Thursday, 29 January 2015 | 10:00 to 11:00

Speaker: Aivars Glaznieks, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Specialised Communication and Multilingualism, European Academy Bolzano (EURAC)

Abstract:

The presentation introduces the project DiDi in which we collect and analyze German data of computer-mediated communication (CMC) written by internet users from the province of Bolzano – South Tyrol. The project focuses on quasi-public and private messages posted on Facebook, and analyses how L1 German speakers in South Tyrol use different varieties of German (e.g. South Tyrolean Dialect vs Standard German) and other languages (esp. Italian) to communicate on social network sites. A particular interest of the study is the writers’ age. We assume that users of different age groups can be distinguished by their linguistic behavior. Our comprehension of age is based on two conceptions: a person’s regular numerical age and her/his digital age, i.e. the number of years a person is actively involved in using new media. The presentation describes the project as well as its diverse challenges and problems of data collection and corpus building. I will also be able to show examples from the DiDi corpus and discuss our criteria for the linguistic analysis.

Location:

Sala Consiglio

Contacts:

Sara Tonelli, satonelli@fbk.eu