All posts by Camilla Vasquez

ADDA 3 Updates

Conference plans for ADDA 3 are underway! A number of exciting panels have been accepted, and individual paper abstracts continue to stream in.

If you haven’t yet submitted your presentation abstract, we welcome you to do so before November 15, 2021. The process is fast and easy. Just sign up on our website and post your abstract: https://adda3.org/users/login1

We’re also thrilled to announce that ADDA 3 will include a special panel (“The hidden forces shaping digital discourse: Analysis and activism“) organized by Caroline Tagg and the editorial team of Discourse, Context and Media. This international panel will feature the following line-up of papers and contributors:

Discourse analysis and the political economy of digital communication

Ana Deumert, University of Cape Town

Social activism and the self as moral project

Gwen Bouvier, Zhejiang University

Dominant ideologies and the affinity spectrum

Rachelle Vessey, Carleton University

Discourse, context and media in digital surveillance

Rodney H. Jones, University of Reading 

The hidden forces shaping the digital discourse of quality assurance and teaching

Per Ledin, Södertörn University 

“I’d blush if I could”: Addressing gender bias in Artificial Intelligence voice assistants 

Maria Grazia Sindoni, University of Messina

We’ll continue to post updates on our website, with more information about our plenary talks scheduled to appear next month.

Approaches to Digital Discourse Analysis

We are thrilled to announce that the third international ADDA (Approaches to Digital Discourse Analysis) conference will be held in the U.S. in May 2022! For more info check out our conference website: adda3.org

Please consider submitting an abstract. Deadline for paper abstracts is November 1, 2021. And organizers of panels should submit their abstracts by October 1, 2021.

We look forward to seeing you at our beautiful USF campus in sunny St. Petersburg Florida!

Current Research on COVID and Discourse

It has now been just over one month of sheltering at home here in the US.  Like most universities around the world, my institution moved all instruction online last month.  One of the courses that I teach is a doctoral seminar in Applied Linguistics, which I describe to friends in the following manner: “we sit around a conference table and discuss different research articles each week.”  Of course, we still read and discuss different research articles each week.  But rather than sitting at the same table in a shared physical space, we now sit in our individual homes and gaze at each other in the small Zoom boxes that appear on our screens. One of the students in my class shared a dream she recently had: “I dreamt that we were sitting around discussing research articles… but they all had something to do with COVID.”  With that statement, she predicted what the next iteration of the course will probably look like.

A number of colleagues I have been in touch with (mostly language people and other social-sciencey types) have found that the topics of their research have somehow been disrupted or impacted by the health crisis (and related circumstances) that we are currently experiencing.  As a response, they are shifting focus and undertaking new research projects – or adapting their current research – in ways that are somehow COVID-related. 

For instance, colleagues at UK and Hong Kong universities have launched a new blog, Viral Discourse, where you can read posts on topics ranging from war metaphors used in journalistic reporting on COVID, to the mixed messages we’re getting about the use and non-use of wearing masks to protect ourselves and others.  Another colleague here in the U.S. is researching COVID-related humor on internet dating sites.

Certainly the variable responses of different political leaders to the public health crisis as well as their messaging tactics is a topic that has elicited a wide range of reactions.  The Association for Business Communication (ABC) invited me to contribute a digital lecture to their collection of online resources, and I decided to focus on leadership discourse, as exemplified by NY governor, Andrew Cuomo’s press briefings.  Like many other viewers, his no-nonsense, stick-to the facts approach really resonates with me.  I also appreciate how he humanizes this very odd reality we are living through by sharing personal narratives about his family’s responses.  You can view my brief lecture on this topic here.

