The Language of Blogs

The Doctrine of Correctness in Web 2.0: Links and References

Here are references for the paper I gave at 'Resisting the Standard', University of Sheffield, 26 July 2015.

'Comprised of'

Andrew McMillen, 3 Feb 2015 One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake: Meet the ultimate WikiGnome

Mark Liberman, 8/2/2015 Can 50,000 Wikipedia Edits Be Wrong?

Geoff Nunberg, 12/3/2015 Don't You Dare Use 'Comprised Of' On Wikipedia: One Editor Will Take It Out [NPR Fresh Air]


Wikipedia

Wikipedia: Basic Copy-editing

Wikipedia: Disputes in English grammar

Wikipedia: Manual of Style

Register of decisions in the Manual of Style

Wikipedia: Comprised of


Correctness in other communities

Facebook: Corect Spelling and Apostrophe Use

Flickr groups: Spelling

Guardian Modern Tribes: The Grammar Pedant


Correctness

Naomi S. Baron (2002) Who Sets E-Mail Style? Prescriptivism, Coping Strategies, and
Democratizing Communication Access, The Information Society: An International Journal, 18:5, 403-413,

Joan C. Beal (2010). The grocer's apostrophe: popular prescriptivism in the 21st century. English Today, 26, pp 57-64.

Sterling Andrus Leonard, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage 1700-1800 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1929). [available on-line at: https://archive.org/details/doctrineofcorrec00leon]

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2010). The usage guide: its birth and popularity. English Today, 26, pp 14-23

Robin Straaijer (2014). Rules of engagement? Usage and normativism: public discourse and
critical language awareness . English Today, 30, pp 11-12

Bridging the Unbridgeable Project on Usage Guides at University of Leiden

June 26, 2015 | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Plenary to Poster

The annual BAAL Conference is this week, at Warwick, but for once I was not worried about getting my paper ready. I proposed a poster, and in May I had done an hour-long plenary on the same topic at a conference on Medical Communication at the University of Bergamo (the written paper will come out in the proceedings of that conference). Here are the slides from the talk: Download MedTwitterCERLIS180614

So all I had to do was to update some of the details and examples.  Yeah, and cram one hour of talk onto an A0 sheet of paper in a readable font, in a layout that makes sense. I haven't done a poster in about ten years, so I had to discover or rediscover a lot of the basics.

