Evaluative Language and Its Solidarity-Building Role on TED.com: An Appraisal and Corpus Analysis

Language is a key resource in the formation of online communities, which are in turn central to an understanding of contemporary social relations. This study looks at TED.com, an educational video-hosting platform with few in-built community-building functionalities, to explore the potential for users to affiliate through their language choices. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study uses the Appraisal framework, extended using corpus linguistic methods, in order to analyse users’ reactions to TED videos. The study shows that online participants use evaluative language to align with certain ideas and, based on these affinities, form affiliations characterized by sociability and solidarity. These affiliations raise important questions about the conception of ‘community’ in twenty-first century society

Discussion Analytics: Identifying Conversations and Social Learners in FutureLearn MOOCs

Discussion among learners in MOOCs has been hailed as beneficial for social constructive learning. To understand the pedagogical value of MOOC discussion forums, several researchers have utilized content analysis techniques to associate individual postings with differing levels of cognitive activity. However, this analysis typically ignores the turn taking among discussion postings, such as learners responding to others’ replies to their posts, learners receiving no reply for their posts, or learners just posting without conversing with others. This information is particularly important in understanding patterns of conversations that occur in MOOCs, and learners’ commenting behaviors. Therefore, in this paper we categorize comments in a FutureLearn MOOC based on their nature (post vs. reply to others’ post), classify learners based on their contributions for each type of post-ing, and identify conversations based on the types of comments composing them. This categorization quantifies the dynamics of conversations in the discussion activities, allowing monitoring of on-going discussion activities in FutureLearn and further analysis of identified conversations, social learners, and course steps with an unusually high number of a particular type of comment

Using research vignettes to explore co-production in a large diverse team: implications for research in superdiverse contexts

This chapter responds to Vertovec and Wessendorf’s (2010) call for new methodologies in exploring linguistic and cultural transformations in superdiverse settings by focusing on the potential insights generated by large diverse research teams. To explore the divergent perspectives which emerge from teamwork, we focus on vignettes produced as part of a large Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project exploring multilingualism as a communicative resource across four UK cities (the Translation and Translanguaging [TLANG] project). Vignettes have traditionally been used as a participant-orientated method to elicit reflections (Hughes 1998). In this case, the vignettes were significantly different: they represented researchers’ own accounts of being involved in ethnographic fieldwork. This methodological shift in the application of vignettes was developed by members of TLANG on two earlier projects (e.g. Creese and Blackledge et al. 2015). On the current project, the team comprised a core group of linguists and other scholars at various career stages and with different project roles, as well as key participants (KPs) who were embedded in a range of community settings and who brought experience from various language, socio-cultural and educational backgrounds

The discursive construction of mobile chronotopes in mobile-phone messaging

This article draws on data from an ethnographic project to explore the ways in which migrant micro-entrepreneurs exploit mobile messaging apps to co-construct mobile chronotopes: dynamic configurations of time and space negotiated by geographically separated participants, who draw on different contexts and frames of understanding. Analysis of mobile messages by two couples—Chinese butchers in Birmingham and Polish shop-owners in London—informed by interview and interactional data collected at work and home, suggests they discursively negotiate and exploit multiple chronotopic layers, creating complex intersections between virtual and physical spaces in everyday interactions. We focus on the role that multilingual and multimodal semiotic resources play in co-constructing mobile chronotopes. In particular, we explore critical junctures at which communicative expectations are challenged, rendering mobile chronotope negotiation visible. Our concept of the mobile chronotope has implications for both the theorisation of mobile phone communication and understanding how chronotopes function in contemporary transnational migrant discourse

English language and social media

Social media is transforming the ways in which people interact, maintain relationships and get things done through language and other communicative resources. The English language – as a global online lingua franca – plays a key role alongside other languages in the way people manage these transformations. Research into English language and social media can therefore shed light on what it means to be human in twenty-first-century networked societies. Much of this research falls into the traditional remit of digital humanities, with researchers drawing on digital visualisation tools and large databases of digital data, thus illustrating how digital tools can transform our understanding of an object of study. However, focusing on how English language use is itself transformed by social media, this chapter highlights the need for digital humanities to take into account not only how the digital shapes the humanities but also how the humanities might shape our understanding of the digital, as concepts and theories taken from the humanities are applied to texts and discourses that are ‘born digital’. One key transformation brought about by social media is the availability of multimedia and networked resources, access to which enables users to connect with wider conversations, align with virtual communities and share their lives with meaningful others across social media platforms, as well as to draw on resources from languages in which they may not have full proficiency. These new possibilities for communication are illustrated by a sample analysis of WhatsApp messages which, as with other forms of social media, innovatively extend the meaning-making potential of English, with implications for what it means to be an effective communicator in the twenty-first century. Drawing on this analysis, the chapter makes a case for digital humanities to consider how the humanities can be used to explore and understand our increasingly digitally mediated lives