Camilla Vásquez’s lecture on Leadership Discourse

I’ve also been observing how the travel and tourism industries have been severely impacted by this crisis.  With non-essential travel and tourism currently on hold, one creative business adaptation I have been following with great interest is Airbnb’s Online Experiences. Offering remote experiences such as “Wine Class with a Cool Wine Expert,” “Easy Balinese Vegetarian Home Cooking” and “Guided Meditation with Sleepy Sheep,”  Airbnb is harnessing the immersive, educational and interactive aspects of tourism and offering a digitally mediated alternative to traditional travel.  Airbnb launched Online Experiences on April 9, and since then, the number of experiences on offer have more than doubled.  With this trend, we are likely witnessing the birth of “virtual tourism.” 

USF Research on Digital Stancetaking

Faced with travel restrictions and recent conference cancellations due to concerns about COVID-19, we were very lucky to have the opportunity to participate last weekend at the 24th annual SCFLLF conference, held at USF’s beautiful St Petersburg campus.

Our own Linguistics and Language Studies (LALS) doctoral students, Yaqian Jiang, Antonella Gazzardi and Anna Stepanyan (pictured below, L to R) presented their research on digital discourse.

Yaqian’s study explored Chinese social media users’ reactions on Weibo, following Italian designers’ Dolce & Gabbana’s controversial 2018 ad campaign in China. Antonella’s presentation examined Italian tourists’ epistemic and affective stancetaking in their TripAdvisor reviews of Italian restaurants in the U.S. that are marketed as “authentically Italian.” Anna’s research focused on various forms of political alignment and disalignment in Armenian users’ posts on YouTube.

When customers talk back

Erica Darics, Veronika Koller and Bernard De Clerck are doing a phenomenal job with their podcast series, Words & Actions, which addresses “how language matters in business, politics and beyond.” I was thrilled to join them for their latest episode: #5 When Customers Talk Back

In the words of the hosts, here’s what this particular episode is about:

In this episode we focus on the different guises of customer feedback, from tweets on pizzas without toppings, over outcry about bad company marketing to full-blown Tripadvisor reviews. Including fake ones. Have a listen and find out how good you are at spotting them or learn how to assess online credibility and boost your own. We also have an interview with an expert on reviews and we analyse data that nicely illustrates creative dialogues in customer communications, including tips on how to survive in Bangkok for the next forty years.

Sounds intriguing, huh? Check it out! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1478413579 

In addition, shownotes, full transcript and references can be found here: https://wordsandactions.blog/2020/01/17/episode-5-customers-talking-back/ 

Ethics in Internet Research (Part 1): Responses to Online Harrassment

This post is the first in a series that will explore ethical issues in digital media research.

This week’s RDM guest blogger, Brooke Nelson, is a second year student at USF’s Master’s program in Applied Linguistics.  In addition to her studies focusing on Teaching English as a Second/Foreign language, Brooke has developed an interest in multimodal digital discourse analysis.  She recently presented her research at the SECOL and A-MODE conferences.

Brooke writes:

I’ve been working on this project about women’s responses to online sexual harassment since Fall 2018. Instagram accounts such as “ByeFelipe” have emerged as spaces where women can share and document instances of harassment and – in some cases – their own responses to such acts of online aggression. Women who have been targets of online harassment on Instagram as well as on popular online dating platforms (e.g., Tinder, Bumble) can post screenshots of abusive messages they have received to the “ByeFelipe” account and, by doing so, share their experiences with others.

I got it interested in this phenomenon because of my own experiences on dating apps and social media. I always knew how I responded to online harassment- with the utmost sass. My favorite was to give them the fictitious number- 1-800-NAH-PASS. I was also partial to sending their Tinder profiles to their girlfriends or wives. However, I had no idea about the creativity that other women employed.  Some of the interesting things I’ve found include the unexpected ways that women exploit different platform affordances as well as the types of intertextual references they draw on when they “clap back” to those who have harassed them.

The first example shows an instance of how one woman creatively incorporates a familiar  intertextual reference when responding to an unwelcome sexual message from a man.  In it, she responds with a slightly modified monologue from the classic film, The Godfather. This iconic movie scene is recontextualized by the female user for the purposes of objecting to the message sent by the male user, while at the same time humorously informing him that such a message is not only inappropriate but also disrespectful.

Next, in the following example, a woman shows how she exploited the platform affordances of Instagram to respond to a male user who sent her a sexually explicit photo.  After receiving the unwelcome photo from this man, the female recipient took a screenshot of a list of his Instagram followers, and threatened to forward his original message and photo to all of his female followers on the social media platform.

Along with this verbal threat, she also included a photo of the doll used in the Saw franchise, which the antagonist in the films uses to deliver horrifying ultimatums.  So in her response, this female user not only exploits the affordances of Instagram (forwarding the harassing message to the sender’s followers), but she also includes a multimodal resource (image of the doll from Saw), which happens to also be an intertextual reference to a popular film series.


Recently, I’ve been thinking about some of the complicated ethical issues that my research raises. My main question revolves around the second example. Is the (re-)posting of this image a type of “revenge porn”?

Revenge porn is typically considered the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their permission. For instance, websites like IsAnyoneUp,dedicated to sharing user-generated content, often featured revenge porn – unauthorized images of users’ former partners along with identifying information about them. As a response, several years ago local governments began to take action against revenge porn and its distribution. But getting back to my own research, Example 2 includes a screenshot that was posted to a public Instagram account, and it was likely posted without the subject’s permission. This begs the question: Is this a new form of revenge porn?

This question seems to evade an easy yes/no answer.  Yes, the example I provided is certainly sexually explicit, and yes, it was likely posted (on ByeFelipe, by the recipient of the image) without the permission of the individual depicted in the photo. However, the individual’s name is blocked out, his face is hidden, and his genitals are covered. Furthermore, the page’s creator edited the images, thus left no identifying information about him included in this post: no address, no social media handles, no location. (It is also worth pointing out that the person who was sent this photo likely did not give her permission to receive this type of image in the first place!) I would argue that the reposting of the image by the female social media user who received the uninvited image (along with her response to it) onto Bye Felipe is intended to draw public attention to the inappropriateness of this more widespread type of behavior (sending unsolicited sexually explicit photos) – and perhaps to also empower other women who are also the targets of online sexual harassment – rather than to publicly shame the individual person responsible for sending this one specific image.   While this question is too large to be thoroughly addressed in one blog post, it appears that with the rise of social mediapages like ByeFelipe, the debate over revenge porn is about to become even more complex.

Novelty Twitter Accounts

I’m preparing for my upcoming presentation at the ADDA-2 conference. ADDA is the perfect-sized conference, plus all of the presentations have something to do with online discourse, so it’s always inspiring and a great place to meet researchers with similar interests.  ADDA-2 will be held in Turku, Finland next month.

This year, I’ll be presenting a case study of two of the seven novelty Twitter accounts that are described in more detail in my forthcoming book.

For this presentation, I’ve decided to focus my analysis on the 2 novelty accounts that originally got me hooked on this topic: Kim Kierkegaardashian and Shit Academics Say.

There are some interesting differences between these accounts.  For example, Shit Academics Say speaks more from a voice of collective experience, whereas Kim Kierkegaardashian blends the voices of two real individuals, one living (mega-celebrity Kim Kardashian West) and one dead (19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard).  The focus of my talk is on how, in spite of these differences, both accounts rely on a similar discourse strategy to construct their tweets: register incongruity.  Register incongruity refers to as a situation where you have a text in which most of the language is in a particular style or tone, except for a few words which are in a tone, or register, that is radically different from the rest.  While register is not a precisely defined concept, it is related to factors such as formality, literariness, standardness, and so on.  Register incongruity creates a clash of styles.

So, for instance, in the following Kim Kierkegaardashian tweet, we can see how two sociohistorically distinct voices, which represent extremely different concerns and realities are juxtaposed.

