[Linganth] Ling anthro research on language variation and ethnicity in tech?

Sun Jun 5 17:28:24 UTC 2016

Thanks everyone who responded! I think for the most part what I am seeing
is that while we have research on digital use outside of tech companies
(such as in homes and in peer groups across income levels and ethnic
groups), tech companies have remained virtually untouchable as a research
site when it comes to language use and, more problematically, the
production of ethnicity and race through institutional discourse from
startups to established companies. (My guess is this has a lot to do with
the NDAs that many of us who work in it have to sign or even research in.)

As such, this suggests that much of the discourse on 'diversity' in tech
has been reduced to a numbers game of quantitative research and little to
no systematic qualitative research on the production of ethnicity and race
in interracial workplace settings, which, ironically, is actually one of
the main reasons many historically-underrepresented ethnic groups (and
minorities within those groups) cite leaving the tech industry (i.e.,
interactions they position as 'micro-aggressive').

Might be a research project for some of us to consider as a means of
'studying up,' in Laura Nader's terms.

Cheers,
Nate

On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 3:51 PM, Jacqueline Messing <
jacquelinemessing at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Nate,
>
> My former graduate student Glenn Abastillas completed an MA thesis in
> Linguistics at Georgetown last year on a relevant topic.  He looked at
> Cebuano/English code-switching in the Philippines, primarily through the
> study of Twitter.  I think you will find it relevant to your project.  The
> abstract and link to the full text are below:
>
> DIVERGENCE IN CEBUANO AND ENGLISH CODE-SWITCHING PRACTICES IN CEBUANO
> SPEECH COMMUNITIES IN THE CENTRAL PHILIPPINE
> *Glenn Abastillas, BSN*
> Thesis Advisor: Jacqueline Messing, Ph.D.
>
> Abstract
> The Philippines is a diverse linguistic environment with more than 8 major
> languages
> spoken and a complicated language policy affected by its colonization
> history. With this
> context, this research investigates Cebuano and English code-switching
> (CS) in the
> Central Philippines and Mindanao. This research draws from prior studies
> placing
> multilingual and code-switched language practices at the center of an
> individual’s
> identity rather than at the margins (Woolard, 1998; Stell, 2010; Eppler,
> 2010; Weston,
> 2013). Code-switching is defined to be the hybrid of multiple languages
> and,
> subsequently, multiple identities (Bullock & Toribio, 2009). I expand on
> these ideas to
> examine the homogeneity of Cebuano identity across four Cebuano speaking
> provinces in
> the Central Philippines and Mindanao through their CS practice in computer
> mediated
> communication (CMC) on Twitter. I demonstrate that the Cebuano speech
> community is
> divergent in their CS practices split into two general groups, which are
> employing CS
> practices at significantly different rates.
>
> Using computational tools, I implement a mixed methods approach in
> collecting and
> analyzing the data. My data consist of short manually tagged messages
> called tweets from
> the social media platform Twitter. Tweets were collected at various times
> during the day
> and night over a period of 3 months from the Cebuano speaking provinces of
> Cebu,
> Negros Oriental, Misamis Oriental, and Davao del Sur. Collectively, there
> were 2,652
> users, tweeting 7,729 times, who contributed to this corpus, representing
> language from
> all four provinces in both rural and urban contexts. A chi-square (χ2)
> analysis on CS with
> respect to province found that the four provinces employ CS at
> significantly (χ2 = 84.75,
> p < .001) different rates. A chi-square analysis also showed that there
> was a strong relationship
> between CS and population density (χ2 = 3.47, p < .1). Lastly, a T-test
> analysis showed that longer tweets are significantly more likely to have
> CS than shorter
> tweets (one-sample t(105) = 6.7963, p < .001).
>
> The results of the chi-square analysis demonstrate a divergence in the
> Cebuano speech
> community in the Philippines. That is, the southern provinces of Misamis
> Oriental and
> Davao del Sur (Southern Group) adopt CS significantly more than the
> northern provinces
> of Cebu and Negros Oriental (Northern Group), which were less likely to
> adopt CS.
> Because of a strong pro-Cebuano sentiment in Cebu, I reason that the
> Northern Group
> adheres more strongly to the Cebuano identity resulting in less CS.
> Conversely, the
> Southern Groups may be identifying less with Cebu and the Cebuano
> identity, which
> results in more CS. In summary, the Cebuano speech communities in the
> Philippines
> express their differentiating identities through adoption of CS.
> Permanent Link http://hdl.handle.net/10822/760907
> Date2015
> Subject
> Cebuano; code-switching; computer mediated communication; corpus
> linguistics; identity; Twitter; Linguistics; Asia -- Research;
> Communication; Oral communication; Linguistics; Asian studies;
> Communication;
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 2:42 PM, Rachel Flamenbaum <rnflame at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Nate,
>> You've hit on a major lacuna in ling anth and its allied fields--there is
>> a ton of work out there on digital learning and computer mediated
>> communication, but it tends to be sited in informal (ie non-institutional)
>> white middle class post-industrial contexts, and few are oriented from a
>> language ideologies or language-as-social-action perspective.
>>
>> I'm about a week away from filing my dissertation on socialization into
>> digital literacies (and their related ideologies) across class in Ghana,
>> which speaks to many of these issues. I have some work in the publication
>> pipeline, but the only thing currently out is a small piece as part of a AA
>> vital topics forum on Anthro in and of MOOCs
>> <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aman.12143/abstract> edited
>> by Graham Jones--all of the authors are troubling a priori assumptions of
>> monolithic user experience in some way.
>>
>> If you haven't come across their work already, you might also look at
>> what Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames have done (separately and together) on
>> the design of the XO laptop and the One Laptop Per Child program's claims
>> re: "the world's poor," as well as Lisa Poggiali's work in the burgeoning
>> tech sphere in Nairobi and Lily Irani's work on HCI and entrepreneurial
>> citizenship as tied up with tech in India. I'm sure I'm forgetting
>> important additions to this list, but I plead dissertation brain!
>>
>> Outside of academia, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (housed in the Sesame
>> Workshop) has some really useful publications
>> <http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/publications/> on media use in
>> lower-income and ethnically-diverse families, geared towards shifting
>> policy and design.
>>
>> Would love to continue the conversation more with you and others
>> interested in this work!
>>
>> Back to the dissertating grindstone,
>> Rachel
>>
>> Rachel Flamenbaum, M.A.
>> Doctoral Candidate
>> Department of Anthropology, UCLA
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 7:57 AM, Nathaniel Dumas <nadumas at ucsc.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Good morning colleagues!
>>>
>>> I hope all is well. I'm emailing to ask if anyone knows of any work that
>>> is specific to the tech industry on language ideologies and their
>>> intersections with race/ethnicity? I ask because I am about to start
>>> working with a non-profit aimed at increasing African American
>>> participation in tech, particularly to train critical user experience
>>> researchers. Yet much of the work that is out there on speech events like
>>> the 'user interview' and 'diary studies' do not take ethnicity and language
>>> ideologies into account. Moreover, a majority of the work excludes and
>>> omits much of the work done by critical native anthropologists who have
>>> raised critiques of traditional anthropological methods that the tech
>>> industry often uses in UX research without doing any critical appraises of
>>> it that really challenge status quo ideologies.
>>>
>>> Also, most of the work, except in the context of international user
>>> experience research, assumes a cultural homogeneity within work in the US,
>>> and has consequences for how persons of color who come from different
>>> backgrounds may be evaluated as 'effective' and 'non-effective'
>>> interviewers as tech begins to push for more people of color to be a part
>>> of their teams without a critical understanding of all this entails. Of
>>> course, I could point my colleagues to Charles Briggs' work, but tech
>>> people, I've found, like to read things a bit more closely aligned to their
>>> industry and it's a long hard battle since user experience research has had
>>> a particular bent towards psychology/cognitive science.
>>>
>>> That said, does anyone know of any linguistic anthropology work on this,
>>> or graduate students currently working on this? I'd also like to use these
>>> materials to start reshaping the diversity and inclusion training as well
>>> at levels higher up, so if anyone has any best practices for that, that too
>>> would be great.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Nate
>>>
>>> --
>>> Nathaniel Dumas
>>> Research Associate, Department of Anthropology
>>> University of Santa Cruz
>>> nadumas at ucsc.edu
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> Jacqueline Messing, Ph.D.
> Instructor, Department of Anthropology
> University of Maryland-College Park
>
> Instructor, Department of Linguistics
> Georgetown University
>

-- 
Nathaniel Dumas
Research Associate, Department of Anthropology
University of Santa Cruz
nadumas at ucsc.edu
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