  • I started with an A4 PowerPoint slide. I don't know if that is the usual software to use now, but it was ten years ago, and it still seems like an easy way to move elements around on one page.  
  • A very helpful page at Lancaster University Information Services told me I should lay it out A4 size and blow it up when I print it.  They suggested 18 pt font for the main heading, and 6 pt for the text, to get 72 pt and 24 pt when enlarged.
  • I chose portrait layout, because I had the idea of introductory stuff and overview above, examples in boxes below. Also, I recall that nearly all BAAL posters are portrait layout.
  • I started, of course, by leaving out lots and slots of stuff. I took some key slides from the talk, edited them down into just four key boxes, and arranged them in the middle of the page in a square.  It was helpful at this point to us the grid in Powerpoint to align them.
  • The key pointI was making in the talk was that most examples actually fall between these four boxes.  So logically, the 'hybrid' category would go in the middle.  But there wasn't space to do that, so I put these examples below, and added a circle (later an ellipse) in the middle to stand for them.
  • Then I put the diagram of my overall model at top centre, partly to break up all this text. In the talk, I'd developed the diagram gradually, starting with a model from Roberts & Sarangi (1999), but here I just gave the last version.  Too complex to pick up in the talk, probably, and maybe too complex to pick up on a poster.
  • To show the links between the diagram and the data,I gave each of the four boxes in the diagram a different colour of border, and used that colour for the border of the data box below, I moved the data  boxes around so that their arrangement corresponded, roughly, to the diagram.
  • Then I realised that the little diagram was redundant - the whole poster was the diagram. So I good the arrows and labels out of the diagram above, put them in the main section of the poster, and deleted the little diagram.
  • That gave me space in the top middle for my favourite illustration, a cartoon from Monica Lalanda. (I'm not worried that it is in Spanish - anyone can figure it out from the image alone).
  • On either side of the cartoon I put boxes for the introduction and methods.  These remained empty until almost the last step.
  • Then I edited the text in the main data and analysis boxes.  There was too much in them, and some of the examples that made sense (I hope) when I explained them orally in the plenary might not make much sense to someone standing in front of a poster.
  • I picked out one example from each of the four boxes and put it in a much bigger font, bigger even than the headings in the boxes.
  • At this stage, I was still using the default font of Powerpoint, Calabri, which is sans serif. It is clear enough but over-used and boring.
  • So I returned to Zen Faulkes' excellent site, Better Posters, and looked for advice on fonts.  He says to use sans serif, and not the default of whatever software you are using. He suggests buying a distinctive font package, and his own preference is Helvetica.  My examples are from Twitter, so I checked what font was used there (yes, I should have known).  It used to be Helvetica Neue (with come controversy when it changed to Gotham).  Helvetica Neue is on PowerPoint, so I tried it.  The text came out slightly wider and bigger, for the same font size, and it looked better, so I kept that family, using 8 pt bold for headings, 7 pt for the main explanatory text, and 6 pt for analysis and examples.
  • As I cut examples and aded explanations, I moved the boxes and arrows around to keep them aligned (the barrows had turned to diamonds at this stage, because arrows were too squashed).
  • Most posters seem to put references at the end, or on a handout (usually put on a chair or an envelope at BAAL).  I can't picture anyone writing all this stuff down, so I gave a link to a list here on my blog.
  • At this stage I still had the one crucial reference, to Roberts & Sarangi.  But it took up lots of space in the lower right, and I needed that space for some sort of summary, so I moved that to blog list too (sorry Celia and Srikant), and compressed all the summary slides from my talk into three bullet points.
  • I realised that my colour-coded borders were no longer necessary, and were looking rather busy.  So I made all the main boxes in the middle blue, to keep them together.  The hybrid category at the bottom I made gray. The Summary and reference link box at lour right I made yellow, to pick up the colour of the cartoon at the top.
  • Finally I put in the introduction and the methods in their boxes, and did a bit of resizing.
  • Here's the draft version: Download MedicalTwitterPosterdraft310814
  • So now I need to print it, and see if these font sizes and margins are right.
  • Then I'll go to BAAL and look at the other posters, and see what decisions they made about layout and fonts.

My feeling now is that I successfully got some good stuff on the poster, in not-too-crowded layout.  But I think it lacks a clear line of reading through it. And I'm not sure that a reader can really reconstruct the argument just by looking at the boxes. And I don't take advantage of the way a poster can present striking visuals.  I'll see what people say at the conference.

August 31, 2014 | Permalink | Comments (1)

References for 'Time and Work on Science Twitter'

Here are the references for the talk I am doing today at AILA in Brisbane:

Adam, B. (1990) Time and Social Theory.  Cambridge: Polity.

Adam, B. (1995) Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time. Cambridge: Polity.

Adam, B. and C. Groves (2007) Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics. Leiden: Brill.

Barton, D. and C. Lee (2013). Language Online: Investigating Digital Texts and Practices. London: Routledge.

boyd, d., Golder S and Lotan G. (2011) Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE.

Clegg, S. (2010). Time future: The dominant discourse of higher education. Time & Society 19: 345-364.

Cockelbergh M. (2011) What are we doing?Microblogging, the ordinary private,and the primacy of the present. Journal of Information, Communication & Ethics in Society 9: 127-136.

Georgalou, M. (forthcoming). The discursive performance of self in social network sites: Greeks on Facebook. PhD thesis, Lancaster Univrsity.

Gillen, J. & Merchant, G. (2013). Contact calls: Twitter as a dialogic social and linguistic practice. Language Sciences. 35: 47-58 .

Guzmán-Valenzuela, C., & R. Barnett (2013). Marketing time: Evolving timescapes in academia. Studies in Higher Education 38: 1120-1134.

Honeycutt C and Herring S. (2009) Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE.

Mandorvilli A. (2011) Trial by Twitter. Nature 469: 286-287.

Marwick AE. and boyd d. (2011) 'I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately': Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media and Society 13: 114-133.

