Enacting identity in microblogging

I had a great time at ESFLCW in July at the University of Coventry. I've written a paper based on my plenary titled Enacting identity in Microblogging which will be published in Discourse and Communication sometime soon(ish).

St Mary's Guildhall - lovely location
for a conference dinner!

Here's the abstract:

This paper explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how “users of language perform their identities within uses of language” (Martin et al., forthcoming): how do microbloggers perform relational identities and enact discourse fellowships? Addressing this question means understanding how personae enter into ambient affiliation, negotiating social bonds by construing opinions and emotions in posts. Such affiliation is ambient in the sense that social media users may not be interacting directly, but instead participating in mass performances of hashtagging or contributing to iterations of Internet memes. This paper will consider three key bonds enacted by microblogging personae, using both a 100 million word corpus of posts and a smaller specialised corpus collected by extracting the entire Twitter stream of a particular user.

I'll put a pre-proof version up on here once I finish fixing it up.