This document discusses research methods for studying digital language practices. It outlines four main themes: how digital media enables transnational mobility; the impact of polymedia on linguistic repertoires; transmodal interaction across different modes; and the global circulation of semiotic resources. The document emphasizes ethnographic and mixed methods approaches, using online participant observation, blended data collection from both online and offline contexts, and scripts to analyze large datasets. The goal is to understand language use in its social and cultural contexts as superdiversity increases connectivity between online and offline spaces.

1. Moving Methods Online
RESEARCHING DIGITAL LANGUAGE PRACTICE

2. Digital Media
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3. Digital language practice
Core part of language and
superdiversity research
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4. 3 Aims
The historical and theoretical background of digital language
research in sociolinguistics
Practices of blended data collection across online and offline
contexts
How social and communicative aspects of superdiversity
impact on research methods
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5. 3 themes
The role of mobile media for transnational trajectories
The consequences of polymedia for linguistics repertoires
Practices of transmodal interaction
The circulation and recontextualization of semiotic resources

6. Historical Perspectives
Digital language practices
Narrow definition: written and spoken language practices
that are accomplished with networked devices in various
genres and modes of digital communication.
Broader definition: language practices that are in some way
contiguous to digital communication, i.e.: social interaction
around digital devices

7. Historical Perspectives
Digital practices always transverse boundaries between the
physical and the virtual, and between technological systems
and social systems
Pre-web internet (1993): early research about virtual
community and classifications of digital modes and genres
The early web of 1990s: new technologies of information
storages and unidirectional communication (corporate
websites and personal homepages)

8. Historical Perspectives
In the 2000s
web 2.0 simplifies the production and distribution of online
content
Facilitates mass scale cultural participation
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Historical Perspectives
Today’s web
Users contribute, consume, and negotiate content
interactively
Platforms are controlled by global corporations
Users have choices of local and translocal practices

10. Historical Perspectives
Polymedia
The constant availability of a range of mediational tools for
interpersonal communication, each with semiotic
affordances, participation formats, and symbolic meaning

11. Three Research Themes on Digital
Language Practice
How digital spaces enable the formation of virtual
communities among migrant and diaspora populations.
Various practices of self-presentation and interaction that
digital media affords individual users
The wealth of semiotic resources made available by the web
of practices of cultural production and participation, the way
these resources are experienced and recontextualized in
situated action.

12. MOVING METHOD ONLINE
Researching Digital Language Practices

13. Core Issues and Topics
A Principle of Ethnography as method is
Triangulation. The reliance on a range of
data sources in order to gain complementary
perspectives on the communicative
processes under investigation (Karrebaek
and Charalambous).

14. The Term of Mixed Methods to refer to strategies of
collecting and analyzing data from different sources within a
single research design. Mixed Methods designs were
developed in the turn from medium-related to user-related
approaches in the Sociolinguistics of Computer-mediated
communication, as researchers realized the need to engage
with actors and sites of Digital Discourse (Herring and
Androutsopoulos, 2015).

15. Methods of Digital Data Collection can be typified in terms
of their orientation to Digital Language Data as opposed to
data collected with participants (Androutsopoulos, 2013).
By means of Scripts or Web Crawlers, which can download
very large sets of Digital Data based on predefined sampling
criteria (Eisenstein 2015; Heyd 2014).

16. Research in the Super diversity paradigm typically draws on
Online Participant observation either in advance of or
parallel to the collection and processing of textual data.
The main aim of Ethnographic observation online is to gain
an understanding of how people interact, how discourse
activities unfold and how digital spaces are related to one
another. In the framework of discourse-oriented online
Ethnography (Androutsopoulos, 2008, 2013).

17. Observation includes a range of researcher practices, such as surfing
around the Websites that are relevant to the focal users; following
online trajectories of people, topics or artefacts; and exploring the
resources for participation that are available to regular participants.
Ethnographic Observation is particularly typical for public web
spaces of multi-party discourse, such as: Discussion Forums, which
probably are the most intensively researched digital sites in the
language and superdiversity literature.

18. The combination of Digital Data with observation and/ or
participant contacts – “blended data” – has become standard
practice among Sociolinguists of Digital Language, and the
Techniques outlined above are used in several individual
variants, which goes to show the creative potential of online
research methods (Angouri 2016; Angouri and Tseliga 2010,
Bolander 2013, D’Arcy and Young 2012, Seargeant et al
2012, Spilioti 2011).

19. Translanguaging research departs from the assumption that language
practices encompass “the full range of linguistic performances of
multilingual language users” (Wei 2011;1223).
Coupland (2009a:45) argues that the conditions of late modernity,
such as mobility, diversity and mediatisation, prompt increased
Siociolinguistic reflexivity. When faced with less predictable
relations between signs, social categories and contexts of
communicative action, people are becoming increasingly reflexive of
their own and others’ communicative conduct.

20. NEW DEBATES
New approaches are needed to address these developments,
and this section starts by identifying four digital practices
which call for new approaches:
a.The role of Digital Media for Transnational Trajectories
b.The relation of polymedia to linguistic repertoires
c.The emergence of transmodal interaction
d.The circulation and appropriation of Semiotic resources.

21. The first Theme for Research on Superdiversity
and Digital Practices is how Digital Resources
enable people to plan and accomplish
trajectories of transnational mobility. Digital
Tools are essential to the global increase in
Transnational Mobility.

22. The Second Research Theme is The Impact
of Polymedia on Linguistic Repertoires
examines the practices and meanings of
media choice for interpersonal
communication (Madianou and Miller 2012,
2013).

23. The Third Research Theme is
Transmodal Interaction, such as the
unfolding of communicative activities
across different semiotic
materialisations and meditational tools.

24. The Fourth Research Theme is The Global Circulation and
Local Appropriation of Semiotic Resources in Digital
Language Practices. Even when speakers are not themselves
physically mobile, semiotic resources can travel globally,
eventually entering locak repertoires where they can take on
New Indexical Meanings (Androutsopoulos 2010,
Blommaert 2010, Pennycook 2007).

25. Conclusion:
Research methods on digital language practice are constantly changing
to adapt to the rapid changes in the affordability of digital technology.
Digital communication brings together online and offline spaces,
spoken and digital discourse, body and technology devices.

26. Key points for online research in
contemporary sociolinguistics:
1. Based on ethnography
2. Context-sensitive
3. Using a combination of ways to gather and analyze data
4. Broadening the analysis's focus to include multimodality and
polymedia as well as written language and literacy.
5. Refuse to be prematurely separated from the realm of online and
offline communicative action
6. Focuses on how individuals use language in their daily lives

27. Researchers that studying digital languages should be aware of the vast array of
digital instruments available for online ethnography, not withstanding their reliance
on linguistic ethnographic traditions.
The major focus is on understanding language behaviors online, with user-based
data serving as a counterbalance to the predominance of digital textual data.
Scripts written in open-source software can be used to track and display the flow of
people and semiotic resources across borders.
These resources can revolutionize ethnographic study of how language, mobility,
and digital gadgets interact.