John C. Paolillo

Language variation on Internet Relay Chat: A social network approach†

This paper examines linguistic variation on an Internet Relay Chat channel with respect to the hypothesis, based on the model of Milroy and Milroy (1992), that standard variants tend to be associated with weak social network ties, while vernacular variants are associated with strong network ties. An analysis of frequency of contact as a measure of tie strength reveals a structured relationship between tie strength and several linguistic variants. However, the variant features are associated with social positions in a way that does not correlate neatly with tie strength. An account of these results is proposed in terms of the social functions of the different variables and the larger social context of IRC affecting tie strength.

The Virtual Speech Community: Social Network and Language Variation on IRC

Many scholars anticipate that online interaction will have a long-term effect on the evolution of language, but little linguistic research yet addresses this question directly. In sociolinguistics, social network relations are recognized as the principal vehicle of language change. In this paper, I develop a social network approach to online language variation and change through qualitative and quantitative analysis of logfiles of Internet Relay Chat interaction. The analysis reveals a highly structured relationship between participants’ social positions on a channel and the linguistic variants they use. The emerging sociolinguistic relationship is more complex than what is predicted by current sociolinguistic theory for offline interaction, suggesting that sociolinguistic investigation of online interaction, where more detailed and fine-grained information about social contacts can be obtained, may offer unique contributions to the study of language variation and change.

Structure and Network in the YouTube Core

In this paper, we present results of an empirical investigation into the social structure of YouTube, addressing friend relations and their correlation with tags applied to uploaded videos. Results indicate that YouTube producers are strongly linked to others producing similar content. Furthermore, there is a socially cohesive core of producers of mixed content, with smaller cohesive groups around Korean music video and anime music videos. Thus, social interaction on YouTube appears to be structured in ways similar to other social networking sites, but with greater semantic coherence around content. These results are explained in terms of the relationship of video producers to the tagging of uploaded content on the site.

Language Networks on LiveJournal

Language use in 1,000 randomly-selected and 5,025 crawled LiveJournals was analyzed in order to determine the overall language demographics, the robustness of four non-English language networks (Russian, Portuguese, Finnish, and Japanese), and the characteristics of individuals who bridge between different languages on LiveJournal.com. The findings reveal that English dominates globally but not locally, network robustness is determined mostly by population size, and journals that bridge between languages are written by multicultural, multilingual individuals, or else they have broadly accessible content. Implications of these findings for cross-cultural conversation via blogs are considered

Social Network Analysis on the Semantic Web: Techniques and Challenges for Visualizing FOAF

The Semantic Web promises to provide new applications for Internet users through the use of RDF metadata attached to various information resources on the web. Yet is somewhat unclear who will provide the metadata, or what will motivate people to provide it, let alone the exact nature of the applications the Semantic Web will ultimately support. What will the “killer app” of the Semantic Web be, and what shape will it take? An answer to this question may have already arisen, in the form of the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) vocabulary. The FOAF project was begun in 1999 to explore the application of Semantic Web technologies (RDF/XML) to describing people’s personal details: their professional and personal lives, their friends, interests and other social dispositions. Its main product is the FOAF vocabulary, an RDF/XML namespace with elements defined for describing an individual’s social sphere (Brickley and Miller, 2003).

Fast Talking, Fast Shooting: Text Chat in an Online First-Person Game

How actively do users chat, with whom, about what, and how coherently, when they are shooting enemies and dodging bullets in a fast-paced virtual gaming environment? This paper reports on a study of public text chat in BZFlag, an open source capturethe-flag game in which user avatars are tanks. Chat data were analyzed using methods of content and discourse analysis, including analyzing the coherence of extended conversations. The findings reveal that public chat is used actively in BZFlag, primarily to react to and negotiate game play, and that extended conversations occur intermittently and are surprisingly coherent. Implications are discussed for multitasking, classifying multiplayer online games, and enhancing the chatability, or chat usability, of first-person shooter game designs.