Page R. (2012) Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction, London: Routledge.

Page, R., D. Barton, J. Unger, and M. Zappavigna (2014) Researching Language in Social Media: A Student Guide.  London: Routledge.

Potts, A., W. Simm, J. Whittle, and J. Unger (forthcoming, 2014). Success in digitally augmented activism: A triangulated approach to UK activist Twitter use.

Rodrigues Araujo, E. (2005). Understanding the PhD as a phase in time.  Time & Society 14: 191-211.

Sorokin, P. and R. Merton (1937) Social time: A methodological and functional analysis. American Journal of Sociology 42: 615-629.

Ylikijoki, O-H., and H. Mäntylä (2003). Conflicting time perspectives in academic work. Time & Society 12: 55-78.

Ylikijoki, O-H (2011). Boundary-work between work and life in the high-speed university. Studies in Higher Education 38: 244-255.

Zappavigna M. (2011) Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media and Society 13: 788-806.

Zappavigna, M, (2012), The Discourse of Twitter and Social Media. Continuum: London.

August 10, 2014 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some links and references on Social Media and Medical Practice

I am doing a talk on 'Social Media, Scientific Research and Professional Practice',at the conference, THE LANGUAGE OF MEDICINE: Science, Practice and Academia CERLIS, June 2014.  Here are some materials to go with it.

Greg Myers

Links

Anne Marie Cunningham’s blog: http://wishfulthinkinginmedicaleducation.blogspot.co.uk/

Monica Lalanda [Emergency Doctor and illustrator in Spain): blog at http://monicalalanda.com and tweets at @mlalanda

Craig Nicholson. Palliative care on Twitter: who to follow to get started http://theothersidestory.co.uk/resources/ijpn_2003_vol19_article.pdf -

Social Media Codes and Guidelines for Professionals

ACAS [UK conciliation service] Social media and how to develop a policy: http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=3381

American Medical Association http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/medical-ethics/code-medical-ethics/opinion9124.page?

Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency: http://www.ahpra.gov.au/News/2014-02-13-revised-guidelines-code-and-policy.aspx

Australian Medical Association: http://www.medicalboard.gov.au/Codes-Guidelines-Policies/Social-media-policy.aspx

British Medical Association. ‘Social Media Use: Practical and Ethical Guidance for Doctors and Medical Students: http://bma.org.uk/practical-support-at-work/ethics/ethics-a-to-z

Chris Boudreux, Social Media Policy Database: http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies/

Rachel Miller, 300 Social Media Policies: http://www.allthingsic.com/smpolicy/

UK Royal College of General Practitioners: http://www.rcgp.org.uk/~/media/Files/Policy/A-Z-policy/RCGP-Social-Media-Highway-Code.ashx

UK Civil Service: http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/news/lets-get-social/how-to-use-social-media

References

Barton, D. and C. Lee (2013). Language Online: Investigating Digital Texts and Practices. London: Routledge.

boyd d, Golder S and Lotan G. (2011) Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE.

Cockelbergh M. (2011) What are we doing?Microblogging, the ordinary private,and the primacy of the present. Journal of Information, Communication & Ethics in Society 9: 127-136.

Gillen, J. & Merchant, G. (2013). Contact calls: Twitter as a dialogic social and linguistic practice. Language Sciences. 35: 47-58 .

Hawn, C. (2009). Take Two Aspirin And Tweet Me In The Morning: How Twitter, Facebook, And Other Social Media Are Reshaping Health Care. Health Affairs, 28/2:361-368. http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/28/2/361.long

Honeycutt C and Herring S. (2009) Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE.

Mandorvilli A. (2011) Trial by Twitter. Nature 469: 286-287.

Mansfield, SJ, SG Morrison, HO Stephens, MA Bonning, Sheng-Hui Wang, AHJ Withers, RC Olver and AW Perry (2011). Social media and the medical profession Medical Journal of Australia 194/12.https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2011/194/12/social-media-and-medical-profession

Marwick AE. and boyd d. (2011) 'I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately': Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media and Society 13: 114-133.

Page R. (2012) Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction, London: Routledge.

