Analysis of a medium of communication

This assignment constitutes 20% of your final grade. Please work on the task individually. Unless specifically requested otherwise, your report will be posted on-line with a CC-BY license.

Deadline: see main page.

Describe one medium of communication not discussed in class and compare it to both speech and text. (So you should not discuss: face-to-face conversation, book publication, telephone conversation, email, blogs, chat or wikis.)

• The medium can be something new (like Twitter) or something old (like Semaphore)
• Describe the medium and give some statistics as to how widely it is/was used
• Summarize relevant literature on the medium
• Describe how the properties of the medium affect the language used to communicate
• Describe what new kinds of communication the medium has enabled (if any) and its general effects on language and society (if any)
• You may wish to use Herring's (2007) faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse (but don't have to)
• You may use the seven features introduced by Crystal (2006, Ch 3–6)

  Speech like	Text like
  time bound	space bound
  spontaneous	contrived
  face-to-face	visually decontextualized
  loosely structured	elaborately structured
  socially interactive	factually communicative
  immediately revisable	repeatedly revisable
  prosodically rich	graphically rich

Deliverable

• The deliverable is be a paper of six to eight pages including diagrams and references
• Make sure you include page numbers
• Use single spacing.
• Include the author and title, but not on a separate page.
• If you want to make it even more beautiful, as I am sure you do, take a look at my (Computational) Linguistic Style Guidelines: a guide for the flummoxed.
• Submit softcopy only.
• What I look for when I mark:
  • Good choice of medium: has it been described before, is there something interesting linguistically to say about it
  • Description of medium: do you give statistics of its use; are there examples, especially of interesting linguistic phenomena; is your description neutral
  • Linguistic analysis: Is your analysis correct; can you back your analysis up with examples and/or references
  • Position in a wider context: are the linguistic features similar to those in other media and if so why; how does this effect communication more generally
  • Overall readability: do you have a clear title and structure, is your name clearly visible; are there many careless mistakes; do you define new terms clearly

References

• Susan C Herring (2007). A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@Internet
• David Crystal (2006). Language and the Internet. Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition.

Inspiration

• Papers from earlier years

Assignment One for LTI