Gary Larson’s Far Side: Nonsense? Nonsense!

The Far Side cartoons ofGary Larson have been claimed t o exemplify the nonsense (NON) humor type of the 3WD humor taxonomy (Köhler and Ruch 1994), where NON is characterized äs having a structure in which there is no resolution. et closer examination reveals three main difficulties with Köhler and Ruch s approach: (i) the cartoon sample size; (n) the raters cultural background; and (iii) the Interpretation ofthe 3WD äs comprehensive. These difficulties are raised through a structural analysis of 800 Far Side cartoons, using the Generalized Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo and Raskin 1991). Three distinct resolution types emerge in this sample: FÜLL, PART and , which pattern in significantly non-random ways with other structural characteristics of the cartoons, especially Target (TA) and Logical Mechanism (L M). It is shown that the füll ränge of resolution types is unlikely to be represented in Köhler and Ruch s sample, and that their German raters are likely to lack crucial aspects of the cultural knowledge of TA and LM invohed in interpreting Far Side cartoons. An alternative Interpretation of Köhler and Ruchs results is proposed in which cultural knowledge plays different roles in processing Far Side cartoons of different resolution types. Far Side cartoons and the 3WD Gary Larsons Far Side cartoon series has enjoyed populär success, both commercially and among humor analysts. Newer single-frame cartoons such äs The Quigmans, Real Life Adventures, Bizzar o, Close to Home and others are heavily influenced by the drawing style and the premises of Humor 11-3 (1998), 261-290 0933-1719/98/0011-0261

Formalizing formality: an analysis of register variation in Sinhala

Variation in language on the basis of formality (register variation) is often neglected both in grammatical descriptions and in sociolinguistic analyses. I demonstrate here that in Sinhala, and perhaps in other diglossic languages, register variation in syntax cannot be ignored. In a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) analysis based on a corpus of naturally occurring Sinhala texts, I propose an analysis of register variation in which the syntax of all observed registers is accounted for within a single grammar. I further explain how the approach to register variation developed here can be extended to other types of sociolinguistic variation.

North American English Vowels: A Factor-analytic Perspective

Previous studies of American English have identified a number of robust patterns involving the vowel system, such as the Northern Cities Chain Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift. These studies primarily employ methods which treat separately the phonetic properties of specific vowels as produced by individual speakers which are later assembled into complete vowel systems. While this provides a useful picture of production, it is not adequate for comparison with dialect perception studies, where interpretation of the results often requires some understanding of the correlations among linguistic features and between those features and individual talkers. We conducted a factor analysis of the duration and first and second formant frequencies of each of the fourteen vowels produced by forty-eight speakers representing six regional varieties of American English and both genders. The data were submitted to factor analysis using maximum likelihood estimation and Varimax rotation. Results confirmed significant correlations between regional dialect and acoustic-phonetic properties of the vowel systems, although these patterns are complicated by interactions with gender. These results illustrate the utility of factor analytic methods in examining systematic variation across an entire linguistic system such as the vowels.

Democratic participation in the discursive management of Usenet

Internet voting, sometimes proposed as a means of enhancing democratic participation, is partly inspired by the democratic process of newsgroup creation on Usenet. To better understand how online voting might influence democratic participation more generally, we conducted an empirical investigation into the voting activity on newsgroups in the comp hierarchy of Usenet since 1989. Counter to expectation, participation does not appear to be organized into factions or interest groups, but rather there are distinct, individualized patterns of voting. At a coarser level of analysis, some interest-based patterns do emerge, but these appear to correspond to frequent individual voters instead of coherent groups of voters. Noting that the Usenet voting protocol is designed to function principally as a gauge of participant interest, rather than as a genuine plebiscite, we conclude that the design of the Usenet voting system may not adequately gauge the electorates will in an electronic democracy where voter turnout and democratic participation are chief concerns.