Potts, A., W. Simm, J. Whittle, and J. Unger (forthcoming, 2014). Success in digitally augmented activism: A triangulated approach to UK activist Twitter use.

Roberts, C. and S. Sarangi (1999). Hybridity in gatekeeping discourse: Issues of practical relevance for the researcher. In S. Sarangi and C. Roberts, eds. Talk, Work, and Institutional Order (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter), PP. 473-504.

C. Roberts, S. Sarangi, L. Southgate, R. Wakeford, and V. Wass (2000). Oral examinations—equal opportunities, ethnicity, and fairness in the MRCGP. BMJ, Feb 5, 320(7231): 370–375. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127149/.

Zappavigna M. (2011) Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media and Society 13: 788-806.

Zappavigna, M, (2012), The Discourse of Twitter and Social Media. Continuum: London.

June 17, 2014 | Permalink | Comments (0)

365!

I got into my one bit of real social networking by accident.  Yes, I am on Facebook, Academic.edu, and Linked-In, but as anyone who knows me from those networks can tell you, I don’t do much. I have two mostly dormant but not quite zombified  blogs, this one and one on porridge.  But I can perhaps imagine a bit of what a more involved user of these networks goes through, because I experience every day on Flickr the sense of a routine, the flow of entries, the counting of views, the multiplication of contacts, the use of tags, and the measures of popularity (or lack of it)

My Account page tells me I have been on Flickr since 2007, so I suppose it is true.  I set up an account to show students in Ling 233, Researching Media, how to research social media, which is why my Flickr name is so pretentious and unhelpful (in some other social networks, my username is the number of an office I left long ago).  I then used Flickr to upload photos I wanted to share with family members, so the folders from the earlier years are mostly holiday snaps.

In January 2012, I resolved to post one picture a day.  It was a good experience; I started looking for different kinds of subject matter:  a tree stump, a quarry, cufflinks, a bronze lamp, flowers, a view of Lancaster at dusk.  My wife Tess set herself the parallel task of writing a haiku about every one, and that meant members of her writing group looked at them, to see what had inspired her (or they didn’t, since the haiku was enough).  That meant each one got five or six views, so it was perhaps that experience that got me going.  I continued in the next month, focusing on the theme of colour (but Tess stopped the haikus; it was very time-consuming and some of my photos were perhaps not very good subjects for the form). And I did another month, focusing on cropping and framing.

One day I ran into David Barton who has written a book about on-line discourse (with Carmen Lee).  He pointed out that there is a Flickr group devoted to posting one photo a day.  So that day, I checked, and joined Project 365! (there are in fact several similar groups, and I’ve never tried to compare them).  I've made a set of some of my favourites over the last year and a half. What I learned, and the reason I am posting this now, is that being in a group makes all the difference.

Several thousand people post daily on Project 365, so that means there is an average of one photo posted every minute.  I would usually comment on one or two of the other recently posted photos, and some of those people commented back and became contacts. Since I invariably post around 10 pm, my contacts are mostly people who post around the same time; that is the most likely way they would have seen my photos. Many of them were in the time zone ahead of me, in Germany or France, or in the UK, though one or two have been in the US (so they must sometimes post in the afternoon, their time).

The nice thing about Project 365 is that participants generally post oen photo, so they choose, but they are driven by the dailiness to look for news subjects.  All my contacts do striking photos, or I would not have noticed them in the stream, and most are so much better than me that we aren’t really doing the same sort of thing.  Lénaelle does (or did – she has finished her 365) stunning macros of flowers and animals, Heinrich Markus did stunningly composed cityscapes and textures, lucy*photography did wonderfully composed shots of everyday objects, Henry Hemming (my first 365 contact) does flowers and cities, Favmark devotes this time of year exclusively to orchids of an astonishing range (I came across his work through Henry Hemmings). Sunchild57 takes walks in Northamptonshire. JKLSemi seems to be in Ohio, and often does views from university buildings, or witty scenes with plastic toys, and  TomMayNC observes the birds at his feeder and the cars along the highways in North Carolina. I learn a lot from them, especially when they capture a strange and intriguing image, or nail a simple task I have fluffed: taking a picture of the cat, making architectural detail interesting, conveying all the needed information about a wildflower, capturing the activity of a street scene.

