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

Chapter 1
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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Introducing Reddit
    • 2.1User origin and accessibility
    • 2.2Structure and features of Reddit
  • 3.Communities of Practice and the online self
    • 3.1A world of make-believe?
    • 3.2Community of Practice
  • 4.Crawling Reddit: Data and method
  • 5.Subreddits as CoPs: Some findings
    • 5.1Talking about community
    • 5.2User behaviour
    • 5.3Shared repertoire
  • 6.Discussion: Framing subreddits as CoPs
    • (1)Mutual engagement
    • (2)Jointly negotiated enterprise
    • (3)Shared repertoire
  • 7.Conclusion and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.98.01leu
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