The Kardashian voice tends to center on themes such as fashion trends and beauty tips – as well as self-promotional discourses that are typical of celebrity tweets.  A novel twist is provided by the inclusion of additional elements that represent the voice of nineteenth-century existential philosopher, Kierkeggard: these include more profound themes of contemplation, despair, suffering, and so on.  Having these two distinct voices (or registers) appear side-by-side in every individual tweet – and the incongruity between those two registers – is the “formula” that underlies the verbal humor in the tweets posted on this account.

Similarly, several tweets from Shit Academics Say start out in one linguistic register, but end in a different one.  For instance, the tweet below begins with a cliché (X is like a box of chocolates), that is traceable to the popular film, Forrest Gump.  But the text following the colon continues in what might be called “academese,” a linguistic register that is characterized by its syntactic complexity, as well as specialized vocabulary specific to this register (words like scope, magnitude, competencies).

Therefore, even though the content and the topics posted on the two accounts are very different from one another, they both rely on the same discourse strategies to create humor.

How pronouns help attract online audiences

Today’s RDM guest blogger, Katharina Lohmann comes from the University of Bonn, in Germany. RDM is very pleased to be able to share Katharina’s work, about a very timely topic — language use in gaming videos. Katharina writes:

Photo: Controller by superanton

If you’re into video games or if you scroll through YouTube from time to time, chances are you’ve stumbled upon a “Let’s Play”. Although many variations of this type of video exist, the essence of it is easily explained: a gamer – the Let’s Player – records him/herself playing a game and simultaneously comments on their gameplay. Let’s Plays are highly popular on YouTube. The Let’s Players I’ve been studying have between 2-22 million YouTube subscribers. This means that Let’s Players are able to attract a huge anonymous audience to watch their videos without being able to immediately interact with them. So how do they do this?

YouTube’s Participation Framework

Linguist Marta Dynel suggests that communication on YouTube has two levels. The first consists of a speaker talking in front of a camera – either with the viewer in mind or addressing the viewer directly. On the second level the hearer interprets what the speaker has said. Building on this, I propose that Let’s Plays have three levels of communication. The first level takes place inside of the game. On the second level the Let’s Player interprets the in-game communication. On the third level the Let’s Player’s audience interprets the Let’s Player’s reaction to the game and the speech the Let’s Player addresses directly at them. Since the audience can’t interpret the first level communication on their own as they could when playing the game themselves, Let’s Players might try to make their videos appear more unmediated through their language. How can this be achieved with the help of personal pronouns?

The Pronoun “I”

To answer this question I transcribed the first 10 minutes of 9 Let’s Play videos and analyzed how often which personal pronoun is used, because personal pronouns demonstrate who we identify ourselves with and have an impact on the way we perceive relationships. When Let’s Players use the first person pronoun “I”, however, they do not always mean themselves. Instead they can equate themselves with the character they are playing.

10 I: just got MURDERD.

Obviously it’s not the Let’s Player who got murdered, but it’s his character that he is referring to. (Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to tell us about it :-).) The Let’s Player doesn’t simply talk about what has happened to his in-game self. He is his in-game self. This equation makes the Let’s Play appear more immediate to the viewer, as one level of mediation is erased in his talk.

“I do” vs. “We do”

One big challenge for Let’s Players is the conflict of trying to present the Let’s Play as a mutual experience shared by the Let’s Player and their audience, without being able to hide the fact that the Let’s Player is the only one who initiates the actions in the video. If the Let’s Player uses the pronoun “I”, they emphasize their role as the actual decision maker, as in the example below:

348 i don’t know if i’m gonna be able to beat this,

349 but i wanna at least lea:rn..,

350 how these work,

If, on the other hand, a Let’s Player uses the pronoun “We”, meaning the Let’s Player and the audience, the Let’s Player instead emphasizes the mutuality of the experience that is happening in the gameplay:

92 .t alright,

93 we’re in again.

94 (1.4) let’s see where we’re goin’.

