28.2320, Review: English; Ling & Lit; Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: Schildhauer (2016)

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Subject: 28.2320, Review: English; Ling & Lit; Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: Schildhauer (2016)

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Date: Wed, 24 May 2017 15:45:53
From: Marina Santini [MarinaSantini.MS at gmail.com]
Subject: The Personal Weblog

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2198.html

AUTHOR: Peter  Schildhauer
TITLE: The Personal Weblog
SUBTITLE: A Linguistic History
SERIES TITLE: Hallesche Sprach- und Textforschung. Language and Text Studies. Recherches linguistiques et textuelles - Band 14
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Marina Santini, Swedish Institute of Computer Science

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

INTRODUCTION

“The Personal Weblog: A Linguistic History” by Peter Schildhauer is a
monograph that describes and interprets the evolution of the personal weblog
genre. The study of the personal weblog is corpus-based. The corpus was
created using material from The Internet Archive. The volume is written in
English. It is based on the author’s PhD thesis (p. 17), originally written in
German. The reading of this book is recommended to all those interested in
genre analysis, genre evolution, genre classification, blog genre analysis.  

SUMMARY

The volume ”The Personal Weblog: A Linguistic History” has 308 pages. It
includes Acknowledgements, Contents Overview, Table of Contents, List of
Illustrations and References. The volume does not have an Index. 

The monograph opens with an Introduction and contains 4 parts, namely “Part A:
Background”, where the theoretical framework, the methodology and the research
corpus are presented; “Part B: Facets of the History of the Personal Weblog”,
that describes in detail all the dimensions introduced in Part A; “Part C:
Conclusions”, where a synthesis of the results is presented; and finally “Part
D: Appendix”, where the source URLs of the blog posts used to build the
DIABLOC research corpus are listed. All in all, the volume has 12 chapters,
numbered from Chapter 0 (Introduction) to Chapter 11 (Corpus and Citation).
 
Chapter 0 contains a short preamble and the outline of the book. 

In Chapter 1, the author frames the concept of genre. He discusses several
facets and focuses on the following aspects:
- genre users and genre’s community;
- genres as cognitive prototypically structured devices;  
- genres as complex multimodal patterns;
- genre dynamics and change. 

A genre model of the personal weblog is proposed and graphically illustrated
in Fig. 4 (p. 39). According to this model, genres are cognitive devices that
show prototypical traits.  Genres are based on communication forms (i.e.
technical affordances that give rise to communicative potentials) and are
instantiated in individual texts that can be analysed in terms of descriptive
dimensions, such as situation, structure and function. Genres evolve over
time. The author accounts for genre evolution in terms of the interaction
between individual change and collective change and adapts the Invisible Hand
Theory (Keller, 1989) to genre. Keller’s theory assumes that language change
is based on the sum of the actions of individual speakers. Similarly, genres
(which can be seen as acts of language) are pushed forward by the sum of
actions of individual genre users (p. 45). 

Chapter 2 describes the design and the content of the Diachronic Blog Corpus
(DIABLOC), i.e. the research corpus on which the book is based upon. DIABLOC
was compiled using The Internet Archive. For the annotation of the texts, the
author applied the ”ethnocategory-based approach to genres” (p. 49), which
basically means that a text is a member of a genre as soon as the genre label
is declared as such in some way by members of the community. DIABLOC spans
from 1997 to 2012, contains 3,553 posts and approx. 771,537 words (p. 57). A
differentiation of the terms: “weblog”, “blog” and “personal weblog” is then
provided (pp. 49-52).

Chapter 3 outlines the methodological framework of the research, which,
essentially, rests on three “methodological pillars”, namely:
1. a variety of linguistic approaches;
2. “a bundle of qualitative methods and premises developed in social sciences”
collected under the umbrella term of Grounded Theory, which conceptualizes
research as a circular incremental process;
3. a variety of quantitative methods (descriptive statistics in SPSS and
WordSmith 6.0). 

Chapter 4 opens Part B and describes several aspects, namely the multiple
layers of the blog communication form (e.g. the spread of blog software and
multimodality); the influence of the blog communication form on other
dimensions of the genre; accessibility, innovation, and the notion of
“blogging community” that plays an important role in the development of the
blogging activity and practice. Fig. 9 on page 95 illustrates the complexity
of the blog communication form. This is a crucial chapter that helps make
sense of the complexity of the blog genre. 

