NetDynam 2.0

Title: The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis

Series Title: Continuum Discourse Series

Publication Year: 2009

Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

http://www.continuumbooks.com

Book URL: http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=132398&SearchType=Basic

Editor: Greg Myers

Hardback: ISBN:  9781847064134 Pages: 192 Price: U.S. $ 150.00

Hardback: ISBN:  9781847064134 Pages: 192 Price: U.K. £ 75.00

Paperback: ISBN:  9781847064141 Pages: 192 Price: U.K. £ 24.99

Paperback: ISBN:  9781847064141 Pages: 192 Price: U.S. $ 44.99

Abstract:

Blogs and Wikis have not been with us for long, but have made a huge impact
on society.  Wikipedia is the best known exemplar of the wiki, a
collaborative site that leads to a single text claimed by no-one; blogs, or
web-logs, have exploded into the mainstream through novelisations, film
adaptations and have gathered huge followings. Blogs and wikis also serve
to provide a coherent basis for a discourse analysis of specific web
language.

What makes these forms distinctive as genres, and what ramifications does
the technology have on the language?  Myers looks at how blogs and wikis:

*allow for easier than ever publication

*can claim to challenge institutional hierarchies

*provide alternate perspectives on events

*exemplify globalization

*challenge demarcations between the personal and the public

*construct new communities and more

Drawing on a wide range of popular blogs and wikis, the book works
alongside an author blog – http://thelanguageofblogs.typepad.com/ – that
contains regularly updated links, references and a glossary.  An essential
textbook for upper level undergraduates on linguistics and language studies
courses, it elucidates, informs and offers insights into a major new type
of discourse. This coursebook includes a companion website for student and
lecturer use.

it’s the blog on “the language of blogs” which appears to be a very good resource, with a lot of links to recent work on blog research, other blogs related to online research, and posts of relevance to our own interest. i think i might need to comment on some of those posts….

Is Technology Dumbing Down Japanese?

Emily Parker, New York Times, November 5, 2009 | src

excerpt:

Now the Japanese language is being transformed by blogs, e-mail and keitai shosetsu, or cellphone novels. Americans may fret over the ways digital communications encourage sloppy grammar and spelling, but in Japan these changes are much more wrenching. A vertically written language seems to be becoming increasingly horizontal. Novels are being written and read on little screens. People have gotten so used to typing on computers that they can no longer write characters by hand. And English words continue to infiltrate the language.

this weekend here at sydney uni, the 2nd annual free linguistics conference is being held. plenty of interesting papers for linguists of all persuasions, but i am especially motivated to check out michele & colleague’s latest work on the graphic visualisation of text analytic work…

MODELLING AND VISUALISING DISCOURSE PATTERNS

Bandar Almutairi, University of Sydney, Australia;
Michele Zappavigna, University of Sydney, Australia.

Texts can be intractable. As discourse analysts, we are limited by the extent to which our perceptual systems can detect long-range and complex patterns in discourse, even where we have manually annotated the data. Since a text is more than a bag of words, clauses or any other structure (Martin, 1985) we need technology that can assist the analyst in achieving both a synoptic and dynamic perspective on their text analyses. This paper develops a text visualisation strategy that leverages periodicity, how information is organised as a text unfolds (Halliday, 1985; Martin & Rose, 2007). Since periodicity is “concerned with information flow – with the way in which meanings are packaged to make it easier for us to take them in” (Martin & Rose, 2007: 188), we argue that the intangible time of a text can be measured by a complex unit based on this concept. We use mathematical interpolation to produce representations of waves of periodicity that can be used as a time reference helping us to visualise the distribution of other linguistic systems (e.g. Appraisal, Process-Type etc.) throughout the text. We use this method to detect patterns in these features in terms of their relative distance from the peaks of the waves. The method can be used recursively (e.g. nested functions; functions of functions) to create waves of waves corresponding to patterns of patterns at the same stratum or generalized to include components from higher or lower strata in language. We apply the method in a pilot study to compare the unfolding of prosodies of evaluative meaning in two texts annotated using Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005). A long term aim of this project is to develop a metalanguage, as Zhao (forthcoming) has suggested, for describing the kinds of logogenetic patterns, in other words, patterns of unfolding meaning, that are possible in texts.

their work is very much related to our ongoing interest here, in visualising the dynamics of interaction. data visualisation. interaction is mediated through writing, or recorded in writing using a transcript of spoken conversation, or having a video text of a multi-modal event. such a transcript can then be analysed using any number of approaches or frameworks. the next step is to create a ‘transformation’ of that analysis into a diagram which represents the interaction according to whatever elements or figures we are interested in examining – and then further transforming at will those elements cross-referenced by other elements or figures to reveal correlations and new figures that are not immediately obvious from raw analysis alone.

For my own purposes, I am known to speak of affectual topologies and affectual ecologies. (This having to do with memesis and anthropology–whatever.)

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts
New York Times
By ALEX WRIGHT
Published: August 23, 2009

(excerpts)

1.
Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.
This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.

