Chapter published in:
Corpus Approaches to Social Media
Edited by Sofia Rüdiger and Daria Dayter
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 98] 2020
► pp. 15–40

Towards a digital sociolinguistics

Communities of Practice on Reddit

| Technische Universität Dresden
| Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg
This paper investigates to what extent the ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP) concept can be applied to the subreddits r/leagueoflegends, r/linguistics, and r/rupaulsdragrace. Using qualitative and quantitative corpus-linguistic methods, the study analyses users’ self-understanding of the subreddits, how often and in which contexts they discuss the concept of community, how often they frequent different subreddits, and which words they typically use online. The paper relies on frequency analysis, manual analysis of tokens, and an innovative system of rating user contributions in order to understand their posting behaviour. Although there are limitations, all important criteria defining CoPs are met by the subreddits. The chapter thus shows that corpus-linguistic methods are useful for the investigation of social media from a sociolinguistic perspective.
Keywords: Community of Practice, corpus linguistics, Reddit, social media, sociolinguistics
Published online: 04 November 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.98.01leu
References

References

Barthel, Michael, Stocking, Galen, Holcomb, Jesse & Mitchell, Amy
2016 Reddit news users more likely to be male, young and digital in their news preferences. 28 October 2017, http://​www​.journalism​.org​/2016​/02​/25​/reddit​-news​-users​-more​-likely​-to​-be​-male​-young​-and​-digital​-in​-their​-news​-preferences/ (30 November 2019).
Barton, David & Lee, Carmen
2013 Language Online. Investigating Digital Texts and Practices. London: Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Benoit, Kenneth, Watanabe, Kohei, Wang, Haiyan, Nulty, Paul, Obeng, Adam, Müller, Stefan & Matsuo, Akitaka
2018 Quanteda: An R package for the quantitative analysis of textual data. Journal of Open Source Software 3(30): 774. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bubenhofer, Noah
2019 Social Media und der Iconic Turn: Diagrammatische Ordnungen im Web 2.0. Diskurse – digital 1(2): 114–135. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cover, Rob
2016 Digital Identities. Creating and Communicating the Online Self. Amsterdam: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Crystal, David
2006 Language and the Internet, 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dayter, Daria & Rüdiger, Sofia
2016 Reporting from the field: The narrative reconstruction of experience in pick-up artist online communities. Open Linguistics 2: 337–351. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope
2012 Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 87–100. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope & McConnell-Ginet, Sally
1992 Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 461–490. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2003 Language and Gender. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope & Wenger, Etienne
2005 Communities of Practice in sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(4): 582–589. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Flesch, Marie
2019 ‘That spelling tho’: A sociolinguistic study of the nonstandard form of though in a corpus of Reddit comments. European Journal of Applied Linguistics 7(2): 163–188. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving
1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Jansen, Bettina
2020 Introduction. In Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research, Bettina Jansen (ed.), 1–28. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, Helen
2006 Beyond anonymity, or future directions for internet identity research. New Media & Society 8(6): 859–876. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia PA: University of Philadelphia Press.Google Scholar
Lave, Jean & Wenger, Étienne
1991 Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leppänen, Sirpa, Kytöla, Samu, Jousmäki, Henna, Peuronen, Saija & Westinen, Elina
2014 Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media. In The Language of Social Media. Identity and Community on the Internet, Philip Seargeant & Caroline Tagg (eds), 112–136. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leuckert, Sven
2020 Rethinking community in linguistics: Language and community in the digital age. In Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research, Bettina Jansen (ed.), 111–125. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Marx, Konstanze & Weidacher, Georg
2014 Internetlinguistik. Ein Lehr- und Arbeitsbuch. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Massanari, Adrienne
2017 #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society 19(3): 329–346. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McCulloch, Gretchen
2019 Because Internet. Understanding the New Rules of Language. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.Google Scholar
Medvedev, Alexey N., Lambiotte, Renaud & Delvenne, Jean-Charles
2019 The anatomy of Reddit: An overview of academic research. In Dynamics on and of Complex Networks III. Machine Learning and Statistical Physics Approaches, Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad, Rishiraj Saha Roy, Fariba Karimi, Jean-Charles Delvenne & Bivas Mitra (eds), 183–204. Cham: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam
2011 Introducing Sociolinguistics, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam & Strycharz, Anna
2013 Communities of Practice. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 2nd edn, Jack K. Chambers & Natalie Schilling (eds), 428–447. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team
2019 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://​www​.R​-project​.org/ (30 November 2019).
Weidacher, Georg
2007 Politik der Hypermodalität. In Textdesign und Textwirkung in der massenmedialen Kommunikation, Kersten Sven Roth & Jürgen Spitzmüller (eds), 247–266. Konstanz: UVK.Google Scholar
Wenger, Étienne
1998 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wickham, Hadley
2016 ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. New York NY: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar