Sociolinguistics and CMC

[joshua]

nice to hear from you. i think you're right that there isn't much work on CMC from a linguistic standpont. most of my theorietical background comes from com,discourse analysis, sociology, and anthro. there's a bit of a call here at UT in the anthro department to look seriously at online communites. in this vein, i've seen a couple ethnographies of online communites, but nothing really of note.

my interests are in online identity, but i don't think that cyber-socioling is anywhere near developed enough methodologically for me to actually do any work on identity. there's a rich history of socioling methodology, but i've yet to find anyone who has attempted to adapt socioling method to online communites. for instance, watered down, socio looks at the relationship between dmographic data (age, gender, ethnicity, etc.) and language (how they use it, what they
think about it, judgments, etc.). both points of comparison are different online. so we can't just extend current socio methodlogy to online communites. i'm interested in figuring out the correlates for age, gender, ethnicity, etc in the online world.

keeping this in mind, my current project is looking at language ideology online. basically, i'm manipulating a bunch of lingusitic variables (spelling, capitalization, smilie use, punctuation, presence of marked face to face (FTF) dialect use) and seeing how people describe their interlocutor (intelligent, happy, friendly, etc.) I'm coupling this with observations and interviews inside an online role playing game. i'm hoping to show that, like in face to
face communities, there are stigmatized ways of "speaking" online. i'm also hoping to add to (or begin) the discussion of online speech communities and how they can be defined. in most cases, FTF speech communities are, in part, defined by some common kinda of language. i'm hoping that the study i'm doing will show that there are indeed different kinds of languages with different language ideologies online. Since the beginning of most socio studies lies in
identification of some speech community, with this study, i'm hoping to begin to figure out how to adapt the socio methods to online communites.

as a kind of different project (but related), i'm working with a group from different departments to help two austin communies develop community blogs. one group is a network of foster kids who are taking classes on public speaking so that they can get their stories out. we're going to show them how make blogs in order to give them an online outlet for their stories. the other group is a pretty typical digital devide casuality. a hispanic/black neighboorhood association approached us and asked if we could help them publicise their cause
(better schools, roads, less crime, etc.). We're helping them develop blogs as well. so the study that will come of these will look at how marginalized groups represent themselves online. this project is bring run by UTs Science, Technology, and Society Center, which is composed of a bunch of people from a lot of different disciplines. but it's still very much anthro/socio/social work/activism oriented (as i mentioned above.)

ok. i'll shut up now. i have to save something for future emails.

let me know more specifically what your interests are. 





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