Sprache und Digitalkultur / Language and Digital Culture – Serie

This book draws from graph theory and a semiotic comparison between language and distributed ledger technologies (also known as Blockchains) to motivate three experiments on language and network structure. The work explores the importance of this concept in different areas of linguistic research and establishes elements of a tentative linguistics of networks. Its empirical investigation is based on data from threads posted to the imageboard Hispachan, which often displays radicalized language and hate speech. The experiments (based on topic modeling and sentiment analysis) reveal an impact of the network structure of interaction on the interaction itself as well as the use of ingroup signalling and emotionally charged vocabulary to expand the network of interaction..

This work examines the practice of reading aloud in the interactional context of adult participants engaging in an interface-mediated collaborative game activity. With a conversation analytic approach onto video data of user studies, empirical cases of reading aloud are presented. It is shown how participants multimodally co-organise reading aloud in-interaction for providing accessibility to game text in a game that is unfamiliar to them. With reading aloud, participants meet the interactional challenge of making game text audibly accessible that is not always visually accessible for all participant alike. This practice is not only conducted for another but with another in a truly joint fashion, working as a continuer to accomplish the unfamiliar game.