Flickr, like other social networking systems, though it seems flat, is very hierarchical.  There are different possible ways of measuring success – having lots of contacts, being invited to join moderated groups, getting lots of favourites.  For me, the interest is in getting comments and favourite marks from people whose work I know.  About every third photo or so gets a comment from someone, usually because I have commented on one of theirs and they comment back (reciprocity is not required, but it seems to be an implicit norm).  Comments are typically short and positive, and sometimes surprising. In other Flickr groups, there are lots of technical comments about cropping, levels, saturation, black point, and other matters of settings and processing, but my commenters stick to saying they like it, usually saying something about what they like, which is just what I do.

There are several reasons some people get many more comments.  First, they are very good, with attention to focus, lighting, colour and framing. Second, there is a kind of photo that stands out in the rush of images that is Flickr, however mundane the subject matter: dramatic lighting, unconventional composition, deep colour, especially almost monocolour.  Another reason for higher comments would be that some people post to many more groups, increasing their chances of being seen.  And they use tags cleverly, so someone looking for a photo of, say, a canal bridge, might find their image.

I finished my first year of posting on New Year’s Eve 2012, but I went on until I reached the anniversary of my Project 365 with my 365th posting.  I stopped then, relieved not to have to go upstairs every night before bed and find something on my camera that would be worth posting, hoping that I would stop soon seeing a 3 X 4 frame around everything I looked at.  But it was only a few weeks before I started again.  Yes, Project 365 is time-consuming, but I also find it very relaxing, at the end of a day of work, to look over some very striking and unpredictable photos by my contacts and other  P365s. My excitement at getting favourable comments is undiminished from my days as a third-grader looking for the teacher’s stuck-on start (a symbol appropriated by Flickr for favourites).  And it gives a discipline to the kind of visual roaming that is an important part of my life.  My chosen photo isn't always very good; most people in Project 365 seems to find there are some days when there isn’t much time for photography, or when they are confined to spaces that only a gifted photographer could make interesting. But I do now have a better sense what makes a good photo, or at least a good Project 365 Flickr photo.  It makes me look.

So why is this my one real bit of social networking?  On Twitter and Facebook and even in the blog I am doing stuff I might have done without the social networking site, but on Flickr, the social network involves people I did not know before (the contacts), it is part of my daily routine (up to the computer at 10 pm), and it shapes that routine (seeing the world in terms of one possible picture). Project 365 is social networking slowed down, not the passing of moments but the passing of days and years.

 

June 23, 2013 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Twitter Practices: Reality Check

We are holding a conference about Twitter at Lancaster University 10-12 April (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/twitter_and_microblogging/index.htm). Most of the papers will be academic analyses of the discourse of Twitter.  But we thought it would be exciting to have some interaction with people who regularly use Twitter. So we are planning to have a virtual panel via Twitter leading up to Thursday 11 April, using the hashtag #LUtwitRC.

We are inviting people from a range of fields, to illustrate the wide ranges of uses to which Twitter is put in different communities, and we have focused on people who have something to say about the medium in which they work.  We are inviting people who

  • have between 1000 and 10000 followers
  • post regularly,
  • and are all entertaining writers in the 140-character form.

We have invited panelists, but anyone who uses Twitter regularly can join in.  We’ll start it off with some questions. Participants at the conference would be discussing the tweets online from 4:15 to 5:15 pm (16:15-17:15) UK time on 11 April.

Issues in the discussion might include:

  • Writing: Where does micro-blogging fit in your other writing activities (print journalism, blog, academic articles, books, talks)?
  • Time: How do you possibly have time for Twitter?  How often do you check it? When do most of your responses come in?
  • Form: How do you use visuals? Links?  Is the length limit a problem or an opportunity?
  • Audience: Do you ever find a message misfires or gets misinterpreted?  Because of the compression?  Or the multiple audiences?  How important are retweets in your feed?
  • Following: Name two or three Twitter feeds you think are really well written.

We promise no rewards other than the expectation of some interesting interactions and new followers.  If you would like to participate, just let me know, and I will put up background on panel participants.

Greg Myers

[email protected]

@GregMyers

[for the LUtwit team: Julia Gillen, Diane Potts, and Johnny Unger]

Department of Linguistics and English Language

Lancaster University

April 03, 2013 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Tweeting Science: Compiling a Reference Corpus

I am making claims about scientists' use of Twitter, so I need a corpus of non-scientists' tweets for comparison. But there is a big issue with all collections of Twitter data:  what constitutes a representative sample?  Literary scholars can restrict appeal to a canon for their selection of texts.  Samples of blogs often focus on those that get the most links; samples of academic texts often choose the highest-impact journals in a field, or heavily-cited papers;  samples of news often go to newspapers with large circulations or those that make some claim to be newspapers of record.  But the Twitter feeds with the most followers are celebrities, and in some ways they are the least typical;  they may be doing something quite different from the writers that interest me.

My science Twitter feeds are to some degree about their scientific field, so I looked for non-science feeds that were focused on specialist topics (wine, food, horses, dogs, parenting, transport).  Also, my science Twitter writers each had about 1000 to 5000 followers, showing they were popular and consistent enough to attract readers far beyond their friends and connections, but not so popular that they were mainly science journalists or popularisers.  So I started by looking for non-science Twitter feeds that had a similar number of followers.  I searched the topic lists at We Follow and Twitter for various non-science topics.  I threw out those that had too many or too few followers, those that posted infrequently, or that were just adjuncts to a blog or other site.  I ruled out the feeds that claimed to be written by dogs.  And I came up with this list:

@alicefeiring - American who writes about natural wines.

@anniemole - Blog name of the writer of the great Going Underground blog, about the London transit system; her day job seems to be working for a foodie web site.

@cliffysmom - Nancy J. Bailey, an American who writes about and paints pictures of horses.

@EnglishMum - mostly about food and travel, not parenting.

‏ @dogloversdigest - Kevin Myers, dog breeding and training.

@mochadad - American writing about parenting and dating.

@paulawhite - An American teacher of English.

@SecondAveSagas - one of several Twitter feeds by Benjamin Kabak, this one focuses on the New York transit system.

‏ @shunafish - Shuna Fish Lydon, a New York pastry chef.

@woodswines - Simon Woods, a British wine writer.

Of course many other selections would be possible, and there is perhaps some personal bias here: food, wine, cities, but no politics, music, sports, or celebrity gossip.  But it was important that these people have some sort of expertise in their specialist areas, so that they might be doing something roughly comparable to the scientists using Twitter.

I wanted to keep them in separate files, so I couldn't just follow them and copy out the feed as it appeared in my box. I took about 10,000 words of each feed, to compare with the sample of ten science bloggers. There are problems with this approach to collecting the sample and preparing a corpus, but I'll come to them in another post.

 

April 11, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Independent scholars, web visibility, and Academia.edu

Not quite blogs, but a related topic:

I have been thinking about the visibility and invisibility of researchers on the web.  I have been thinking about this because, in editing the journal, I spend a lot of time contacting potential referees of articles.  If I can’t think of anyone on a specific topic offhand, or find someone on our Editorial Board, I usually look for other people who have written on the topic, in articles cited by the author or found in Google Scholar.  I get the name and the institution they were at when they wrote the article (maybe in 1995 or 2005) and search.  Usually that works, because academics in full-time employment at universities are pretty well represented on the web.  Some institutions, such as the Open University, won’t give an e-mail address, but usually they give enough detail on publications so that I can tell if this is a plausible person to referee on this topic or not, and I can find an e-mail address somewhere else.

That all works if the researcher has stayed at the same institution for most of their working life, as I have.  But of course many of the researchers who have written on just what I need (say, sit coms in Estonia, or deictic expressions in text messages) have moved.  They could have been research associates, or graduate students, or assistant professors without tenure, or teaching fellows, and they could be working doing something very different from what they wrote about, or they could have retired.  Or they could have gotten a better job somewhere else.  And it may be that universities are tightening up about just who is associated with them. At Lancaster it used to be common to offer an honorary research fellowship to someone who had been involved in research there but had moved on;  then the university declared that such positions could not be offered to anyone who had previously worked at the university, so anyone searching for these people will find nothing, even though they are most strongly associated with Lancaster.

