Studying (minoritised languages in) online
contexts: challenges in data collection
“the field of sociolinguistics will benefit from analyses on language-in-use in CMC contexts because of the overwhelming popularity of various forms of CMC among people in (almost every part of) the industrialized world”
“Neighbourhood and community events and activities are real neighbourhood life and they feed back to one’s real family immediately. Media, at best, only creates a ‘virtual’ community”
“In order to establish a sustainable policy for safeguarding and promoting linguistic diversity, policies for digital development have to be embraced. With so much of our lives happening on the internet and through digital devices, the digital domain represents a context that cannot be ignored.”
“Minority speakers can increase their languages’ online presence with content that is aligned to their communities’ needs and aspirations.”
“simply because a user has posted on a Facebook page does not mean they intend or expect for their comment to be reproduced”
“should a user delete their Reddit posting, removing this from the public domain, scholars should assume it unethical to continue to use, replicate, host or store this data”
“we are entering an era where media will be everywhere and we will use all kinds of media in relation to each other. … A teenager doing homework may juggle four or five windows, scanning the web, listening to and downloading MP3 files, chatting with friends, wordprocessing a paper and responding to email, shifting rapidly between tasks”
Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead 🧵
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) February 2, 2023
“Most research of Wikipedia does not involve ethical issues of informed consent. Because all contributions to Wikipedia are publicly released under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License … content analysis – the analysis of publicly-available pages, archives, or logs is generally considered exempt from such requirements”
“Earlier studies in the field of minority language media generally expressed the hope that the internet could provide spaces for virtual communities which would function as immersion settings for speakers of smaller languages to meet, interact and communicate”
“Facebook is more involved in the translations produced than first appears … this can be seen as a ‘top-down’ decision by Facebook leading to the enacting of their language policy. From looking at Facebook documentation, it is clear that the site intervenes in the decisions and language policy of the communities. Facebook facilitates the use of the Translations app as a ‘bottom-up’ mechanism of language policy, but only within its own parameters and ultimately its own ‘top-down’ decisions.”
“An Internet that is dominated by corporations that accumulate capital by exploiting and commodifying users can in the theory of participatory democracy never be participatory, and the cultural expressions on it cannot be an expression of participation”