The ethics of digital ethnography in a team project

This article draws on researcher vignettes to explore ethical decisions made in the process of collecting and analysing mobile messaging data as part of a team ethnographic project exploring multilingualism in superdiverse UK cities. The research involves observing key participants at work as well as recording them at home and collecting their digitally-mediated interactions. The nature of ethnographic research raises ethical issues which highlight the impossibility of divorcing ethics from project decision-making. We therefore take on board a re-conceptualisation of research ethics not as an external set of guidelines but as the core of research, driving decision-making at all steps of the process. The researcher vignettes on which we draw in exploring this process facilitate a reflective approach and enable us to identify and address ethical issues in our research. In this article, we focus on the potential impact that digital communications technologies can have on the kinds of relationships that are possible between researchers and research participants, and on the roles they can carry out within the project. In doing so, we explore the part that digitally-mediated communications play in the co-construction of social distance and closeness in research relationships. Our discussions around these issues highlight the need for an awareness not only of how our participants’ media ideologies shape their use and perceptions of digital technologies, but also how our own assumptions inform our handling of the digital data

Polymedia repertoires of networked individuals: A day-in-the-life approach

This article introduces the concept of the polymedia repertoire to explore how social meaning is indexed through the interplay of communicative resources at different levels of expression (from choice of media to individual signs) in digitally mediated interactions. The multi-layered polymedia repertoire highlights how people move fluidly between media platforms, semiotic modes and linguistic resources in the course of their everyday interactions, and enables us to locate digital communications within individuals’ wider practices. The potential of our theoretical contribution is illustrated through analysis of mobile phone messaging between participants in a large multi-sited ethnography of the communicative practices of multilingual migrants working in linguistically diverse UK city neighbourhoods. Our analysis of mobile messaging exchanges in a day-in-the-life of these networked individuals reveals the importance of device attention in shaping interpersonal interactions, as well as the complex ways in which choices at different levels of a polymedia repertoire are structured by social relationships, communicative purpose and (dis)identification processes

Repertoires on the move: exploiting technological affordances and contexts in mobile messaging interactions

This article advances thinking around the semiotic repertoire by exploring how resources are negotiated in the course of interactions mediated by mobile messaging apps, and how this process of co-constructing repertoires is shaped by the affordances and constraints of the virtual spaces in which these interactions take place. Drawing on micro-analysis of ethnographic data from a large funded project, we focus on the closed online networks of two women of Polish origin living and working in the UK, looking specifically at their uses of mobile messaging apps including WhatsApp and Viber. We show how resources come into being through talk and how emergent semiotic repertoires take shape in processes of repertoire assemblage. In particular, we explore the ways in which technological affordances and pre-programmed signs are harnessed and exploited by mobile interlocutors for making meaning in the course of an immediate interaction, often with longer term impact within a network’s emergent repertoire. The study highlights the importance of a dynamic conceptualisation of the semiotic repertoire

The ethics of digital ethnography in a team project

This article draws on researcher vignettes to explore ethical decisions made in the process of collecting and analysing mobile messaging data as part of a team ethnographic project exploring multilingualism in superdiverse UK cities. The research involves observing key participants at work as well as recording them at home and collecting their digital interactions. The nature of ethnographic research raises ethical issues which highlight the impossibility of divorcing ethics from project decision-making. We therefore take on board a reconceptualisation of research ethics not as an external set of guidelines but as being at the core of research, driving decision-making at all steps of the process. The researcher vignettes on which we draw in exploring this process facilitate a reflexive approach and enable us to identify and address ethical issues in our research. In this article, we focus on the potential impact that digital communication technologies can have on the kinds of relationships that are possible between researchers and research participants, and on the roles that both carry out within the project. In doing so, we explore the part that digital communications play in the co-construction of social distance and closeness in research relationships. Our discussions around these issues highlight the need for an awareness not only of how our participants’ media ideologies shape their use and perceptions of digital technologies, but also how our own assumptions inform our handling of the digital data