Scientific Network:
Empirical Research on Internet-based Communication

[ This page in German ]

In the Internet and especially in the social networks of the so-called "Web 2.0", new forms and genres of mediated communication are emerging. Language use and social interaction in these new genres have become subject of interdisciplinary research. The scientific network "Empirical Research on Internet-based Communication" unites fifteen researchers from twelve different universities and research institutions to work on the empirical analysis of linguistic phenomena in internet-based communication using techniques and methods from Corpus Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. Due to the digital source format of linguistic data on the internet, datasets of internet-based communication are initially simple to collect; however, up until now empirical research on internet-based communication has been lacking well-established formats, standards and description categories for representing and capturing the linguistic and interactional phenomena in new genres such as e-mail, instant messaging, chats, Twitter, weblogs and Skype as well as in discussion forums, wikis and on social network sites. Moreover, the existing procedures for the automatic processing of linguistic data—procedures that have been developed for standard written texts—need to be adapted to the linguistic characteristics of internet-based writing

The network, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), combines skills from German Linguistics, Computer Linguistics, Computer Science and Psychology in order to achieve two goals: First, based on a set of concrete research questions, to compile suggestions for standards and the processing of linguistic data from German internet-based communication and, second, to develop methods and tools for their empirical computer-assisted analysis. The findings will be documented in publications, and the suggestions for standards and procedures will successively be provided online