Chapter 5 is a multifaceted chapter focussing on and developing three themes,
namely: communicative sphere, conceptualized audience and conversational
maxims. The communicative sphere is analysed in terms of the characteristic
traits of a typical personal weblog (e.g. blogging as leisure activity; the
sense of “immediacy”, i.e. acting “here” and “now”; authorship and
self-disclosure). The audience concept is very variable and it may contain
friends, family and mass audience. Personal weblogs seem to be characterized
by the ambivalence of being “private” and being “public” at the same time. The
dilemma is often solved by conceptualizing the audience as similar to the
blogger himself/herself as for demographics, opinions, interests, and the like
(p. 138). Finally, the author argues that conversational maxims of quality,
quantity relevance and manner play an important role in the production and
reception of blog posts (see Section 5.8). 

Chapter 6 is organized into several subsections, where the structure that
characterizes blogs is analysed at macrolevel (i.e. a personal blog is seen as
part of a website), mesolevel (where design and layout are considered) and
microlevel (where the use of links, language and images are investigated).  As
for the linguistic characterization, the author states: “it’s hard to pinpoint
something like the language of personal weblogs” (p. 181). He uses WordSmith
6.0 to analyses some linguistic traits such as word frequencies (that show how
personal pronouns are more frequent in DIABLOC than in the BNC), spontaneity
(assessed using interjection frequency), emulated orality, emoticons,
parataxis and hypotaxis, and standardized type-token ratio. All these
phenomena fit into the debate on the hybridisation hypothesis, i.e.
“blog-posts cover all shades from emulated orality to prototypical literality”
(p. 185-186).

Chapter 7 provides an insightful analysis of blog posts. The author adopts the
concept of genre profiles (Luginbühl, 2014) and assumes that a “blog post can
be related to certain post genres, which in turn are more delimited in a
structural and functional way than the super-genre personal weblog” (p. 245).
The author discusses informative, appellative and contact-oriented post
genres, but focuses primarily on informative genres as they occur most
frequently. Many examples are described and analysed in detail. The overall
picture that we get is one of complexity, a complexity that the author
summarizes in Table 44 (p. 223). In Section 7.5 it is shown that “genres of
blog posts do not, in most cases, only serve communicative purposes, but that
the writing process itself also fulfils important functions for the authors;
for example, structuring thoughts and reaching insights, releasing emotional
tension and generating creative ideas.” (p. 245). 

Part C provides a synthesis of the results from two different perspectives,
namely Chapter 8 provides an historical overview of the personal weblog,
including the weblog and its online ancestor; and Chapter 9 addresses more
theoretical questions, such as why genres changes. In this chapter, the author
restates and reinforces the idea that Keller’s theory of the invisible hand
(see Chapter 1) can be profitably applied to some phenomena of the personal
blog. 

Chapter 10 closes the book with a summary and questions for further research. 

Part D contains the Appendix related to the DIABLOC corpus. 

EVALUATION

The book is a valuable contribution to the history of personal weblog and to
the interpretation of the concept of genre. 

The most valuable part is, in my opinion, the Chapter 1, where the author
tries to systematize the complexity of the concept of genre. 

Genre has often been defined as a “complex and multi-faceted” notion (e.g.
recently Stukker et al., 2016). The author expands this idea of
multifarious-ness and proposes the definition of genres as “multi-layered
phenomena” (p. 30). Genres are defined as cognitive devices which group texts
according to similarities based on structure, situation and function and where
texts are seen as multimodal rather than language-only entities (p. 38-39).
Genres are basically cognitive categories that  often have prototypical
structures and that are instantiated in specific texts. “Each instantiation of
a genre is unique and contains innovations” (p. 40). It is the mass of
individual instantiations of a genre that trigger genre evolution in the long
term. This view of genre evolution is compliant with the Invisible Hand Theory
(cited above), and reminds me of the Saussurian “langue and parole”
interaction in humans: ‘langue’ encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and
conventions, while ‘parole’ refers to the concrete instances of the use of
‘langue’. I find this view convincing as far as personal blogs are concerned.
I am not completely sure that this view would be entirely applicable to more
recent genres created on social network platforms such, as tweets and Facebook
microblogging (instantiated in conversation threads and individual comments),
where imitative behaviour seems to be widespread, but conventions are hard to
identify consistently.

