Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geolinguistic Contours of the Web

This paper analyzes the digital dimensions of places as represented by online, geocoded references to the economic, social, and political experiences of the city. These digital layers are invisible to the naked eye, but form a central component of the augmentations and mediations of place enabled by hundreds of millions of mobile computing devices and other digital technologies. The analysis highlights how these augmentations of place differ across space and language and highlights both the differences and some of the causal factors behind them. This is performed through a global study of all online content indexed within Google Maps, and more specific analyses of the linguistically and topically segregated layers of information over four selected places. The uneven linguistic geographies that this study reveals undoubtedly influence the many ways in which place is enacted and brought into being. The larger aim of this project is to use these initial mappings of the linguistic contours of the geoweb to push forward a broader debate about how augmented inclusions and exclusions, visibilities and invisibilities will shape the way that places become defined, imagined, and experienced

Understanding U.S. regional linguistic variation with Twitter data analysis

We analyze a Big Data set of geo-tagged tweets for a year (Oct. 2013–Oct. 2014) to understand the regional linguistic variation in the U.S. Prior work on regional linguistic variations usually took a long time to collect data and focused on either rural or urban areas. Geo-tagged Twitter data offers an unprecedented database with rich linguistic representation of fine spatiotemporal resolution and continuity. From the one-year Twitter corpus, we extract lexical characteristics for twitter users by summarizing the frequencies of a set of lexical alternations that each user has used. We spatially aggregate and smooth each lexical characteristic to derive county-based linguistic variables, from which orthogonal dimensions are extracted using the principal component analysis (PCA). Finally a regionalization method is used to discover hierarchical dialect regions using the PCA components. The regionalization results reveal interesting linguistic regional variations in the U.S. The discovered regions not only confirm past research findings in the literature but also provide new insights and a more detailed understanding of very recent linguistic patterns in the U.S

Targeted Query Expansions as a Method for Searching Mixed Quality Digitized Cultural Heritage Documents

Digitization of cultural heritage is a huge ongoing effort in many countries. In digitized historical documents, words may occur in different surface forms due to three types of variation - morphological variation, historical variation, and errors in optical character recognition (OCR). Because individual documents may differ significantly from each other regarding the level of such variations, digitized collections may contain documents of mixed quality. Such different types of documents may require different types of retrieval methods. We suggest using targeted query expansions (QE) to access documents in mixed-quality text collections. In QE the user-given search term is replaced by a set of expansion keys (search words); in targeted QE the selection of expansion terms is based on the type of surface level variation occurring in the particular text searched. We illustrate our approach in a highly inflectional compounding language, Finnish while the variation occur across all natural languages. We report a minimal-scale experiment based on the QE method and discuss the need to support targeted QEs in the search interface.ye

Unpacking the lore on multilingual scholars publishing in English: A discussion paper

In the past three decades, a body of research on issues related to multilingual scholars writing for publication has emerged, paralleling the rise of pressures on scholars around the world to publish their work in high-status journals, especially those included in particular journal citation indexes; these indexes typically privilege the use of English. Researchers have investigated multilingual scholars’ experiences and perspectives, the social contexts of their work, policies on research publishing, aspects of the texts produced by multilingual scholars, the kinds of people scholars interact with while working to publish their research, their collaborations and networks, and pedagogical initiatives to support their publishing efforts. Nevertheless, as ongoing research is conducted, the existing research base has not always been consulted in meaningful ways. In this paper, we draw on the notion of ‘lore’ to identify some of the preconceptions or received wisdom about multilingual scholars and their writing that seem to be circulating, then argue for researchers to move beyond the ‘lore’ and make greater use of both findings from empirical research and related theoretical and methodological conversations. We identify directions for future research to be conducted

Geographic information systems and perceptual dialectology: a method for processing draw-a-map data

This article presents a new method for processing data gathered using the "draw-a-map” task in perceptual dialectology (PD) studies. Such tasks produce large numbers of maps containing many lines indicating nonlinguists' perceptions of the location and extent of dialect areas. Although individual maps are interesting, and numerical data relating to the relative prominence of dialect areas can be extracted, an important value of the draw-a-map task is in aggregating data. This was always an aim of the contemporary PD method, although the nature of the data has meant that this has not always been possible. Here, we argue for the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in order to aggregate, process, and display PD data. Using case studies from the United Kingdom and Germany, we present examples of data processed using GIS and illustrate the future possibilities for the use of GIS in PD researc

Languages of African rainforest « pygmy » hunter-gatherers: language shifts without cultural admixture

Communication au colloque international «Historical linguistics and hunter-gatherers populations in global perspective» (Max-Planck Inst., Leipzig, 10-12/8/06)The aim of this paper is first to point out the diversity of the situations, thus resulting from various historical processes. There is not one single type of « Pygmy » group, nor an archetype of relationship between « the » Pygmies and « the » Farmers – there is even not a typical community of farmers ! The history is complex, and much rich. Second, this paper will underline the great gaps in the available documentation

Reporting and quoting: functional analyses of logico-semantic relations of clause complex citations

Citations are significant academically for establishing research backgrounds and justifying a research problem. In spite of the increasing studies on citations, limited studies have employed the Systemic Functional Linguistics in analysing citations. Therefore, this study explores the logico-semantic relations in citations with clause complexes, employing the ideational metafunction of the Functional Theory. The study adopted a purposeful sampling in selecting the literature review chapters of 20 PhD theses by EFL postgraduates in a public Malaysian university in two disciplines: Information Technology and Applied Linguistics. The findings revealed that citations were structured to realise two logico-semantic relations, mainly Expansion and Projection with several subcategories for each. A combination of Projection and Expansion was also used, which resulted in reclassifying the logico-semantic relations. The findings could present comprehensive descriptions of citations that could be pedagogically utilised for academic purposes