When the Let’s Players seem to be unable to connect both concepts, there is a rapid change in the use of personal pronouns in their speech, as in this example:

424 we got a lot of stuff i wanted to do with you,

Here, the “we” indicates a collective decision, but the “i wanted” emphasizes that the decision was initiated by the Let’s Player.

All of this shows that language and the use of personal pronouns has the power to influence “the way we interpret our relationship with others” (Proctor & I-Wen Su). It can emphasize the distance between two people, but it can also help to reduce it, even if those people are being separated by two screens, time and space.

References

Dynel, M. (2014). Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 73, 37-52.

Lohmann, K. (2018). “We got a lot of stuff I wanted to do with you“ How personal pronouns help capturing the audience’s attention in Let’s Play videos on YouTube. (unpublished).

Proctor, K. & I-Wen Su, L. (2011). The 1st person plural in political discourse – American politicians in interviews and in a debate. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 3251-3266.

Example 1&4: EthosLab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meSIp50ymkU Example 2: Markiplier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA5OMtKTbzc Example 3: Jacksepticeye: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9nL9qISMc

This post is based on my term-paper, written for my B.A. studies “English Studies” at the University of Bonn (Germany). Thank you to my lecturer Dr. Stefanie Pohle for her support!

Are Yelp reviews racist?

Well, according to a recent study carried out by food studies scholar, Sara Kay, many Yelp reviews are reinforcing harmful ethnic stereotypes.    Kay examined 20,000 Yelp restaurant reviews and found that 7% of them made reference to authenticity in some way.

In her study, summarized here, Kay explains how reviewers’ discussions of “authenticity” vary according to what type of restaurant they are describing.  For instance, the décor of one Korean restaurant deemed “authentic” was described as a “kitschy hut”; whereas that of one “authentically” French restaurant was most often described as “elegant.” In other words, comments about authenticity on Yelp tend to associate European-cuisine-serving restaurants with positive attributes.  In contrast, where Chinese or Mexican restaurants are concerned, the typical Yelp reviewer associates authenticity with negative attributes, such as dirt floors or plastic stools.

Kay’s study found that these harmful stereotypes can also extend to describing interactions with service staff at these restaurants.  My research collaborator, Alice Chik, and I discovered similar kinds of comments in our dataset of Yelp reviews of Michelin-starred Chinese, Japanese and Korean restaurants in New York.  For instance, in a review of one of our Chinese restaurants, the following comment appeared.  (Check out the explicit bias and stereotyping in the part I’ve underlined!)

The person at the front desk is pretty rude. I mean, there is a level of rudeness you’d expect from a chinese restaurant, but that woman was just down right rude.

As Kay explains: “Not only do Yelp reviewers talk about non-Western workers differently, but the difference is racist, rude, and frightfully mimicking of other supremacist trends on the internet and in American life.” 

This is a valuable study, and one that contributes to our understanding of online review language.

Memes, old and new

Just when you thought the “cash me ousside” meme had come and gone…

My colleague, Erhan Aslan, and I have recently had an article appear in the Journal of Sociolinguistics about how YouTube users describe and assess the speech of Danielle Bregoli (the “cash me ousside” girl). The abstract is available online here , or you can email me if you’d like a copy of our article.

And a discussion about our article has already appeared on Reddit! Ah, how I love the endless recursivity involved in studying internet phenomena…

In case you haven’t been following the life of Danielle Bregoli, she’s got an active career as a rapper (she goes by the name of Bhad Bhabie), and a small country’s worth of followers on social media (over 15 million on Instagram alone).

Erhan and I have just launched Phase 2 of our study, in which we’ll be analyzing over 200+ different variations of the image macro shown above. Our focus this time will be on how meme creators exploit word play and other forms of linguistic humor.

And speaking of playful and humorous memes, this recent article in the Guardian showcases some delightful examples of parodies of the #himtoo campaign. These examples really highlight parody’s potential for serious critique!