If universities are good about recording who is there, they are very bad at recording anything about people who used to be there;  they seem to delete their web pages as soon as the office is empty and the key is returned.  It would be so nice if they just left a note:  ‘Dr. Media was just teaching that year at Sorry U., but maintains his interest in Estonian sitcoms, and can be reached at [email protected]” or “Professor Deixis is happily retired from the tensions of Worry U., is busy with her allotment, and really doesn’t want to hear about what tasks you have to offer her, so don’t bother.”  That would be better than nothing.

Then I began to think of this problem from the other side, the academic wanting to be found rather than the editor wanting to find them.  I began to think about this when I saw an author who did have a job but gave as her web page an Academia.edu address.  Others have a page dedicated to their topic hosted on some other service, or a Google site.  There might be many reasons to do this: university web pages are more and more centrally controlled, and one might not be able to present one’s work or update it as one wished.  Or one might prefer to be associated with one’s interesting topic or group, rather than one’s employer.  Or one might be going through a series of short-term or part-time jobs, and not want to have one’s web identity tied to some institution that just pays you the minimum possible per hour of marking.

I signed up on Academia.edu because this site came up frequently at the top of Google searches.  It does a lot of what one might hope for maintaining a web presence:  e-mail, CV, links to papers.  One could sign up as “Independent Scholar”, or as an ex of your old university.  Of course the problem is that the person searching has to be on Academic.edu too, but that may become more common. I’d be interested in any comments on whether it works for keeping up contacts.

March 13, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tweeting Science: week 1 - compiling a corpus

I'm returning to this blog to make some notes about a new project, a paper on 'Tweeting Science'.  It began as a paper at 'Writing Research Across Borders II' at George Mason University (abstract here, see p. 33). That was almost a year ago, so you see how long it takes me to write something up for publication.  Twitter was an afterthought in a proposed paper on blogs, but as I worked on it it seemed like the more interesting data.  Twitter also seems more relevant to what most scientists are doing now.  Science blogs were big a few years ago;  the science blogosphere began to fragment in June 2010, and many of the bloggers I was following are no longer posting regularly.  Those that remain have become much more straightforward professional science journalism.  But all the tweeters I studied last year are still at it, regularly, and Twitter seems like a key part of their professonal practice.  So I am going back to those tweeters, adding more, and studying Twitter practices more centrally.

More about my research questions for next week.  This week I was mainly working on getting together a corpus.  The corpus I had for WRAB was, as with many rushed conference presentations, too small and too careless.  I had simply copied and pasted the feed of tweets.  But there are several problems with this:

  • I lost the conversations with other tweeters - probably irrelevant for the corpus as a database, but problematic when I later want to come back and look more closely at specific tweets. 
  • I included the words that are put there by Twitter, what I am calling the frame: for example Reply, Retweet, Favorite, dates.  I thought I could just get away with ignoring these very frequent words, but of course they throw off the relative frequencies of other words.
  • I hadn't been very systematic in my choice of Twitter feeds.  As it turns out, they were good choices, but I didn't think enough about criteria for inclusion.

So I went back to those feeds, all still very active, deleted one, and added more.  I started with the 'science' categories in WeFollow and Science Pond by Sawhorse Media. My criteria were:

  • must be a practicing researcher (not necessarily at a university of course);  the science tweets with the most followers are usually science jorunalists or communicators, and I needed an active research life for reasons that will be clear.
  • must post regularly, so Twitter is clearly a part of their routine.  Just makes it easier to collect enough words.
  • more than 1000 followers and (usually) less than 5000.  Tweeters with low numbers of followers are typically doing something different (for instance, social arrangements with friends) where those with over 5000 are usually associated with publishers and institutions, and are serving as a kind of popular science node.
  • A range in terms of disciplines (Physics, Biology, Geology, Psychology).
  • Men and women, at different stages of their careers from PhD student to FRS, in North America and the UK (because those were the areas where most of the science tweeters were found).  All mainly in English, though some of the tweeters are clearly multilingual.

