October 26, 2018
Dr. Trena Paulus, Professor in the Qualitative Research Program at the University of Georgia, is passionate about language-based research methods, particularly as applied to discursive phenomena in online spaces. She has used narrative analysis to explore how people make requests on crowdfunding sites and discourse analysis to describe the ways online grief support groups socialize new members. She has also explored how hyperlinks are used in service provider chat interactions using conversation analysis. Each of these projects illustrates how the structure of an interaction provides insight into social processes, and shows that the examination of discursive features is as relevant to online interaction as it is to face-to-face conversation. With her background in Education, Paulus has been especially concerned to demonstrate how language-based analysis methods (narrative analysis, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis) can reveal how learning is made visible as it occurs online. She is also a strong advocate for the expansion of language-based research methods to examine a wide variety of other social actions in online conversations more generally. Her recent literature review of how conversation analysis methods have been applied to online spaces shows that such methods have allowed scholars to examine interactional coherence, compare face-to-face and online conversations, describe how interactional “trouble” is resolved, and investigate how social actions are accomplished in asynchronous environments.
Dr. Paulus is currently putting the final touches on a methodological textbook, co-authored with Alyssa Wise, that will be published by Routledge in 2019, called Research Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk: A Research Framework.
Trena Paulus received her Ph.D. in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University in 2003. She is an Affiliate of the IU Center for Computer-Mediated Communication.
Selected articles from Trena Paulus’s recent research:
Paulus, T., & Roberts, K. (2018). Crowdfunding a “Real-life Superhero”: The construction of worthy bodies in medical campaign narratives. Discourse, Context and Media, 21, 64-72. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.09.008
Paulus, T., Warren, A., & Lester, J. (2018). Using conversation analysis to understand how agreements, personal experiences, and cognition verbs function in online discussions. Language@Internet, 15, article 1. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2018/paulus
Paulus, T., Warren, A., & Lester, J. N. (2016). Applying conversation analysis methods to online talk: A literature review. Discourse, Context and Media, 12, 1-10. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2016.04.001
Zeigler, M., Paulus, T., & Woodside, M. (2016). Informal learning as group meaning-making: Visible talk in online communities. In O. Meijiuni, P. Cranton, & O. Taiwo (Eds.), Measuring and Analyzing Informal Learning in the Digital Age (pp. 180-196). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.
Paulus, T., & Varga, M. A. (2015). “Please know that you are not alone with your pain”: Responses to newcomer posts in an online grief support forum. Death Studies, 39, 633-640. doi:10.1080/07481187.2015.1047060