2.
Jodange, based in Yonkers, offers a service geared toward online publishers that lets them incorporate opinion data drawn from over 450,000 sources, including mainstream news sources, blogs and Twitter.

4.
Such tools could help companies pinpoint the effect of specific issues on customer perceptions, helping them respond with appropriate marketing and public relations strategies.

5.
While the more advanced algorithms used by Scout Labs, Jodange and Newssift employ advanced analytics to avoid such pitfalls, none of these services works perfectly. “Our algorithm is about 70 to 80 percent accurate,” said Ms. Francis, who added that its users can reclassify inaccurate results so the system learns from its mistakes.

Translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science, however. “Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,” said Seth Grimes, the founder of the suburban Maryland consulting firm Alta Plana, who points to the many cultural factors and linguistic nuances that make it difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment. “ ‘Sinful’ is a good thing when applied to chocolate cake,” he said.

The simplest algorithms work by scanning keywords to categorize a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (“love” is good, “hate” is bad). But that approach fails to capture the subtleties that bring human language to life: irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions. Reliable sentiment analysis requires parsing many linguistic shades of gray.

“We are dealing with sentiment that can be expressed in subtle ways,” said Bo Pang, a researcher at Yahoo who co-wrote “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis,” one of the first academic books on sentiment analysis.

To get at the true intent of a statement, Ms. Pang developed software that looks at several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?).

For example, a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.

As sentiment analysis algorithms grow more sophisticated, they should begin to yield more accurate results that may eventually point the way to more sophisticated filtering mechanisms. They could become a part of everyday Web use.

Code-swarm, anyone?

I noticed this site has a Lemke article on ‘downward causation’.

In cases where levels of organisation = levels of abstraction, there can’t be causation (up or down) between levels.

I once heard a (serious) talk discussing whether:
‘the atoms move the fan’ (upward) or ‘the fan moves the atoms’ (downward).

This is nonsensical because the fan and the atoms are not distinct entities that can act on each other. They are the same matter-energy occupying the same region of space-time, modelled at different levels of abstraction.

One reason we have this confusion is that the grammar realises composition the same way it realises accompaniment. eg

(1) a dog has legs
(composition: ‘dog’ and ‘legs’ at different levels of abstraction)

(2) a dog has fleas
(accompaniment: ‘dog’ and ‘fleas’ at same level of abstraction)

The notion of the meaning-making (semiogenetic) trajectory thus provides a way of conceptualizing how body-brains contextually integrate information deriving from different perceptual modalities (e.g. seeing, hearing, moving) in the here-now of their own and others’ bodily activities to events, activities, and so on, on other space-time scales, both in the actual past and in the anticipated future, involving either the same or other participants (see Thibault 2000a: 303-6; 2003b). It is in this way that infants are integrated, through their active participation in such events, to the higher-scalar ecosocial processes and dynamics where semiotic entities such as, for example, ‘wants’, ‘beliefs’, ‘intentions’ and ‘desires’ are recognized and used as the basis both for adjusting to and accounting for the behaviour of others qua selves to whom we attribute such things as wants, beliefs, intentions, and desires (see Matthiessen 1993; Thibault 1993; see also Zelazo 1999).

On this view, intentions are not, as I pointed out above, epistemically private mental states that belong to an ontologically distinct domain of ‘mind’ with independent causal powers. Instead, they are meaning-making resources that belong to the higher~scalar system of interpretance of some ecosocial semiotic system. As such, agents use them for the purposes of interpreting and orienting to each other in discourse, in the process adjusting their own activity on the basis of the belief in our culture in the notion that persons are in possession of intentions qua epistemically private mental states that can be read of behaviour as evidence for the existence of a private mental realm that language simply serves to reveal. This account is essentially a realist one: intentions have a separate existence in the mind with respect to the signs that refer to them. In my account, intentions, desires, wants, and so on are semiotic categories that agents appropriate from the interpersonal moral orders in which their actions are recognized, understood, and accounted for (Harre 1983). As such, they are not independent of the semiotic resources that we use in discourse to construe and enact them. They function in meaning-making activity to interpret and orient our own and others’ activities.

excerpted from the Introduction; Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body. Paul Thibault. Continuum 2004

Description from Continuum Books

Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body is an exploration of a multimodal theory of cognitive science. Using linguistic theories first developed by Saussure and more latterly by M. A. K. Halliday, Paul Thibault analyses how social and biological systems interact to produce meaning. This fascinating study will be of interest to undergraduates and academics researching cognitive linguistics and advanced semiotics.

The book engages with the current dialogue between the human and life sciences to ask questions about the relationship between the physical, biological aspects of a human being, and the sociocultural framework in which a human being exists. Paul J. Thibault argues that we need to understand both the semiotic, discursive nature of meaning making, and the physical context in which this activity takes place. The two are inseparable, and hence the only way we can understand our subjective experience of our environment and our perceptions of our inner states of mind is by giving equal weight to both frameworks. This ‘ecosocial semiotic’ theory engages with linguistics, semiotics, activity theory, biology and psychology. In so doing, the book produces a new way of looking at how a human being makes sense of his or her environment, but also how this environment shapes such meanings

.