I came up with these  (with summaries of their Twitter profiles):

@AtheneDonald - Athene Donald, Professor of Physics at Cambridge

@attilacsordas - Attila Csordas, bioinformatician at European Bioinformatics Institute

@deevybee - Dorothy Bishop, Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford

@DNLee5 - Banielle N. Lee, biologist, urban ecologist, and science outreach, Scientific American blogger, apparently at a university in Oklahoma

@highlyanne - Anne jefferson, watershed hydrologist at University of North Carolina at Charlotte

@scicurious - anonymous but very well known blogger (currently Neurotic Physiology at http://scientopia.org/blogs/scicurious/).  'She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at a celebrated institution that is very fancy'

@clasticdetritus - Brian Romans, assistant professor of Geology at Virginia Tech (industry experience before that), another well-known blogger

 @DoctorZen - Zen Faulkes, Associate professor at The University of Texas-Pan American, studies the neurophysiology of crustaceans and has several blogs (including an excellent one critiquing conference posters)

@sc_k - Sarah Kavassalis, 'Permanent student of mathematics, physics and, sometimes, the philosophy of their intersection' (Department of Physics, University of Toronto)

@aetiology - Tara C. Smith, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, University of Iowa

@KamounLab - The group of Sophien Kamoun at The Sainsbury Lab, Norwich UK (Biology).

@systemsbiology - Steve Watterson, a research fellow at Edinburgh Uni working in systems biology. 

I realised I was creating a kind of snowball sample, since I was following up people who posted interesting tweets on a page I was sampling.  So each of these feeds is followed by at least one of the others, and in the case of @scicurious, most of the others.  But I don't think that overlapping is a problem for what I am studying.  I would like to add a wider range of disciplines - maybe chemistry, some medical imaging, other areas of physics - but I can do that when I scale up from 50K to 100K words.

Now the reference corpus.

 

 

 

 

 

February 02, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (6)

Blogging linguists II

Back in August 2006, I listed some blogs by linguists.  Most of them are still going in 2009, and they are kept up rather better than my blog.  I asked then whether PhD students who blogged this well would ever find time to finish their dissertations, so I am happy to see that the author of the excellent Tenser, said the Tensor has. 

A couple posts ago, I got a comment from Carole at Bloglingua, which made me think I need to update that list.  Bloglingua is from a translation services company, so they are linguists in the more popular sense of the word:  they know languages and use them professionally. From the Bloglingua blogroll, I found Transubstantiation and Blogos, which are also about translation, and are also regularly updated with lively language stories.

When I made my first list, I somehow missed Separated by a Common Language, by Lynne Murphy at the University of Sussex, perhaps because her blog was new then. And as her title suggests, she has a specific focus:

So, when you heard about a blog on British and American English, did you think: 'There's a blogger who's going to run out of material soon'? If only! I've written more than 300 posts on BrE and AmE over the past three-and-a-bit years, have 92 messages in my inbox requesting discussion of other (often MANY other) topics that I've not yet covered . . .

I come across (or produce) lots of examples of UK/US differences. Here's one:  when I say in my northwest US accent that my wife is going to her writing group, British people think it will be something to do with horses - unless they know my wife.  Like anyone from the US living in the UK (or presumably the other way around), I have a store of these examples, but I have never treated them with Murphy's thoroughness and skill, even when I briefly taught a course on the subject.  And she performs the service of listing both US and UK commentators on language, in lists that overlap with mine a bit. 

There is another list that is still updated at The Linguist List, but it is rather a mixed bag.

Blogging has moved on since 2006.  I didn't think I would find any linguistic Twitterers, but 40 people do find useful things to say at Linguistics Twibe.   Well, there are mostly queries and announcements;  apparently it does take more than 140 characters to say something about linguistics (I usually find the 8,000 words of a journal article rather restricting). 

There is a wonderful Twitter project linked to a study by my colleague Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall of Manchester Met:  it sends the message found on an Edwardian postcard every day. I've subscribed  because it seems like an excellent way to think about the similarities and differences between the two media for short texts, postcards and Twitter.  Julia and Cath Booth have even figured out a way to include the pictures.

October 03, 2009 in Blogosphere | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

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