28.4151, Calls: Anthro Ling, Comp Ling, Disc Analysis, Pragmatics, Socioling/Germany

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4151. Wed Oct 11 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4151, Calls: Anthro Ling, Comp Ling, Disc Analysis, Pragmatics, Socioling/Germany

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Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2017 11:02:37
From: Britta Schneider [ken at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Quantitative Approaches to Discourse on Social Media

 
Full Title: Quantitative Approaches to Discourse on Social Media 

Date: 22-Mar-2018 - 22-Mar-2018
Location: Berlin, Germany 
Contact Person: Britta Schneider
Meeting Email: britta.schneider at fu-berlin.de

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 31-Dec-2017 

Meeting Description:

Prior to the ''Wild Publics'' conference, on 22 March 2018, we offer two
methodological workshops for junior researchers, one oriented towards
qualitative and one towards quantitative methods to study language practice in
online contexts. We are proud to announce that both workshops are conducted by
specialist experts to the field. Quantitative Approaches to Discourse on
Social Media is one of these workshops. 

Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, etc. are an abundant
data source for texts generated by a diversity of users online. This provides
unique opportunities and challenges for linguists and social scientists
working with textual data. In this workshop, we address some of the specific
challenges posed by social media data: For one, the large amount of data
necessitates automatic methods for collecting and storing texts, as well as
quantitative approaches to analyzing the resulting corpora. In addition, the
language in social media contains many non-standard features which on the one
hand, may prevent the use of established tools for natural language
processing, and on the other hand, may themselves constitute exciting
opportunities for research. In particular, the conversational nature of many
kinds of social media draws attention to our lack of theoretical and practical
knowledge about how to model dialog and discourse (as opposed to monological
texts).

In this workshop, we will present methods from computational linguistics and
computational social science that enable the collection and analysis of large
corpora of social media data, with a particular focus on interactive language.
The workshop is aimed at young researchers who want to start working
quantitatively with social media data. Since we do not assume programming
abilities, the focus will be on available tools and methods for computational
linguistic analysis that are approachable for social scientists and can be
immediately applied to your next research project. In addition, we will
discuss state-of-the-art analyses of the nature and variability of language on
social media and approaches to using social media data as a sensor for
non-linguistic social data (e.g., health, human well-being, or politics).

 Topics covered will include:

- What is computational linguistics/natural language processing?
- Collecting social media corpora
- Working with non-standard language
- Computational social science: detecting user properties
- Discourse structure of social media multilogs
- Available tools and methods

 Finally, we will give pointers to tutorials that introduce social scientists
to scripting languages like Python and the basics of programming and allow you
to implement even more powerful analyses.

References

Jones, Rodney H., Alice Chik & Christoph A. Hafner 2015. Introduction.
Discourse analysis and digital practices. In Jones, Rodney H. et al. (eds.)
Discourse and digital practices. Doing discourse analysis in the digital age.
London: Routledge, 1-17.


Call for Papers:

See
http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/v/wild-publics/workshop/index
.html for detailed descriptions.

Pre-doc and post-doc researchers from any disciplinary background are welcome
to apply. You can apply for only one of the two workshops at ''Wild Publics''
as both take place simultaneously. Participation is free and participants can
attend the symposium that takes place on 23 and 24 March 2018 for free
(accommodation, food and travel is self-paying).

Places are limited therefore we ask for a brief and informal application
containing a short CV and a short description of your PhD / post doc project
and one sentence that explains why you want to participate. Please hand in
your applications until the 31 December at britta.schneider at fu-berlin.de or
theresa.heyd at fu-berlin.de. Feel free to contact us if you have further
questions.




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