The linguistic landscape of social media: A case study of the Senate Square, Helsinki

Transcription

1 The linguistic landscape of social media: A case study of the Senate Square, Helsinki Tuomo Hiippala Digital Geography Lab University of Helsinki tuomo.hiippala@iki.fi cb

2 Digital Geography Lab A multidisciplinary research group based at the Department of Geosciences and Geography Researchers with backgrounds in geoinformatics, human geography, conservation biology, computer science... and linguistics! New data sources (e.g. social media) for studying human mobility, accessibility, activities, nature conservation, illegal wildlife trade etc.

3 Linguistic landscapes A relatively new subfield of sociolinguistics, which examines the visibility of languages in (built) physical environment Previous research has studied tourist attractions, landmarks, transportation hubs, marketplaces, etc. (see e.g. Bruyel-Olmedo & Juan-Garau 2015; Soler-Carbonell 2016) Bruyel-Olmedo, A. & Juan-Garau, M. (2015) Shaping tourist LL: language display and the sociolinguistic background of an international multilingual readership. International Journal of Multilingualism 12(1), Soler-Carbonell, J. (2016) Complexity perspectives on linguistic landscapes: A scalar analysis. Linguistic Landscape 2(1), 1 25.

4

5

6 Converging physical and virtual spaces Aharon Kellerman (2016) has long argued that physical and virtual spaces have become intertwined. The resulting double space envelops its users due to connectivity provided by mobile technology. He proposes, in particular, that specific physical places are converging with their virtual counterparts in this double space. User-generated content on social media reflects this convergence by mediating presence (Villi 2015) via content and geographical metadata. Kellerman, A. (2016) Daily Spatial Mobilities: Physical and Virtual. Routledge: New York and London. Villi, M. (2015) Hey, I m here right now : Camera phone photographs and mediated presence. Photographies 8(1), 3 22.

7 Extending linguistic landscapes to virtual space Should social media posts geotagged to a specific location be considered an extension of the linguistic landscape in the physical environment? Social media posts do not take a concrete form in the physical environment, but exist on various platforms in the virtual space. The posts reflect language use by individual active in/with the space at some point in time. The term extension seems appropriate, because any virtual space is ultimately founded on physical infrastructure.

8

9 Data We are currently using two datasets to study the linguistic landscape of the Senate Square in social media. Both datasets were collected from Instagram, consisting of posts geotagged within a 150-metre radius of the square centre posts by unique users, taken between June 1, 2014 and March 31, 2016 no location history posts by 8495 unique users, taken between January 10 and May 17, 2016 location history with up to 50 previous locations for each unique user.

10 Methods To take on high-volume data collected from social media, we draw on methods from various fields of study: 1 Natural Language Processing (NLP) Automatic language identification 2 Geoinformatics Spatiotemporal analyses 3 Ecology and biology Diversity measurements

11 Automatic language identification For performing language identification, we evaluated three different frameworks: 1 fasttext 176 languages (Bojanowski et al. 2017) 2 langid.py 97 languages (Lui & Baldwin 2012) 3 Chromium Language Detector 2 83 languages We sampled our second dataset for 20% of the captions and annotated their language manually to establish a gold standard for the evaluation. Lui, M. & Baldwin, T. (2012) langid.py: An off-the-shelf language identification tool. Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. ACL, pp Bojanowski, P. et al. (2017) Enriching word vectors with subword information. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 5,

12 Preprocessing 1 Great weather in Helsinki!!! On holiday :-) #helsinki #visitfinland 2 Great weather in Helsinki!!! On holiday :-) #helsinki #visitfinland :nerd face & sun & passenger ship: 3 Great weather in Helsinki!!! On holiday :-) #helsinki #visitfinland 4 Great weather in Helsinki!!! On holiday with :-) #helsinki #visitfinland 5 Great weather in Helsinki!!! On holiday with :-) 6 Great weather in Helsinki!!! On holiday with 7 Great weather in Helsinki! On holiday with 8 ["Great weather in Helsinki!", "On holiday with"]

13 Performance Automatic language identification of short texts is challenging: performance may be improved by dropping very short captions. Trade-off between data volume and performance? Framework No thresh. >8 characters >16 characters >32 characters fasttext (0.006) (0.024) (0.035) langid.py (0.006) (0.034) (0.076) CLD (0.006) (0.026) (0.079) Data loss 0% (1315) 4.03% (53) 19.01% (250) 49.35% (649)

14 Daily pulse 15 Mean number of posts Hour of day

15 Languages per week Percentage of posts Language en fi ru ja de Week of 2016

16

17 Initial observations English is the dominant language in social media the Senate Square: is English still the language of tourism (cf. Dann 1996)? Events taking place in the physical space appear to shape the linguistic landscape in the virtual space. Swedish is prominent in the built environment, but largely absent from the virtual linguistic landscape. Dann, G.M.S. (1996) The Language of Tourism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Wallingford: CAB International.

18 Next steps Measuring the diversity of the linguistic landscape a comparison with Kamppi, a transportation hub, not a touristic attraction (Peukert 2013). What motivates the language choice among locals and visitors? How frequently users switch between multiple languages? Spatiotemporal characteristics of both locals and visitors a comparison of activity spaces and periods (joint work with Henrikki Tenkanen and Olle Järv). Peukert, H. (2013) Measuring linguistic diversity in urban ecosystems. In J. Duarte & I. Gogolin (eds) Linguistic Superdiversity in Urban Areas: Research Approaches. Benjamins: Amsterdam, pp

19 Thank you! Feedback or questions?