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.
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.
ReplyDeleteHugs,
Vladiclea
Valdiclea
Hi Valdiclea,
ReplyDeleteI'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
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