Data di Pubblicazione:
2017
Citazione:
Microblogging as Professional Practice : The Use of Twitter by Academics / G. Riboni. ((Intervento presentato al convegno Representing and Redefining Specialised Knowledge tenutosi a Bari nel 2017.
Abstract:
This study sets out to examine the language of microblogging interactions in the academic domain and specifically investigates the practice of conference live-tweeting. Live-tweeting, i.e posting a sequence of focused entries (“tweets” of 140 characters) on the microblogging platform. Scholars often adopt it to cover the conferences they attend, thus providing their audience with information as well as their personal observations. Live-tweets always include a hashtag (a keyword beginning with the # symbol) which performs the double function of detailing the content of the entry and of allowing users to retrieve all the tweets marked with the same hashtag (Serneels 2013). This means that people (notably academics) who cannot be physically present can have a real-time report -albeit mediated- of the conferences they are interested in by simply clicking on the hashtag link.
Building on previous studies on conference live-tweeting from a linguistic perspective, this paper intends to explore the textual and rhetorical features of Twitter messages posted by academics attending conferences. Twitter feeds are well-suited to automatic interrogation routines typical of corpus-based approaches (cf. among others, Sinclair 1991; Baker 2006): due to their interconnectedness and extensiveness, they are arguably better investigated as a whole rather than separately, as normally happens in other areas of discourse analysis (Myers 2015, p. 55). Consequently, an ad hoc corpus consisting of ca. 3,000 tweets was collected for the study and analyzed through the automatic interrogation routines typical of corpus linguistics; tweets were selected on the basis of hashtags in order to examine the microblogging coverage of three different sets of conference events with each set corresponding to a specific academic discipline (i.e. Linguistics, Medicine, and Web Development). The three subcorpora were investigated and compared both quantitatively and qualitatively in order to shed light onto the similarities as well as the peculiarities of conference live-tweeting practices of these three academic communities.
References
Baker, P. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.
Myers, G. 2015. Social Media and Professional Practice in Medical Twitter. In Gotti, M., Maci S. and Sala M. (eds.), Insight into Medical Communication, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 51- 69.
Serneels, A. 2013. How to Really Define A Live Tweet? Live Tweet App. Articles about Using Twitter for Your Events, Twitter Wall and Social News. 7th Feb 2013. . Accessed 16.04.2016.
Sinclair, J. M. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tipologia IRIS:
14 - Intervento a convegno non pubblicato
Elenco autori:
G. Riboni
Link alla scheda completa: