of their learning.<span> </span>Only nine students (of the 160 signed up to the circle) posted to the stream on this topic, but still, the feedback was very useful. It has mean that we could modify the presentations right away (we are only in week 3 of the course) and, more importantly, we could talk with the students immediately about their comments.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m hoping that more students will join in, and I want to find a way of encouraging higher levels of engagement.<span> </span>We are not assessing their contributions, so the feedback is voluntary.<span> </span>If you’ve got suggestions, please let me know!</div>Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-33097010587717207452011-12-07T03:31:00.000-08:002011-12-07T06:21:14.221-08:00It's all about you? Celebrating a year of BBC Woman's Hour on TwitterEarlier this week I got a call from the producer of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/womans-hour/" target="_blank">BBC Woman's Hour</a>, who had read the <a href="http://www2.le.ac.uk/news/blog/2011-archive/december/tweet-elite-how-women-are-leading-the-social-media-discussion" target="_blank">press release</a> that the University of Leicester recently ran about my new book (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Social-Media-Interaction-Sociolinguistics/dp/0415889812">Stories and Social Media</a>). Later this month (27th December), BBC Woman's Hour are running an item on Twitter and women. Very exciting!<br />
<br />
So the linguist in me couldn't resist taking a peek at the tweets <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/BBCWomansHour">@bbcwomanshour</a> have posted over the last year and seeing how their vital statistics matched up with some of the patterns I've observed in celebrity, corporate and 'ordinary' use of Twitter. And this is what I found:<br />
<br />
<strong>Followers v. Following</strong>:<br />
The profile information for @bbcwomanshour lists 26,354 followers and 2,590. Like celebrities and 'ordinary' Twitter members, there are more followers than those that @bbcwomanshour follows. But the scale of the asymmetry is a ratio 10:1 (followers: following), so closer to the asymmetry that you see on average between 'ordinary' Twitter members (6:1), rather than the disparity on celebrity accounts (60:1).<br />
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<strong>Types of Tweet</strong>:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbeqLlyPmM0SCr16GmnVINIk6hKEWyH0bJlj70vZvkI8CW5B0H3SI-fsP-VLkOpR-JS96q5Fxs1mYNBt-RL7yofO96pgRtg-nhuiBN88WSY7uz1G_Olex_pMz4bIOeIjQzQ8Qt/s1600/Types+of+tweet.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" mda="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbeqLlyPmM0SCr16GmnVINIk6hKEWyH0bJlj70vZvkI8CW5B0H3SI-fsP-VLkOpR-JS96q5Fxs1mYNBt-RL7yofO96pgRtg-nhuiBN88WSY7uz1G_Olex_pMz4bIOeIjQzQ8Qt/s320/Types+of+tweet.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>Like other members of Twitter, @bbcwomanshour use more updates (one-to-many broadcasts) than either directly addressed messages which appear in the public timeline or retweets. Based on the type of tweet, it would seem that @bbcwomanshour is not very conversational. <br />
<br />
But that belies the way that @bbcwomanshour seems to be using Twitter, which is not only to promote upcoming features, but to ask the audience for their opinions. If we look more closely at the pronouns that appear in the tweets, the updates use the pronouns 'you' and 'your' (that focus on the audience) far more frequently than 'us', 'our' or 'we' (that focus on the show's producers and presenters). And this difference is especially obvious in @bbcwomanshour if we compare it with the way corporate accounts, celebrities and 'ordinary' members of Twitter talk, and if we compare it with large offline corpora (like the British National Corpus or the Contemporary Concordance of American English).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAASrIEm2v1YpGbMnO4I7gUA3MlCwN7KIXfXQkRKK3oU5ZkWhzJiYGZLnA2dojQm7IdbNAKz72b4Lq0dLUIwRuHt_Axl1hyphenhyphen5Yil6j66wPcC9Hmt-x60omr7vqKxwPFHkffhejD/s1600/pronouns.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" mda="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAASrIEm2v1YpGbMnO4I7gUA3MlCwN7KIXfXQkRKK3oU5ZkWhzJiYGZLnA2dojQm7IdbNAKz72b4Lq0dLUIwRuHt_Axl1hyphenhyphen5Yil6j66wPcC9Hmt-x60omr7vqKxwPFHkffhejD/s320/pronouns.PNG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<strong>High frequency words and Hashtags</strong><br />
It's not surprising that the most frequent lexical items that appear in the word list for the @bbcwomanshour tweets are topped by 'tomorrow' (which is usually followed by information about an upcoming feature) and 'women' (which appears three times as frequently as 'men') and signals the main themes that the features address. When we look at the hashtags which are used in tweets we can see that this focus on the show and its featured themes is still present: 8% of all the hashtags used by @bbcwomanshour were directly making the term '#bbcwomanshour' more visible. The choice of hashtags also shows @bbcwomanshour engaging with current events (like #spendingreview, #tubestrikes), but more than anything else (even more than the #ff tag), the hashtags are about food: (#cooktheperfect, #cooking, #recipe, #pasta, #italianfood, #Maryberry and so on).<br />
<br />
It's refreshing that @bbcwomanshour are not simply using Twitter to 'broadcast their brand'. Their tweets show engagement with their audience (especially in the use of retweets which forward on audience comments for wider response). And perhaps they hint of the importance that food has for 'women's talk'. Given that I'm married to the wonderful <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/tobizzy2bake" target="_blank">@tobizzy2bake</a>, talking about, making, eating and sharing food has a key place in family life and the friendships that surround our home. All we need now is for a form of virtual #cake that would actually taste good too.Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-1755801155597228532011-11-09T06:30:00.000-08:002011-11-09T06:30:46.606-08:00Follow Friday as Self BrandingAs you might know if you've been reading this blog for a while, I've been working on a paper which examines hashtags (#hashtags) in Twitter. The paper is a study of how hashtags are used by corporate, celebrity and 'ordinary' Twitter accounts. Today I've been writing about the 'Follow Friday' tag, and its implications for self branding. Here are a couple of paragraphs:<br />
<br />
#FF is the abbreviation for ‘Follow Friday’, a weekly practice whereby Twitter members promote to their follower list the usernames of other members that are deemed worthy of interest. These recommendations are considered a token of esteem that within the linguistic economy of Twitter enhances the visibility and follower list of the nominated members. But while the Follow Friday practice appears in part altruistic, it also manifests subtle forms of self-branding, insofar as it enables the recommending updater to establish their position as an expert, who differentiates the hierarchies of perceived value in Twitter. The list of recommended usernames is one means by which the updater can display their network of contacts, and affirm their bonds within that network, which often (although not always) reflects their professional identity. For example, Selfridges uses #FF to promote fashion designers and magazines, the actor William Shatner’s ‘colleagues and friends’ include other actors and directors, while the lawyer recommended ‘legal industry peeps’.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
#ff these legal industry peeps @karasmamedia @markbower @tessashepperson @jamesdunninggeo @brianinkster #law #uklaw<br />
<br />
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:10<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Follow Friday! #ff @vogue_london @grazia_live @nicolerichie<br />
<br />
Selfridges, Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:43<br />
<br />
<br />
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Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:26:40 +0000 Another #FF for more colleagues and friends @rhettreese @willsasso @christophcarley @ac_field @paulcamuso and one more for @davidzappone<br />
<br />
William Shatner, Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:26<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The #FF tag also appeared with expressions of thanks, which both acknowledges and reaffirms the hashtag as a means of accruing visibility and support.<br />
<br />
<br />
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Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:40:02 +0000 A BIG thank you to everyone who #FF, RTed & mentioned us over the weekend. We always appreciate your support!<br />
<br />
Hoover, Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:40<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
thanks for the #FF love @craigcalcaterra @Jason_IIATMS @fackyouk @BrentSGambill! Traveling, will #FF next week...<br />
<br />
Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:10<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
As a form of politeness, thanks imply that the recipient of the ‘Follow Friday’ is in the debt of the recommender. But, at the same time, posting such thanks also builds the reputation of the member by reproducing the recommendation and projecting their identity as someone who is esteemed to be worth following. In some cases, the #FF is explicitly self-promoting, where corporations and celebrities use the practice to advertise their products or outlets, such as the Travel Channel who promoted their new show, Deathwishmovers,<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
#FF @DeathwishMovers (our new show)<br />
<br />
Travel Channel Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:15<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Or the actress, Dannii Minogue who recommended the accounts for her fashion line (ProjectD), which sold through the department stores Selfridges and Marks and Spencer, and designed by Tabitha Webb. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
#FF @projectdonline @selfridges @marksandspencer @tabswebb<br />
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Dannii Minogue, Fri, 14 May 2010 10:29.<br />
<br />
<br />
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What do you think your #FF recommendations say about you? Are they an altruistic attempt to build the reputation of others, or a subtle form of self promotion?Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-72281119514820691322011-09-14T06:01:00.000-07:002011-09-14T06:01:59.650-07:00Checklist to be used when planning a new use of social media in HENext week, I'll be giving a presentation as part of the <a href="http://guardianseminarsocialhe.eventbrite.com/">Guardian's Professional Seminar Series</a>. I want to help others think through the planning entailed in using social media to enhance the student experience, and so I've created a check list of questions. Is there anything I've left out?<br />
<br />
<strong>Resource gathering</strong><br />
• Has anyone else implemented the kinds of change you are planning? What can you learn from their experience?<br />
• Are there any open resources that would be helpful?<br />
• What equipment or software will be needed? Who will maintain/store it?<br />
<br />
<strong>Training</strong><br />
• How many staff and students will be involved? What are their training needs?<br />
• What help guides might be needed?<br />
• When will you (or someone else) provide training/induction, coaching and practice sessions?<br />
<br />
<strong>Departmental/Institutional issues</strong><br />
• How does your innovation fit within institutional /departmental policy and practices?<br />
• Which other staff in your department might need to know about your innovation? What mechanisms are there for sharing good practice?<br />
• If your innovation is based at a module level, what are the implications for other modules the students will undertake?<br />
• Will the student work be archived? Available for other students (and others) to see in later years?<br />
• Does your innovation have benefits for other students beyond your course? Are there links to be made with the library/study skills/employability provision?<br />
• Will your use of social media duplicate existing modes of communication (e.g. email, VLE announcements)?<br />
• Will your use of social media be public?<br />
<br />
<strong>Role of the Tutor</strong><br />
• What will the role of the tutor entail? Providing content? Technical support? Trouble shooting? Moderation?<br />
• Will tutors provide feedback to students? How often? When? How? How long will this take?<br />
• How does the use of social media relate to what is taught in class contact time?<br />
• Is the use of social media assessed? What criteria will be used?<br />
• How will you ensure that students take part?<br />
• How will you help students develop a public profile/voice through your intervention?<br />
<br />
<strong>General</strong><br />
• What are your measures of success?<br />
• What risks are entailed?<br />
• Does your innovation create any digital divides, and if so, what can you do about it?Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-70451643841756096842011-07-15T03:18:00.000-07:002011-07-15T03:18:17.953-07:00Corporate Twitter, interaction and synthetic personalizationI’ve been extending the analysis of ‘celebrity practice’ in Twitter that forms a chapter in my new book (<a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415889810/">Stories and Social Media</a>) by comparing the language used in corporate Twitter accounts with the celebrity and ‘ordinary’ datasets that I gathered last year. <br />
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<br />
(Thanks again to my colleague <a href="http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/people/drphilipashaw">Philip Shaw</a> for his help with this!)<br />
<br />
My analysis has focused on hashtags as identity markers, and today I was doing a more fine-grained (for which read 'manual') analysis of the grammatical contexts in which the most frequently occurring hashtags appear. It won’t surprise you that when the most frequent hashtags from corporate accounts occur with questions and/or imperatives, these projections of interaction are mechanistically reproduced (i.e. it is the exactly the same question that gets reposted numerous times).<br />
<br />
I also observed that there were some modified Retweets in the updates with hashtags too, which <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/RuthPage/narrative-tellership-in-social-media">I argued elsewhere</a> is a form of synthetic personalization (<a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ZRHCNMN3qqUC&oi=fnd&pg=PR8&ots=5Gt9rBrzVf&sig=lf3X5bWJYSzOR-Xw4tWFucF-QAo#v=onepage&q&f=false">Fairclough 1989</a>): that is, a pseudo-backstage (in Goffman's sense) performance which simulates solidarity, but is more like a mass-media broadcast than peer-to-peer conversational exchanges.<br />
<br />
Modified Retweets appeared in the updates from my datasets with the following frequency:<br />
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Corporate accounts: 20%<br />
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Celebrity accounts: 12%<br />
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‘Ordinary’ accounts: 5%<br />
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So my question is, why would this happen, or what do these results suggest? <br />
Is it a case that the more ‘branded’ an account is, the greater the need for synthetic personalization? <br />
Are the modified Retweets there to counterbalance (and give a personal voice in contrast to) the mechanistic questions and imperatives that co-occur with hashtagged-tweets in corporate accounts? <br />
Will 'ordinary' accounts employ dyadic interchange (one-to-one conversations) instead of one-to-many broadcasts?<br />
<br />
What do you think?Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-2929293818192868442011-06-20T09:18:00.000-07:002011-06-20T09:18:57.894-07:00Hashtags and communities of practiceI’ve begun to look at hashtags (#) used in tweets. I’m interested in the way that people use hashtags to signal their membership of wider groups, and so to indicate aspects of their identity.<br />
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<br />
Hashtags make a tweet searchable, and so visible to others who search for tweets on the same topic. If you search for the hashtag #worldcup2010 you will find all the tweets written about that event, whether or not you follow the people who wrote those messages.<br />
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One aspect of the hashtag is that it seems to signal participation in a shared event, for example <br />
<br />
• going to a conference: #gurt2011 (Georgetown Roundtable 2011)<br />
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• Watching a TV show or mainstream media event: #Lost; #BGT; #worldcup2010<br />
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• Supporting a campaign: #foodrevolution, #stoptrafficking<br />
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• Commenting on national events: #ge2010 (general election 2010)<br />
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But I am not convinced that the use of the hashtag creates a ‘community of practice’ around these events. Although the participants are using the same linguistic repertoire, their tweets are isolated broadcasts and there is no ‘mutual engagement’. There are a lot of people all offering their opinions, but not necessarily engaging with each other (they are just all talking about the same topic, not to each other).<br />
<br />
So is there an existing term that describes this aggregating effect, where the talk of an asynchronous and geographically disparate audience coalesces temporarily around a particular event? I know Anstead and O’Loughlin (2010) described this practice as a viewertariat, but I am talking about something wider than this, which mimics a community but is not one. Suggestions?Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-13824489966195425662011-06-16T06:11:00.000-07:002011-06-16T06:11:07.367-07:00Using Antconc to search social media dataIn my recent work on Twitter, I've been using the freely available and user-friendly concordancing software, <a href="http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html">Antconc</a> to search for frequency and collocation patterns in the datasets I've compiled. <br />
<br />
On Thursday 23 June, 2011 at 10.am I'll be in the <a href="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/place?cid=15937401690933119124&q=david+wilson+library+university+of+leicester&hl=en&sll=52.592204,-1.032715&sspn=0.339538,1.347198&ie=UTF8&ll=52.762061,-1.707001&spn=0,0&z=10">David Wilson Library Cafe</a>, happy to chat about the basics of using Antconc. If you'd like to join me for a coffee and an informal Antconc 101 seminar, you'd be very welcome. Give me a shout on Twitter (@ruthtweetpage if you are coming along!Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-31180090653064109742011-03-31T05:00:00.000-07:002011-03-31T05:00:33.878-07:00'Frape' and homosocial solidarityThis week I have been working on a chapter for my new book. The topic is inauthenticity in social media, and it contains some discussions of Facebook 'rape'. At the outset, I want to say that I know the term is really problematic. When I use the term here I don't want to trivialize debates about rape. But as a shorthand to describe what happens when a third party accesses and publishes inauthentic material on a private Facebook account, I'm keeping it for the time being. Here is a short extract from what I have written this morning. I'm not sure it is going to make it in to the book, as I am reaching over the word count, but here goes:<br />
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The inauthentic identities projected through ‘frape’ are often not as innocuous as they might claim to be. , ‘Frape’ often involves projecting sexual identities for the victim. This aspect of ‘fraping’ drew the attention of one of my former students who wrote his term paper on the parodic qualities of ‘frape’ as a means of denaturalizing the mechanics of gender performativity (Butler 2008: 187-188). Here I want to suggest that the gaps made apparent through the incongruous tellability of ‘frape’ are a resource used to position the victim, perpetrator and the ‘knowing’ audience within a shared social identity of heteronormativity. <br />
<br />
<br />
When ‘frapes’ contain sexually explicit material, they often project a sexual identity for the victim that falls outside conventional representations of heteronormativity. This can range from homosexual activity, bestiality, promiscuity to activity with a woman who doesn’t conform to stereotypical, western standards of sexually attractive appearance (see this site on <a href="http://facebookcraze.com/20-hilarious-frape-rules-and-ideas-for-facebook-fraping/">advice for Facebook 'rape'</a> for examples). Because the implicature of ‘frape’ interprets the locutionary content of the update as untrue, this presupposes the ‘authentic’ identity of the victim to be other than if not opposite to that projected in the ‘frape.’ In other words, when the ‘fraped’ projection is queer in some way, this presupposes the sexual identity of the victim to be heteronormative. <br />
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The process of ‘fraping’ thus enables the perpetrator and audience to display homosocial solidarity, and to trivialize identities outside heteronormativity as an out-group of ‘others’ who are really the target of the joke, not the victim at all. The potency of ‘fraping’ is all the more significant, if we consider Facebook as a heterosexual market place where performances of identity are embedded in the circulation of social capital. The value of inauthenticity in this context is dislocated from ontological value and its apparent playful creativity to put to serious heteronormative work.Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-69032061914049183122011-03-17T02:52:00.000-07:002011-03-17T02:52:37.058-07:00Susan Herring's plenary at GURT 2011I've just got back from <a href="http://www8.georgetown.edu/college/gurt/2011/index.html">GURT 2011</a>. All the plenary speakers gave wonderful talks. To help me reflect on what they said, and to share some of the concepts with those who didn't get to go to GURT, I'm posting some summaries of ideas selected from the notes I took. The first up is <a href="http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/herring/">Susan Herring</a>, whose inspiring and influential work remains right at the forefront of CMC.<br />
<br />
Susan Herring proposed a new concept which she described as <strong>Convergent Media CMC</strong> or <strong>CMCMC</strong>. This is defined as: Text based CMC that takes place in convergent media formats in which it is typically secondary, by design, to other information or entertainment-related activities.<br />
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CMCMC overlaps strongly with web 2.0, but it raises issues for those of us studying the discourse which emerges in these contexts. These include<br />
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• Convergent media CMC discourse and language and language use in CMCMC environments<br />
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• Content: tags, updates, annotations<br />
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• Contexts: location based SNS, new audiences, localization of SNS<br />
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• Usage patterns media co-activity (the use of multiple platforms within one genre)<br />
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• Media affordances such as walled gardens, friending, social tagging, recommending, awareness indicators<br />
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• Adaptive strategies: e.g. #, @, RTs, performed interactivity (e.g. in blogs)<br />
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She proposed a three part lens for approaching this, using the distinction between the qualities which are:<br />
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• familiar, <br />
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• reconfigured, <br />
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• emergent.<br />
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These are not simply chronological distinctions, but reflect the complex ways in which genres relate to what has gone before and what is genuinely ‘innovative’. It is inspired by Crowston and Williams’ (2000) classification of reproduced, adapted, and emergent web genres, and reminds of the dangerous tendency to claim newness when there are historical precedents for a form (e.g. blogs, in relation to handwritten diaries).<br />
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Examples of different types of reproduced, adapted and emergent web genres include:<br />
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• Reproduced – course syllabi, scholarly articles<br />
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• Adapted - news sites, geneology sites, e-journals<br />
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• Emergent – hot lists of links, homepages, blogs, wikis<br />
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There is a trend over time for web genres to shift along a continuum from reproduced to adapted to emergent forms, where older genres appear to become more new over time. For example, the SNS Facebook, comes from the print facebook genre but reworks this in novel ways. This observation is nothing new, and social informatics reminds us that new technologies are first put to old uses until new uses of the technology emerge.<br />
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<strong>Web 2.0 which is Familiar</strong><br />
<br />
Herring argued that media convergence results in qualitatively different text types, but that there are many familiar aspects of web 2.0 discourse that remain current including the study of:<br />
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Textuality, interactivity, nonstandard orthography, gender differences, code switching, flaming, email hoaxes/scams, etc.<br />
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She reminded us that familiar phenomenon are often overlooked in favour of newer, more exotic forms of CMD and that the ‘innovations’ may be mistaken for new, or assumed to be different by virtue by virtue of the passing of time. When we study web 2.0 we need to trace relevant antecedents to gain perspective.<br />
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<strong>Web 2.0 is Reconfigured</strong><br />
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Reconfigured genres include:<br />
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Personal status updates, quoting, retweeting, small stories, ad spam, <br />
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For example, Facebook updates not innovative forms which emerged out of the blue. Rather they date back to emotes in MUDS and MOOS (Cherny 1999). But in Facebook the updates are reconfigured as core content, not peripheral, and presented as threads in a multimodal site. Reconfigured phenomena can be tricky to identify as they can be mistaken for emergent CMD. In order to see that the genres are reconfigured, the analyst must apply comparative insight, comparing the functions of one genre with another<br />
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<strong>Web 2.0 which is Emergent </strong><br />
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Emergent web 2.0 has no antecedents. Examples include authorless discourse (e.g. wikis), Multimodal UGC (voicethread) video blogging and exchanges (you tube), computerised programs for forum posters (link builders).<br />
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In summary, Herring argued that some apparently new phenomenon have online or offline antecedents, and as analysts we need to be aware of these. We should then question why certain discourse phenomenon persist, adapt, or arise anew in technologically mediated environments. She contrasted the influence of technological, social and linguistic factors, arguing that interaction seems most likely to be reconfigured, so while social identities are already formed, the format for turn taking structures can change. We might find new formats for online talk (in Retweets, updates voice over threads) but the gendered styles for example, might stay the same.Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-87561774971200095962011-03-04T08:16:00.000-08:002011-03-04T08:17:22.412-08:00Becoming 'resident' in twitter: acquiring the languageEarlier this week I was talking to <a href="http://www.microbiologybytes.com/AJC/index.html">Alan Cann</a> (@ajcann) about digital skills for new academics. He pointed me in the direction of <a href="http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2009/10/14/visitors-residents-the-video/">David White’s</a> distinction between digital residents, who integrate social media with their personal and professional life, and digital visitors who go online to carry out specific, selected tasks and then log off again. To exemplify his point, Alan pointed out that I was resident in Facebook but a visitor in Twitter. It’s a good job he didn’t look at this blog, or he might have concluded that I had moved out.<br />
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But this made me think about my use of Twitter, which really has been only visitor-like, but has begun to migrate more towards the behaviour of a resident this week. One way I recognise this is the changing ways which I have begun to use the conventions of Twitter talk.<br />
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<em>Twitter talk for aliens: unintelligible life signs</em><br />
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Before using Twitter, the timelines on a Twitter profile looked like gobbledygook to me. I could not make sense of what anyone was saying at all, or who they were saying it too. This is not the stance of a visitor, this is viewing Twitter as an alien discourse.<br />
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<em>Twitter talk for tourists: recognising the road signs</em><br />
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I started <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/ruthtweetpage">my Twitter account</a> (@ruthtweetpage) months ago, but didn’t use it, even though I began to understand the difference between updates, direct messages, hash tags to signal topic threads and @messages to indicate a user’s name. This was largely due to reading the work of <a href="http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf">danah boyd</a>, <a href="http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/HICSS.2009.602">Susan Herring</a> and their colleagues. This is a crash course in Twitter talk for tourism purposes (you look from the outside but don’t join in, just like being on holiday and only being able to say ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘hello’ in the native language.)<br />
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<em>Twitter talk 101: updates, links and questions</em><br />
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I actually began to send a few tweets now and again. I knew how to post an update, even how to add a link shortened through a site like <a href="http://tinyurl.com/">tinyurl</a>. I made it as far as asking questions. But then I felt a bit put off, because it seemed like no one answered. I figured I had no friends on Twitter, or it was just a really dumb question I had asked. It felt a bit like being an undergraduate who was not really sure how to contribute to a discussion in a conference plenary session.<br />
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<em>Twitter conversations: connecting with the @ symbol</em><br />
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And then I realised that if you want to see what people say back to you in Twitter, you have to click on the @mentions tab. This is where you will find the public replies people send you (as opposed to Direct Messages). And there were the answers to my questions – doh! And suddenly I felt very bad that I had not said thank you, so I posted some tweets doing just that. Then I realised that using the @username was a good way to demonstrate your network of connections and to get your own name circulated in the twitterverse. I’m starting to get a little more proficient in this now, to the point where I instinctively want to use my colleagues’ twitter names than their institutional email addresses.<br />
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<em>Advanced Twitter: modifying Retweets and hashtags</em><br />
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I gave a paper last week on celebrity practice in Twitter to the School of Media where I work. One of the members of the audience (@Flygirltwo) asked me if I had searched for hashtags in my dataset, as this was a good way of promoting topics by making them searchable. I hadn’t and I realised that I haven’t started to do this yet. Clearly this is a step in Twitter literacy beyond my current level of fluency. Likewise, modifying Retweets (forwarded tweets). I know it is possible to add a comment to a Retweeted message by editing it, but can I work out how to do this? Not yet. If you could explain it to me, I would be very grateful. Then send me a tweet so I can practice and let you know that I’ve read your tweet talk. And maybe I might move a little bit further towards residency in Twitter rather than being an occasional visitor.Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-51181501957877065452010-10-15T03:02:00.000-07:002010-10-15T03:02:53.857-07:00Narrative Interactions: SagadiA couple of weeks ago, I was in Sagadi, Estonia, teaching a <a href="http://www.nordicnarratologynet.ut.ee/806848">graduate seminar for the Nordic Narrative</a> Network. It was a great experience, and made me think a lot about the value of connecting different streams of narrative research, but also how difficult it sometimes is to bridge the gap between literary-critical v. sociolingiustic perspectives.<br />
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I spent some time debating the importance of contextualism in relation to unnatural narratives with my good friend, <a href="http://www.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/seminar/abteilungen/literaturwissenschaft/ls_fludernik/staff/alber/?searchterm=Jan%20Alber">Jan Alber</a>. For me, the reader's frames of reference and their cultural situation precede their interpretation to define a scenario as 'unnatural' or not, at least when this moves beyond concrete examples of logical impossibility. And the cultural differences in interpretation strike me as something that would be interesting to explore too. But I'm not convinced that literary narratologists would see things the same way. Does that matter? What do you think?Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-9431838121008928302010-10-14T11:20:00.000-07:002010-10-14T11:20:57.156-07:00Literacy in the Digital UniversityToday I have attended the ESRC seminar for <a href="http://lidu.open.ac.uk/home.cfm">Literacy in the Digital University</a>. There were many interesting presentations, including an excellent talk by <a href="http://www.eszter.com/">Eszter Hargittai</a>. I will be really interested to read some of the work she's published about the demographics of digital skills and their perceived impact on student behaviour. I also came away thinking about the post-human nature of the some of the storytelling I've been analysing: specifically the hybrid way that the machine templates intersect with human generated text to tell our stories in tweet and update streams.<br />
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I also need to resurrect my twitter account, having promised to do so at 7.25 this morning, live on air for BBC Radio Leicester. But Twitter is too busy right now, so that will have to wait for another day.Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-70875790416650065662010-10-13T02:58:00.000-07:002010-10-13T02:58:44.527-07:00To tweet or not to tweetYesterday, the <a href="http://www2.le.ac.uk/">University of Leicester</a> released some of the findings of my celebrity twitter research and there has been a<a href="http://news.google.co.uk/news/search?pz=1&cf=all&ned=uk&hl=en&q=leicester+university+tweets&cf=all&scoring=d&start=0"> small flurry of interest from the online world</a>. For someone who writes a blog (albeit intermittantly) I find myself wondering why I now find myself flipping between feeling slightly unnerved and slightly excited. Maybe it's because I don't think many people will actually read my blog! Maybe because I find myself placing my research alongside rather more weighty issues like the <a href="http://hereview.independent.gov.uk/hereview/report/">Browne report</a> and the rescue of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11489439">Chilean miners</a>. <br />
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Some of the questions I've been asked are:<br />
Do I think the celebrities are consciously self promoting and disguising this with conversational engagement?<br />
Well, I'm not inside their heads, and I don't think Twitter is a way of seeing inside their heads either, despite what <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/sep/26/sam-leith-50-cent-twitter">the Guardian</a> might suggest. But if we can infer anything about people's identity from their discourse style, then we can say that celebrities are the example par excellence of how to amplify your identity in twitter.<br />
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Who are the worst offenders?<br />
In my sample, the distribution between promoting shows and personal self disclosure was evenly distributed across the different personalities, but there were some celebrities who never disclosed anything personal (like Boris Johnson and Arnold Schwarzenegger). It depends on whether you see the personal disclosure as good or bad as to whether you think their practice is something negative.<br />
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Who was the most interesting tweeter to read?<br />
I enjoyed Sarah Brown the most, Andy Murray the least.<br />
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Do I tweet?<br />
Well, that would be a 'no', despite having a twitter account (ruthtweetpage). Maybe I just can't squeeze what I want to say into 140 characters!Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-29375887568841914172010-10-11T06:23:00.000-07:002010-10-11T12:54:23.332-07:00Summary of Celebrity Twitter Study<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Hi there, after the summer break here is a summary of the main findings from the study of celebrity tweet streams I was working on earlier this year. There is more detail on the stats in the post just below, but here I'm reflecting on the possible relevance of the findings too:</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><strong>Main findings:</strong></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">1. Celebrities favour a 1-to-many form of broadcasting in twitter, not peer-to-peer messaging</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The majority of celebrity tweets are about their professional activity, not the ‘everyday’ domestic lives.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">3. The immediacy of celebrity tweeting is used to prioritise shows or products (shown in collocational patterns for ‘today’, ‘tonight’ and ‘tomorrow’, which associate with ‘on the show’)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">4. Like other tweeters, the links celebrities share in their tweets boost their professional status, but they share more photographs which literally increases their online image.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">5. Celebrities cover over this self-promotion with a veneer of conversational strategy, telling jokes, praising and thanking their audience, asking questions, making positive evaluations.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">6.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Women celebrities make positive evaluations in RTs more than men, especially Dannii Minogue and Demi Moore.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><strong>What’s the point?</strong></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mainstream media sensationalise celebrity tweets as giving direct access to the ‘real person’, e.g. the </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/sep/26/sam-leith-50-cent-twitter"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Guardian’s recent piece</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> on ‘seeing into the brain’ of the musician 50 cents, but in fact, most celebrities aren’t using twitter for personal self-disclosure. We don't find out much about the celebrity themselves, let alone see 'into their brain'.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Twitter self-promotion for celebrities doesn’t necessarily result in influence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A recent study from </span><a href="http://mashable.com/2010/09/25/twitter-celebrities/"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Northwestern University</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> showed that specialist knowledge about areas of professional expertise was more important in trending topics than the number of followers or retweets gained by a celebrity.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Substance over style is more important for influence in Twitter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the opposite of what happens in Facebook where seemingly trivial disclosures are important for the ‘social grooming’ work that this small talk achieves.</span></div>Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-17324504861386855292010-07-02T07:58:00.000-07:002010-07-02T07:58:41.128-07:00Celebrity twitter research - key findings so farMy word, time flies when you are having fun, doesn't it? Or at least when you are immersed in reading, sifting, counting tweets....though I am not sure that has always felt like fun in the last few weeks!<br />
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In my attempts to be thorough, I feel as if I have enough data for a book on twitter, not just a chapter. And I also feel that I have sometimes spent a long time working through data to find a small and seemingly insignificant result. Though I will let you be the judge of the significance. Here are some of the facts and figures that are working their way into my chapter:<br />
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<strong>Celebrities have many more followers than people they are following</strong>. In fact, their audience (the followers) is 60 times the number of people they are interested in following. Compare this with the difference for the non-celebrities in my dataset, where the audience is only 1.5 times the size of those they are following in return. <br />
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<strong>Celebrities favour one-to-many twitter updates rather than one-to-one direct messages</strong>. 63% of the celebrity tweets were updates, 32% direct messages. Compare that with the non-celebrity twitter behaviour, where 48% of tweets were updates and 42% direct messages.<br />
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Although the media sensationalise occasions where celebrities post details about their private life on twitter (remember <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/5037620/Demi-Moore-in-bikini-shot-on-Ashton-Kutchers-Twitter-page.html">Ashton Kutcher's photo of Demi Moore</a>?), <strong>the majority of tweets are about the celebrities' professional activities</strong>: 75% in fact, and that's the same whether the celebrity is male or female.<br />
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<strong>Celebrity tweeters post links more frequently than non-celebrities do</strong>. In my dataset, 27% of the celebrity tweets contained links compared with 19% of the non-celebrities. Of those links, 26% of the celebrity set were to photographs, only 8% of the non-celebrity links did this. Other links for the celebrities were to their own webpages, blogs, products, movie trailers, mainstream news in which they were mentioned. In other words, <strong>the higher number of links represents a means of amplifying celebrity identity and boosting their status as an 'elite person'</strong> (Fowler 1996).<br />
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Perhaps no surprises in any of this. But there is an increasing case which shows that the celebrities on twitter are functioning as information sources (about themselves), not trying to be your 'friend' (<a href="http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2317/2063">Huberman 2009</a>). So forget finding out what <a href="http://twitter.com/STEPHENFRY">Stephen Fry</a> or <a href="http://twitter.com/OPRAH">Oprah</a> are having for breakfast - it's a clever promotional strategy designed to boost mainstream celebrity industry.Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-72406844345988180072010-06-09T04:27:00.000-07:002010-06-09T04:29:05.170-07:00Celebrity TwitterI’ve started work on a new phase of analysis: looking at how celebrities use twitter to construct their identities and a sense of engagement with their audiences. I’ve taken the most recent 1000 tweets from 30 celebrities (15 female, 15 male; half from the UK and half from the US). I’ve separated updating tweets from retweets and direct addresses to other twitter users, leaving me with around 14 000 updates to analyse.<br />
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My first round of analysis is to note whether the tweet is a report of an event (or even a series of events), gives the tweeter’s evaluation, asks a question or directs the audience to do something. I haven’t collated the results yet, as I have only just finished this first round of marking up the data, and just for the male celebrities. But I’m already noticing a number of interesting features including:<br />
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<div>The use of deixis to suggest close proximity to the speaker (e.g. here, this, now, just, about to)</div><br />
The use of pronouns to suggest inclusion (e.g. we, our, you)<br />
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The use of ‘affective’ or ‘interpersonal’ markers (e.g. emoticons, kisses, laughter)<br />
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A great deal of variation in terms of how much personal information (e.g. references to home life and family) compared with professional information (e.g. references to working life) or mainstream media (sports events, television programmes) are contained in the tweets. So <a href="http://twitter.com/WOSSY">Jonathan Ross</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/jamie_oliver">Jamie Oliver</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/SCHOFE">Philip Schofield</a> all talk about time and meals spent with their family while <a href="http://twitter.com/mayoroflondon">Boris Johnson</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/williamshatner">William Shatner</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/schwarzenegger">Arnold Schwarzenegger</a> do not.<br />
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<div>Lots of questions that could be asked about this, in terms of what difference this might make, why it is relevant (or not), what effect the twitter discourse has on actual public perception of these figures and audience engagement with their various projects. But for now, I need to do some more work on the textual analysis and will post more here when I've got a bit further. </div>Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-66549214622226688432010-05-25T06:20:00.000-07:002010-05-25T06:28:40.135-07:00Implied authors and collaborative fictionThis week I have been working on revising the conference paper I gave on collaborative fiction. Here's a few paragraphs where I reflect on the relationship between implied and historical authors and fiction:<br />
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The distinction between actual and <a href="http://narrative.georgetown.edu/wiki/index.php/Implied_author">implied authors</a> is complicated by the online environment of the collaborative projects I'm examining. In narrative theory, the implied author is understood as a reading effect rather than a core role in narrative transmission (<a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yzu_n6nJnz4C&lpg=PP1&dq=michael%20toolan%20narrative%20a%20critical&pg=PA65#v=onepage&q&f=false">Toolan 2001:66</a>), an anthropomorphised figure who may be quite distinct the historical author. The notional nature of the implied author has generated considerable controversy in narrative theory (summarised in <a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415282598/">Nunning 2005</a>), but as Toolan goes on to point out, “the pictures we have of authors are always constructions, so that all authors are, if you like, ‘inferred authors’” (ibid). Indeed, the vagaries of online representation might tempt us to abandon the project of recovering historical authors for collaborative projects at all. <br />
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Both <a href="http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php?title=Welcome">A Million Penguins</a> and <a href="http://www.protagonize.com/">Protagonize</a> offer the contributors the opportunity to represent themselves in a profile page. In Protagonize, the profiles follow a standard template where contributors supply an image, user name and information about themselves (which might include where they live, how long they have been writing and so on). Individual contributors vary in the degree of self-disclosure they employ, for example in whether to use a mimetic photograph (or not), a pseudonym or real name. How far a reader might build a biographical picture of the historical author from these paratexts can vary in precision, and the offline accuracy of any such picture cannot be determined from the online materials at all. The blurring of online and fictional identities is all the more exacerbated in the case of <a href="http://www.protagonize.com/story/free-your-mind">Free Your Mind</a>. Contributors were invited to write their Protagonize identities into the story, which is constructed as a metafictional role playing adventure where the Protagonizers are a literary society that functions as a resistance movement. The characters in the storyworld bear the same names as the story contributors and some of the attributes derived from the user profiles, attributes that could be later carried over into playful discussions in the commentary. <br />
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In contrast, the user profiles for A Million Penguins were more or less devoid of mimetic information about the contributor’s offline identities. Like all the wiki pages, user pages could be edited by anyone, not just the writer themselves. Profiles of the story contributors were sometimes reconstructed (sometimes maliciously) by other writers. A case in point is the contributor named Pabruce. On 3 February 2007, Pabruce wrote a brief self description for his profile which linked to a myspace page for Paul Allen Bruce:<br />
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pabruce, aka "bruce the fierce", aka uncle paul singer songwriter, construction worker, marble collector see examples: <br />
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But this description was soon deleted and replaced by another contributor, Kate Fyne, who wrote an alternative profile for pabruce:<br />
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May or may not own a piano. Well known as being a pretty cool guy. Suspected Communist.<br />
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Before Pabruce finally deleted Kate Fynn’s alternative a week later, he inserted dialogic commentary around her text, indicating willing acceptance for multiple versions of his authorial persona to be constructed. But while Pabruce might have tolerated, if not played along with other people authoring his persona at this level, he deeply objected to his persona being treated as a fictional entity within the narrative pages of the wiki, or as <a href="http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/projects/amillionpenguinsreport.pdf">Mason and Bruce</a> put it “just another wiki character” (2008:5). When another contributor wrote a version of Pabruce into the wikinovel, Pabruce responded by leaving the project, stating that “Going to my myspace page and entering a thinly veiled version of my name INTO the novel is too wierd.” While the complex relationship between offline, online and fictional representation mean that implied authors remain a useful heuristic, we should not forget that beyond the narrative discourse, historic authors continue to exist and may feel strongly about their authorial identity.Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-65263627786624892802010-05-18T07:58:00.001-07:002010-05-18T08:23:40.377-07:00ResurrectionWell, after a long, long time of not being a blogger, I have resurrected my Digital Narratives blog.<br /><br />Reasons for the long, long time of not posting anything? Put that down to the crazily busy life I had as Programme Director for the <a href="http://www.lhds.bcu.ac.uk/english/undergraduate">BA English programmes at Birmingham City University</a>. There were some great projects that I got involved in between February of last year and the present time - such as the <a href="http://www.lhds.bcu.ac.uk/english/digital-spaces">Digital Spaces module </a>we taught all our new first year undergraduates, and which I talked about at a recent <a href="http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events/event_detail.php?event_index=281">English Subject Centre event on Digital Writing</a>. But posting about how many emails I managed to get answered (or not) and how much research I was only slowly getting done (or not) just kept falling off the bottom of my 'to do' list.<br /><br />Reasons for the resurrection? Well, I have a new job at the <a href="http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/deptwhy.html">University of Leicester</a>. I was genuinely sad to say goodbye to my many good friends at BCU, but after 13 years in post it was time to move on. And I am genuinely excited about the opportunities my new job holds, not least because of the time I now have to get on with some of the slowly languishing research. And I might even get time to blog about some of it.<br /><br />So, some of the things I have been up to since finishing at BCU:<br />Revising my essay on small stories and status updates in Facebook - it will be coming out in <a href="http://www.degruyter.de/journals/text/detail.cfm">Text and Talk </a>very soon. I gave a version of this at the University of Sussex last month.<br />Presenting my work on collaborative storytelling (<a href="http://www.protagonize.com/">Protagonize</a> and <a href="http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php?title=Welcome">A Million Penguins</a>) at the <a href="http://www.case.edu/narrative/">ISSN conference</a>.<br />Writing an essay on <a href="http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/">Girl with a One Track Mind </a>for the <a href="http://www.jltonline.de/">Journal of Literary Theory</a>, which will form the basis of the keynote I'll be <a href="http://www.lingue.unige.it/ials2010/">giving in Genoa </a>later in the summer. Still working on getting over the flush factor in discussing the grammatical patterns of "shag" and "fuck" compared with "having sex". Writing this on the train on my way to and from Leicester has been interesting - especially when I nearly forgot to get off the train as I was so engrossed!<br /><br />What I'm up to next is a wider analysis of the stories that get told in social media of various kinds. It's going to have to be Twitter next. And I am not sure I really 'get' Twitter yet. I have an account there too, so the resurrection will have to spread further, methinks! But if you have any tips for harvesting data from Twitter, or even just making sense of the tweets, let me know!Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36885965.post-8693472467487227862009-02-26T08:04:00.000-08:002009-02-26T08:10:13.510-08:00I've been battling with trying to get a handle on the temporality of status updates in Facebook. My ideas are still pretty rough around the edges, but I'm posting them here in the hope that some of the narrative / new media scholars and philosophers will give me some feedback and help me hone the ideas. Special thanks to Amy Elias for making me go and read some phenomenology and Joe Baker for pointing me to Ricouer's work on cosmic time. Anyway, here goes...<br /><br />The temporality of the status updates operates on a number of levels. Against the backdrop of a-personal cosmic time, the writer’s status updates can be seen in Ricouer’s terms as an attempt to ‘make time human’ (1984:52) by selecting particular events as worthy of narration while other material is not. However, the human time depicted in the updates themselves is far from a linear string of dates. Rather, as Ochs and Capps put it, human time is ‘sensed holistically’ (2001:157) where the past and future are brought to bear on the present moment. <br /><br />We might interpret the significance of the ‘pull of the present’ in terms of the particular context created by the social network. At one level, the significant of the present moment in status updates might be interpreted simply as a result of the immediate discourse situation. The prompt for the status update after all, asks the writer what they are doing ‘right now’, not what they were doing at some point earlier in their life. As such, the stories in the status updates are a far cry from the canonical examples so influential in work on life story (Linde 1993) or narratives of personal experience (Labov 1972) where the speaker is narrating past events that have since been completed, and are usually retrospectively distant from the present moment. The significance of what is happening ‘right now’ to a writer is clearly appropriate to the technology of Facebook, which is driven by the RSS feeds that promote recency as a driving organizational force.<br /><br />Returning to the Chronotope of the status update, we are reminded that FB is not a collection of updates that exist in isolation to each other. Instead, there are two parameters (the time of the individual's narrative and the space of the social network) where updates are distributed across and form intersections in the social network of Friends. Within the framework of Newtonian time imprinted by the Facebook timestamp, a framework which is linear and unidirectional, the present moments narrated in the status update construct an elastic temporality that generates a sense of ongoing-ness that transcends objective measurement. Hermeneutic approaches to time are useful here. Drawing on Heidegger’s (1962) concept of Dasein, time is not defined in individual terms, but profoundly contextualised by living with others. Status updates are an apt vehicle for realising this idea, for they project an illusion of a present moment that carries beyond its point of articulation (it remains in the archive for longer than the moment it is written) and which is instantaneously shared with all others in the Friendship network. The effect of this ongoing present is one of intimacy, “through mutual embracing of the temporal context (Dasein) we come to understand one another and our own being as well” (Bennett 2000:13). The present tense quality of the status updates’ narrative is not just one that humanizes time (Ricouer) but also is inextricably linked to the social dimension of human reality.Ruth Pagehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06477865780283327177noreply@blogger.com2