October 5, 2018
Professor Jannis Androutsopoulos visited Indiana University Bloomington from October 28 to November 3, 2018 as part of the celebration of the 40-year anniversary of IU’s partnership with Universität Hamburg. Professor Androutsopoulos is a sociolinguist who researches language in mass media and in so9cial media environments. He gave two public talks at IU. The first was on October 30 in the Indiana Memorial Union Faculty Room on the topic “Responding to online hate: How digital journalists interact with commenters in German social media.” This event was co-sponsored by OVPIA, the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences. The second talk, sponsored by the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication, took place November 1 in Luddy Auditorium and was on the topic of “Style in digital punctuation.” Professor Androutsopoulos also met with a number of doctoral students and faculty during his visit.
Jannis Androutsopoulos received his doctorate in German Linguistics and Translation Studies from Universität Heidelberg in 1997. He has worked as a researcher at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, Germany and as a Juniorprofessor für Medienkommunikation at the Universität Hannover. From 2007 to 2009 he was a Reader in Sociolinguistics and Media Discourse at King's College London in the UK. Since 2009, he has been a Professor of German and Media Linguistics at Universität Hamburg.
In addition to his work on media sociolinguistics, Professor Androutsopoulos is internationally known for his scholarship on multilingualism, including code switching and representations of multilingualism in popular culture. He recently worked on the management committee of COST Action IS1306: New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe, a program that sought to investigate what it means to acquire, use, and be “understood as a new speaker of a language in the context of a multilingual Europe.”
Jannis Androutsopoulos is an Affiliate of the IU Center for Computer-Mediated Communication.
Abstracts for talks:
Responding to online hate: How digital journalists interact with commenters in German social media
Tuesday October 30, 3-4:30 pm, Indiana Memorial Union Faculty Room
While anti-social behaviour on the Internet is not new, practices of verbal aggression and discrimination known as ‘hate speech online’, ‘internet hate’ or ‘cyberhate’ gained a much wider reach since the late 2000s and became associated with extreme-right populism in the 2010s. Those who use the Internet to spread hatred towards ethnic, sexual and other minorities exploit the conditions of anonymity and invisibility that shape digital public spaces and benefit from the affordances of rapid spread and interaction with professional news content, which characterize social media platforms. In Europe, hate speech has been identified since the mid-2010s as a serious threat to democratic participation and social cohesion, and has elicited institutional responses that range from the computational detection of hateful Tweets to protection guidelines issued by political and social organisations. Journalism is an important venue for such responses, especially the recent branch of digital journalism, in which the ability to monitor user-generated talk and interact with online users constitute key professional skills. Against this backdrop, this talk examines the resources provided by a leading German public service news website, tagesschau.de, to raise public awareness of hate speech, and presents findings of an in-depth analysis of digital exchanges between journalists and online commenters on the organisation’s Facebook page. Based on a qualitative discourse analysis of these exchanges and interviews with tagesschau.de editorial staff, I discuss how journalists delimit the boundaries of legitimate public expression by deleting user comments; what kinds of user comments they decide to actively respond to; how they take up and recontextualize portions of these comments; and how they actively challenge the presuppositions that underlie these users’ queries and requests. This study concludes that responding to hate online does not stop short at banning hateful comments from the digital public sphere. It also involves engaging in verbal interaction with producers and disseminators of hate speech, thereby resisting hate both at the level of content and through the display of non-discriminatory forms of public debate.
Style in digital punctuation
Thursday, November 1, 4:00 - 5:30 PM, Luddy Auditorium
An innovative use of punctuation signs in computer-mediated communication has been documented since the 1990s (Bieswanger 2013, Herring & Zelenkauskaite 2008) and gained new research attention with the spread of text messaging on smartphones (Gunraj et al. 2016, Squires 2012). This paper reports findings from on-going research at Hamburg University on the deployment of punctuation signs in text messaging, based on corpora of digital interaction among secondary school and university students in Northern Germany (Androutsopoulos 2018, Busch 2018). Drawing on sociolinguistic approaches to language style and a cognitive-pragmatic approach to punctuation, I examine the stylistic meaning of digital punctuation at the level of individual usage as well as community norms. Four points are discussed. First, only a subset of punctuation signs is frequent in the text-messaging data. Second, digital punctuation takes on interactional functions, in that messaging partners jointly manage their deployment to segment their messages and express interactional stances. Third, idiosyncratic preferences for specific digital punctuation signs or sign variants can be observed. Fourth, certain punctuation signs (or combinations) become publicly enregistered (Agha 2003) with social personae such as the “angry citizen” type in the discourse of the populist right in Germany. These findings suggest that punctuation signs constitute a multi-faceted stylistic resource in digital interaction, and that punctuation as a domain of usage is undergoing sociolinguistic change.
References:
Agha, A. 2003 The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication 23(3), 231-273.
Androutsopoulos, J. 2018 Digitale Interpunktion: Stilistische Ressourcen und soziolinguistischer Wandel in der informellen digitalen Schriftlichkeit von Jugendlichen. In A. Ziegler ed. Jugendsprachen, 721-748. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Bieswanger, M. 2013 Micro-linguistic structural features of computer-mediated communication. In: S.C. Herring et al. eds. Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. 463-485. Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.
Busch, F. 2018 Digitale Schreibregister von Jugendlichen analysieren. Ein linguistisch-ethnographischer Zugang zu Praktiken des Alltagsschreibens. In A. Ziegler ed. Jugendsprachen, 721-748. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Gunraj, D.N. et al. 2016 Texting insincerely: The role of the period in text messaging. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 1067-1075. Herring, S.C./A. Zelenkauskaite 2008 Gendered typography: Abbreviation and insertion in Italian iTV SMS. In J. Siegel et al. eds. IUWPL7: Gender in Language. 73-92. Bloomington: IULC.
Squires, L. 2012 Whos punctuating what? Sociolinguistic variation in instant messaging. In: A. Jaffe et al. eds. Orthography as social action: Scripts, spelling, identity and power, 289-323. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
For more on Jannis Androutsopoulos, see https://www.slm.uni-hamburg.de/germanistik/personen/androutsopoulos.html