The volume makes important statements that are useful for those working with
genre analysis. For instance, the author states: “an important indicator for
the emergence of a genre is the use of a genre label. The christening of the
weblog has been traced back to 1997 […].” (p. 249). This importance of the
“genre name” (and its variants) is not new (e.g. cf. Görlach, 2004: 9),
although it is often overlooked. Personally, I think that the widespread use
of a “genre name” is a reliable signal for the identity of a genre, but this
stance is not uncontroversial, since some researchers argues that genres are
not always labelled by a name. 

An additional and not negligible contribution of the research described in the
volume is the creation of DIABLOG, the diachronic corpus of English personal
weblogs that spans from 1997 to 2012. Possibly, the corpus can be further
extended by regularly adding new items along the years and serve as a resource
to monitor the evolution of this genre in the next decades.

The content of the book is very dense. It is understandable that the
organization is sometimes convoluted. For example, Chapter 5 has three ad
interim summaries and an end-of-the chapter “Summary and Conclusions” section.
I wonder whether subdividing dense chapters into shorter independent chapters
would have simplified the reading and the navigation of the book. 

The language used in blogs is analysed in Section 6.4.2 “The Language of Blog
Posts”. However, reflections on language use are interspersed all along the
book. For instance, when discussing “immediacy” in Chapter 5, the author
points out: ”Language-wise, the adherence to immediacy becomes particularly
evident in the use of proximal deictic expressions, for instance the adverbs
“here” and “now” as well as the present progressive […]” (p. 105).  It would
have been nice to have a summary of all the linguistic phenomena in an
Appendix, and it would have been handy for those looking for linguistic
features or cues for automatic extraction.

The typesetting of the book is accurate (no typos struck my attention).
However, I missed the presence of an index in the back matter of the book. The
back-of-the-book index (a handy list of words, phrases and related pointers)
is like a “search engine” for non-digital documents, which helps the reader in
finding concepts, notions and references, thus facilitating the navigation of
the content and creation of associations and relations in the reader’s mind.
This volume would have certainly benefited from it. 

Surprisingly, I did not find any reference to the work of Yates and
Orlikowski, who carried out extensive research on genre and on its definition,
as well on genre taxonomy and genre systems (especially in corporations). In
particular, in Yates and Orlikowski (1992), the authors traced the evolution
from the memo genre to the email genre, and stressed (among other things) the
idea that new genres mostly ”evolve” from previous genres and successfully
settle-in in new communicative environments and on new media.  In The Personal
Weblog: a Linguistic History, the author makes a similar claim. 

Just for the sake of completeness, for those who are currently carrying out
research on the blog genre, I add a related reference, namely Pinjamaa (2016),
which focuses on corporate communication through a blog. Pinjamaa (2016) was
published after the publication of the volume that I am reviewing here. 

In conclusion, “The Personal Weblog: a Linguistic History” provides
comprehensive coverage. It is an excellent reading on (corpus-based) genre
analysis and more specifically on the diachronic analysis of blogs. It is a
recommended reading for linguists and computational linguists interested in
genre analysis and in the genre-revealing linguistic features.

References

Görlach, Manfred., 2004. Text types and the history of English (Vol. 139).
Walter de Gruyter.

Keller, Rudi (1989). ''Invisible-hand theory and language evolution.'' Lingua
77, no. 2 (1989): 113-127.

Luginbühl, Martin (2014). ''Genre profiles and genre change. The case of TV
news.'' Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change 36 (2014): 305.

Pinjamaa, Noora (2016). ''Evolution of the Blog Genre: The Emergence of the
Corporate Personal Blog.'' In Scandinavian Conference on Information Systems,
pp. 3-15. Springer International Publishing, 2016.

Stukker, Ninke, Wilbert Spooren, and Gerard Steen, eds. (2016). Genre in
Language, Discourse and Cognition. Vol. 33. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG,
2016.

Yates, JoAnne, and Wanda J. Orlikowski (1992). ''Genres of organizational
communication: A structurational approach to studying communication and
media.'' Academy of management review 17, no. 2 (1992): 299-326.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a computational linguist interested in text classification, sentiment
analysis, genre analysis, information retrieval, semantics for language
technology and corpus linguistics.





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