Doktorierende der GSH können sich die Teilnahme am Workshop mit 2 ECTS anrechnen lassen.
The use of Twitter data for linguistic research has been increasing in popularity for a number of years, and the reasons for its quick adoption are clear: this innovative source of data allows for the creation of large corpora on an unprecedented scale, with over 500 million tweets sent each day, and the informal nature of this medium results in the kind of naturalistic ‘everyday’ language use that promotes linguistic variation - notably inhibited in many other written genres. This makes it ideal for sociolinguistic research.
In this workshop we will explore the kinds of linguistic questions we can answer using Twitter, drawing on examples that highlight its application in the study of dialectology, lexical innovation and diffusion, and the relationship between orthographic and phonological variation. This will be followed up with a practical hands-on session covering techniques in how to mine Twitter for real-time data collection as well as the computational tools required for analysing this data, with a focus on visualising regional variation.
