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

Mon Jun 6 14:33:22 UTC 2016

Hi Nate -

If you haven't already, it might be worth asking this question on the
Anthrodesign list as well. https://anthrodesign.com/

Daniel

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 1:28 PM, Nathaniel Dumas <nadumas at ucsc.edu> wrote:

> 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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