DiLCo Video Reader
The DiLCo Video Reader is a collection of research talks on digital language and communication research hosted in a dedicated YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/@DiLCo_Video_Reader). The Reader comprises 36 video-recorded presentations that were commissioned and produced by the DiLCo network and presented between October 2021 and July 2024 by expert researchers from all over the world.
The full details of the Video Reader are available in a citeable Information file (DOI: https://doi.org/10.25592/uhhfdm.14786).
The Reader is arranged in 12 Playlists grouped by topic or methodology. You may think of playlists as equivalent to the sections of a traditional handbook or reader. All content is also available in a chronological listing. Here is a brief overview of the Playlists, with more details and complete listings in the Information file.
Playlists on YouTube
01. Digital language variation and change
Based on quantitative and computational approaches, these six lectures explore patterns of digital language variability by age (Vandekerckhove), regional background (Grieve), mobility (Hovy), and heritage (Bohmann, Choudhury and Sitaram), as well as regarding hate speech (Zinsmeister).The data comes from a variety of languages (Flemish, Hindi, Indian English, American English, German) and social media platforms.
02. Digitally mediated interaction
These four lectures examine how verbal and multimodal interaction is carried out in messenger (WhatsApp, texting) and social media (TikTok) posts, and how platform affordances enable and constrain the accomplishment of sequential order.
03. Digital discourse and narrative
Drawing on narrative and discourse analysis, these five lectures examine online storytelling and digital discourse engagement in private (messenger) and public contexts. The lectures that focus on narrative (Busch, Georgakopoulou, Page) explore the tension between platform affordances and narrative performance as well as practices of multitemporal device attention; those focusing on digital discourse examine doxing (Lee) and the cross-media dispersion of discourse figures (Purschke).
04. Semiotic features and communicative practices
These lectures focus on specific semiotic features and/or genres and examine their deployment in digital language and literacy practices. Zappavigna discusses the interplay of emoji and linguistic signs; Androutsopoulos explores the pragmatics and variation of contextualization cues in punctuation and typography; Vásquez looks into the variety of feedback request genres.
05. Enregisterment on social media
Drawing on data from various registers of English, these three lectures explore how enregistered (and embodied) ways of speaking emerge and become popularized on social media, and how the multimodal content of platforms such as TikTok prompts bottom-up experimentation with the relations between image, sound, and the speaking body.
06. Perceptions and ideologies of digital language
These lectures cast a critical light on the semiotic ideologies surrounding various facets of language and communication online. Dovchin challenges the framing of linguistic diversity online as ‘exceptional’ and ‘exotic’; Park reflects on implication of digital literacy practices, such as fansubbing, for the commodification of language; Schneider explores language-ideological implications of LLMs; Nguyen explores how LLMs evaluate linguistic variation.
This additional playlist features six presentations from the DiLCo Lecture Series that explore discourse and communication on TikTok. The lectures reflect on how the novel affordances of TikTok lead to new ways of storytelling (Page, Georgakopoulou), conversational interaction (Herring), and social identity creation (Jones, Kiesling, Ilbury).
08. Multilingual practices across methods
This additional playlist features three papers from the DiLCo Lecture Series that examine multilingual practices online from different methodological viewpoints. Dovchin takes a critical translanguaging perspective; Bohmann offers a variationist approach; while Choudhury and Sitaram cover NLP techniques.
09. Approaches to multimodal and transmodal analysis
This additional playlist features papers from the DiLCo Lecture Series that examine the interplay of signs from different semiotic modalities in digitally mediated communication. Topics include the interaction of spoken/written language and moving image (Page, Georgakopoulou); the interplay between emoji and linguistic signs (Zappavigna); and the relation of written and voice messages in digital interaction (König).
10. Digital methods: Research ethics
Mainly originating in the network’s inaugural event, DiLCo Ethics Lectures in October 2021, these lectures discuss principles and practices of digital research ethics across methods. Markham and Stæhr focus on digital ethnography. Fort and Nissim (a paper from DiLCo Lecture Series 2023) discuss ethics in the context of NLP.
11. Digital methods: Natural Language Processing
These papers offer low-threshold introductions to the collection and analysis of social media data (Barbaresi, Wiedemann), and discuss computational techniques of meaning representation (Nguyen, Wegmann) and challenges with the annotation of abusive language (Kübler). The first three papers were presented at 2022 DiLCo Methods Day (“NLP for analysing digital language”), the fourth one at DiLCo Lecture Series 2024.
12. Digital methods: Multi-sited fieldwork, on/offline nexus analysis
Originally presented at 2023 Methods Day (“Multi-sited fieldwork and heterogeneous data management”), these four papers showcase multi-sited fieldwork across on- and offline sites and discuss the management of heterogeneous data, e.g. interviews, fieldwork notes, and digital data in text and audiovisual formats. All papers share an interest in the increasing interdependence of online and offline activities in everyday private or organizational communication (‘online/offline nexus’).