Comparison of Word Intelligibility in Spoken and Sung Phrases

Twenty listeners were exposed to spoken and sung passages in English produced by three trained vocalists. Passages included representative words extracted from a large database of vocal lyrics, including both popular and classical repertoires. Target words were set within spoken or sung carrier phrases. Sung carrier phrases were selected from classical vocal melodies. Roughly a quarter of all words sung by an unaccompanied soloist were misheard. Sung passages showed a seven-fold decrease in intelligibility compared with their spoken counterparts. The perceptual mistakes occurring with vowels replicate previous studies showing the centralization of vowels. Significant confusions are also evident for consonants, especially voiced stops and nasals

Surveillance and Community: Language Policing and Empowerment in a World of Warcraft Guild

A case study of a World of Warcraft guild explores the relationship between participatory surveillance, public discipline, empowerment, and fun. The guild under investigation in this paper is a self-labeled "safe space" guild for female, LGBT, and other minority members of the gaming population. To promote the safe space environment, the guild's members actively enforce prohibitions against offensive language. A comparison is made between the participatory surveillance model employed by the members of the guild and the top-down policies and discipline enacted by the parent company, Blizzard Entertainment; this comparison demonstrates the effects of co-existing models of surveillance in the game community. Furthermore, the effects of the guild's practice of public discipline of rule breakers are analyzed as a method of shaming that enhances the effects of the guild's rules. Finally, by examining reactions from members of the guild, personal and community empowerment are the outcomes of participation in the system. Recommendations are made to incorporate elements of participatory surveillance into games in conjunction with unilateral surveillance typically employed by game developers

Virtual Discourse Structure: An Analysis of Conversation in World of Warcraft

Discourse in World of Warcraft poses interesting insights for the organization of conversation in text-only mediums. In my work, I show how online discourse can be analyzed using the traditional tools of Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1996). By analyzing logs of chat from within the game world, I show how turns are constructed, paying particular attention to the construction of multiple-message turns. I draw on the insights of Turn Construction Unit Continuation theory (Schegloff, 1996; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono, 2007) to illuminate the construction of these complex turns, and I show how the tools of Cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) can be used to link parts of a turn together. Finally, I show how participants in World of Warcraft use different kinds of repair functions in the discourse, namely *-repair for typographical errors and an in-group feature "get out of my head!" for overlap. Online discourse has unique and particular forms of organization, but can be analyzed in the same manner as spoken language; far from being a random and corrupted form of written language, online language use is regular and organized

Managing Qualitative Data from Online Communities and Sources

This workshop will guide participants through thinking about online communities and some of the sources of data for performing qualitative research, primarily digital ethnography. We will discuss sample communities and the data that can be gathered by a researcher about them. Participants will be encouraged to brainstorm about an online community familiar to them and data from multiple platforms or online locations used by community members

Tell the Story of Data with Metrics

With an increasing focus at many universities on engagement and impact of scholarly work both in academia and outside, knowledge of data re-use is an important consideration when sharing a dataset. Traditional citation measures for data are difficult to track because scholars rarely cite datasets formally (Kratz and Strasser, 2015). Fortunately, there are other tools available for gathering metrics about reuse of data sets that can be used by scholars. These tools are called ‘altmetrics’, and they can capture both traditional scholarly measures of use (such as citations) as well as downloads, news and popular stories that reference a dataset, blog posts, and even social media buzz about data. These metrics can be a valuable tool for scholars to show all of the impact of their work. On this poster, data citations and altmetrics will be explained along with best practices for using tools to gather metrics

Mode-switching in Digital Game Environments: A Multimodal Phenomenon

This paper investigates the phenomenon of mode-switching, or a quasi-synchronous shift of linguistic mode by a speaker in interaction. Video recordings of three World of Warcraft players are analyzed to determine the motivations for mode-switching. Ultimately, the driving force for mode-switches is a shifting participation framework; speakers use a mode which corresponds to the intended audience for their talk. Each mode has certain of topics which are appropriate for the audience present in that mode, and speakers shift between the modes seamlessly in interaction to address each of these sets of participants. The norms for the uses of modes must be learned by speakers and deployed properly in order for a speaker to be considered a competent member of the community. Mode-switching is compared to the processes of code-switching and style-shifting and is found to have numerous similarities, suggesting that the three phenomena are variations of a larger process of variety-changing

Scholarly Communication and Publishing Lunch and Learn Talk #17: Lessons from OpenCon and OpenEd

In this talk, Lauren Collister presents her takeaways from two conferences that she attended in November: OpenEducation 2014 and OpenCon, the Student and Early Career Researcher Conference on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data. She will share the resources that she learned about at the conferences, including projects from all over the world to advance openness in the academic sphere. Presentation viewable online here: https://prezi.com/ixgaqnpovi9m/dr-collister-goes-to-washington