Tuesday, March 20, 2012

THANKS FOR THE...

The approach I have adopted in most of my work with microblogging texts (or microposts as I usually call them) is a combo of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. Essentially this involves playing around quantitatively with language patterns and then focusing-in on anything that looks particularly interesting. I have largely been working with a 100 million word corpus of tweets, HERMES (Olympian God and herald), my technical slave scraped for me last year using Twitter's streaming API.

The most common three word pattern (3-gram) in the corpus is 'THANKS FOR THE'. Generally people are thanking each other for a FF (follow friday) mention or a RT (retweet). For example:

 @User Hi – thanks for the RT. Much appreciated :)

This pattern suggests how interactive Twitter is .... though Chomsky would have us believe it is "not a medium of a serious interchange"......More on that in future posts.

3 comments:

  1. Hi, I'm Valdiclea. I'm brazilian student. Do you remember me? I'd like to thank you for help. I'm finishing my research... There was two last years, you sent me a draft of the paper.Dou you remember? I adored your investigation. It helped me so much... Could I quote you now? Do you speak portuguese? I would like to send my research for you.
    Hugs,
    Vladiclea

    Valdiclea

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  2. Hi Valdiclea,
    I'm glad that the paper helped you :) Sure, I would love to see your research although I don't speak portuguese unfortunately :( Maybe you could summarise the abstract for me? The paper is published now so there's no problem quoting.
    Best wishes with your work,
    Michele

    ReplyDelete
  3. The approach I have adopted in most of my work with microblogging texts (or microposts as I usually call them) is a combo of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. www.realigfollowers.net

    ReplyDelete