Visual Sociolinguistic Network Analysis

Social networks have been studied in multiple disciplines and for multiple purposes. In the field of variationist sociolinguistics, researchers investigate social networks in order to analyze the language use and variation among individuals and groups, while taking the social, cultural, and geographical aspects into account. The traditional research approaches rely on manual data collection and manual analytical methods, though, which are insufficient for investigating large and complex data sets collected from digital data sources such as social media platforms. Therefore, in the scope of this project we aim to address the challenges of making sense of social networks in the context of language use and variation problems by a joint interdisciplinary effort combining sociolinguistic, computational, and visual analytic perspectives.

This project is performed in cooperation with the colleagues from the DISA-DH group at Linnaeus University Centre for Data Intensive Sciences and Applications.