festeringhillock

Haven’t updated this in a (long) while but now is an especially good time to do so (as you will see)…

For anyone not attending (virtually or non-virtually), Ruth Page (@ruthtweetpage) has organised a conference at the University of Leicester on the subject of Language and Social Media. Thankfully, she managed to organise live-streaming access for fellow researchers across the globe – and I managed to catch the first couple of presentations today, and will be (virtually) there tomorrow as well.

Firstly, it’s worth saying that the addition of live-streaming is great – and I’d really like to see that happen at other conferences (although it certainly doesn’t replace actually “being there”). And, although my experience of academic conferences is limited to invited lectures and postgrad conferences, there were (and will be!) some fascinating papers.

Anyway, I only really managed to catch John Caulfield’s presentation on Irish bloggers and Twitter users, and their use of Irish on a, let’s face it, English dominated Internet. You can read the abstract of his presentation over at the conference website but there was one interesting point I’d like to pick up on.

In the comments section of Irish-language blogs, users were generally supportive. Specifically, they would correct lexico-grammatical errors of the blogger. “Ha!”, you say, that’s the sort of rampant, aggressive prescriptivism we see all over the internets. But no! These were constructive criticisms: pointing out lexico-grammatical errors in a supportive way, showing respect for the blogger’s “face” (and, I assume, employing the sort of mitigating strategies we may expect, in line with politeness theory).

This came as a surprise to me, given the usual comments you see on platforms such as YouTube. Johnny Unger (@johnnyunger) made a similar point: “Constructive corrections in Irish blogosphere – how different from prescriptivism in English-lang blogs”

To be fair, I think that there is a tendency to overestimate the amount of aggressive prescriptivism that Johnny’s alluding to. At the very least, from my experience of the English blogosphere, it’s relatively minimal – especially in comparison with YouTube. Fashion blogs (I don’t read these – honest!) display a similar sense of community to the sort of blogs Caulfield mentions – it’s rare to see ‘impoliteness’ (see Jonathan Culpeper, in particular) on these blogs, rather there’s a sense of community and mutual respect (partly derived from the fact that these blogs rely on a mutual exchange of readership). Nancy Baym makes similar points with regards to music fan blogs and discussion forums – though perhaps she hasn’t stumbled upon the music sections of IMDb or The Student Room.

This, of course, all makes sense, because the aggressive prescriptivism displayed in comments sections of certain blogs and on YouTube is not really prescriptivism at all: it’s usually part of an ad hominem attack (something along the lines of “how can your comments be reasonable if you can’t even spell proper!”). This is not to say that the rampant prescriptivism isn’t interesting – precisely because it forms part of a troll’s attack repertoire is interesting, because it shows the way that people view language more generally. And the reason that the lack of attack-prescriptivism (in the case of Irish-language blogs) makes sense is because, as @johnnyunger says paraphrasing Caulfield, “members value each other in a small community of practice” – the sorts of CofP that Baym analyses, and the sorts of CofP that fashion bloggers (may) belong to. There’s a hypothesis forming: the more sense of community, the less likelihood of aggressive, rampant prescriptivism (although we have to be aware that such flaming may be a part of the communities general behaviour – to discourage outsiders from joining, to establish the limits of the group, and so on).

The other point I was going to mention, which arose from Caulfield’s talk, was the issue of “ethics”… but I’ll leave that for another time.

Anyway, anyone who didn’t (virtually) attend should do so tomorrow – although I hear that the conference was being recorded and will hopefully be distributed online soon…

(PS – for anyone who was “there”, I meant this Internet meme – and I’m not sure what my point was – except being a little pedantic, suggesting that the linguistic creativity that Caulfield attributed to Irish web users stemmed from another form of net-creativity, albeit Irish-ized)

(another PS – there was also some disagreement over whether the meme was “om nom nom” or “nom nom nom”, and whether it had something to do with cats, or something to do with the cookie monster – turns out we were all right [see above hyperlink to the meme])

While watching the Football League Show, on BBC 1, from Saturday night, I was struck by a comment made by one of the “experts” on the programme. I’ll get to that shortly.

I think the Football League Show is a really interesting programme. It’s a highlights show, a kind of MOTD-lite, showing highlights from all the day’s matches outside of the Premiership (i.e. the Championship, League One and League Two). But it’s interesting in the way it’s positioned. In many respects, you can view it as a product of football-in-flux and it’s really interesting in the way it positions gender and, in this case, race and nationality.

Now, non-Premiership football has a different status in Britain. Many of the clubs are cash-strapped, reliant on handouts from above and the loyal following of their (usually very local) supporters. In addition, a lot of the teams are supporter-owned. It seems to me that TFLS fills a different gap to that of Match of the Day. Just one example: it’s title screens show supporters (of all ages, genders and ethnicities) “dancing” with a ball in front of the camera (unlike the montage of football “legends”, past and present, that MOTD uses). In other words, it sets itself up as a programme for the “average” fan. But it’s also a place where the BBC experiments with different production techniques and types of coverage. It is the place where supporters can feedback to in-studio “experts”, where a female presenter has a visible role, and so on. (Incidentally, the female reporter has, this season, been axed, as has the segments that she used to present – I once wrote on undergraduate essay on they way she was positioned within the programme, so there is a lot to say about the way TFLS treated football as a gendered pursuit).

What was interesting on Saturday though was a comment made by Steve Claridge, the in-studio expert (he’s a former professional footballer, unlike the presenter). In the coverage of the match between West Ham and Reading, West Ham had a player sent off and, at this point, were pretty much cruising. So much so, in fact, that one of the Reading players, Jimmy Kébé, had time to (literally!) pull up his socks while exchanging passes with a team-mate. A West Ham player, Jack Collison, took affront to this, and pushed Kébé (ultimately resulting in him being sent off). Obviously, Collison’s response was due to Kébé, seemingly, mocking him (and his team-mates). (Here is a short piece, including video, about the event).

But this is what Claridge said, after the highlights, in the studio discussion (with the part I want to focus on in bold italics):

Presenter: [...] So what was your take on it, with that confrontation between him [Kebe] and Jack Collison?

Claridge: Well, I mean you can see here, it’s, for me, a little bit disrespectful to the opposition, the game’s won… and to start, what you could describe as taking the mick, you could probably use another word for it. At that stage of the game, I think it’s unnecessary. You can’t condone what Collison does but, you know, in that situation it’s understandable. And that’s the sort of thing that would happen – I’ve played in plenty of games where, if someone tries to do that, that has been the end result. It doesn’t surprise me, lets put it this way, that it’s not an English player that has done it. Maybe, you know, I just don’t think that- over here I think that players understand that it is disrespectful thing to do.

Presenter: Well I think he knows now (laughing), Brian McDermott took him off soon after [...]

I could say a lot about this, with regards to the general relationship that the interaction creates between the presenter and Claridge (and much more!). But aside from this, Claridge’s comments are somewhat puzzling: “It doesn’t surprise me that it’s not an English player that has done it”. In other words, disrespectful “show-boating” is not English, it is “foreign”. But this isn’t the point I’m making either. Jimmy Kébé represents Mali and is French-born, but has played for Reading since early 2008 (140 appearances according to Wikipedia). In certain respects, he is English. So we can see here how Claridge determines nationality. In addition, Claridge’s “over here” is a strange turn of phrase considering he’s talking about an English match. And, finally, Jimmy Kebe is black. Would Claridge jump so easily to explaining his behaviour is he was white, regardless of nationality?

Certainly, these points are open to disagreement but, for me, this interaction is a tiny snippet of the sort of embedded racial (and ethnic, and nationalistic) tensions within football more generally. Coming back to what I was saying earlier, TFLS has, in the past and present, provided me with a lot to say about how larger issues in football can be seen to have become embedded at the micro-level. With regards to gender and race, football has changed a lot over the past few decades. And yet there are undercurrents of gender and racial tension at every level of the game. An admittedly brief analysis of this sort brings these issues to the fore and is something that I should discourse analysts should turn their attention to (and if I could afford to get over to Berlin, I’d really like to attend SS19 next year, as there is a thematic session on the “Sociolinguistics of Football”). Given the Andy Gray/Richard Keys débâcle and the recent John Terry/Anton Ferdinand racism scandal, there’s a lot to say about language/media/football.

Johnny Unger’s comments on yesterday’s post led me to do a quick search of the Nexis UK Daily Mail archive. I should say that one of the reasons I chose to search the Daily Mail’s own online archives is because they link directly to the reports and so contain images, which I will return to. I also restricted it to “news” articles, so the difference in article counts could be down to that also.

Anyway, I stumbled across an article through Nexis, about the Dale Farm protests and evictions, entitled “Travellers plan to use their children as human shields” (dated 2nd September 2011). Ignoring the plethora of things that could be said about this article, this bit struck me:

In a sign that the operation is being taken over by outside elements, one traveller described a meeting yesterday between the two groups, saying: ‘They [the anarchists] were telling us what to do. They seem to know exactly how to handle the situation.’

The article’s topic, apart from the children-as-shields angle, is about political activists “infiltrating” the Dale Farm protests. So, the two groups in question are “the travellers” and “the activists”. But here “the activists” becomes “the anarchists”, and it seems to give the impression that the “traveller” was referring to “anarchists” with the pronoun “they”. That doesn’t seem to be the case; the journalist is referring to the “they” as “anarchists”.

Prior to this bit of embedded speech, the “activists” are mentioned twice:

Details emerged as a ‘foreign legion’ of activists began joining the barricades at the camp in Crays Hill, Essex [...]

Swedish Marxists and German campaigners, as well as British university students, are among those who have drifted in to the six-acre site [...]

Apart from the obvious questions these extracts raise (whose words are “foreign legion”? The activists “drifted in”? Are “Swedish Marxists” not allowed to protest against issues that aren’t related to “Swedish Marxism”?), the glossing of these groups as “the anarchists” is interesting, given what I wrote about yesterday.

Just for fun, I made a mini-corpus of Daily Mail articles that contain the word “anarchist”. Admittedly, it may play comprise some of my MA dissertation, but it was just out of boredom initially (and, as everyone knows, corpus linguistics is fun!)

Anyway, the corpus is formed of 112 articles, totally about 130,000 words. It covers the years 2005 to present. Specifically, the date range is 4th July 2005 (an article about G8) to 3rd October 2011 (an article about squatting). The article breakdown, by year, is:

2005: 3
2006: 3
2007: 4
2008: 10
2009: 17
2010: 35
2011: 40

While this may have some relevance, you can’t draw many conclusions from it. Firstly, there a larger number of articles concerned with the tuition fees protests (in 2010) compared to the G8 protests (in 2005). Secondly, a number of articles repeat content. Thirdly, I have a feeling the Mail may delete stories from their server, over time. Hence the low numbers of articles mentioning “anarchism” in 2005/6/7 compared with 2010/11. Having said that, the whole reason I put this together was because the concept of “anarchism” seems to have become more prominent over the last couple of years so there may be something to it.

On the whole, the articles in the corpus are mainly about: G20, G8, Greek “riots”, Tuition fee protest(s), Mark Kennedy (an undercover police officer who integrated himself into a environmental activist group), TUC anti-cuts demonstrations, Dale Farm, Pension reform protests, and the Royal Wedding.

The corpus also contains a number of articles that seem out-of-place; an article about Pete Doherty, one about Bansky, and a number referring to neo-nazi arrests. This is mainly due to references to the “Anarchist Cookbook”, one reference to an “Anarchist Bookfair”, an obscure mention of the “Glasgow Anarchist Summer School”, and a mention of Dario Fo’s “Accidental Death of an Anarchist”. There are other references of this sort but I decided not to delete any articles from the corpus due to this.

There are some interesting findings, albeit that have to be qualified.

Firstly, it confirms the Daily Mail’s lack of international coverage. The vast majority of articles are concerned with domestic affairs.

Secondly, there is no attempt to explain anarchism, or to enter into dialogue with “anarchists”. There is very little “anarchist” terminology used (if such a thing can be defined). For example, “solidarity” occurs 8 times, mostly in direct quotation, once in scare quotes, and twice as an element in a compound noun (“Solidarity Party” and “Brighton Solidarity Federation”). “Direct action”, similarly, occurs just 16 times, again mostly in direct quotation and once in scare quotes. Contrast this with “violence” (124) or “riots” (97). There is no mention of “cooperative”, “co-operative”, or “co-op”.

The corpus is too small to really make any firm conclusions regarding collocations of the term “anarchist”. However, where “anarchist” functions as an adjective, the following list is interesting:

group/groups:  52
movement/movements: 8
violence:   4
gang:   4
riots:   3
protesters:  3
mob:   3

Obviously, the frequencies are too small for any real conclusions. Having said that, the neutral “anarchist protesters” occurs just as frequently as “anarchist gang” or “anarchist mob” (and if the two negative terms are taken together, they outweigh the use of the neutral term). The other, more justifiable, point is the use of “group(s)” over “movement(s)”. To me, “group” signifies something much less organised (and less popular or populist) than a “movement”, so it seems there’s a underlying resistance to anarchism as a political concept (which, to be honest, isn’t surprising). And, of course, “movement” has the positive connotation of progression, which group doesn’t.

Of course, it would be unfair to blame the Daily Mail entirely for this picture of anarchism. Anarchism is linked with “violence”. Anarchism can’t be said to “belong” to one group; anarchist groups are, at least in terms of their naming strategies, fragmented into multiple entities (this also isn’t strictly true – people will be members of multiple groups, and all these groups are better thought of as “networks”). These corpus-derived techniques only tell part of the picture anyway and hopefully I’ll post some more about this topic when I get around to looking at the individual articles from a more discursive perspective. And there is a LOT more to say about this. I think this relatively badly-designed corpus does highlight some interesting things though, especially as a starting-point. And I might build a complementary corpus of Guardian articles.

While John Locke’s “Duels and Duets” (he talks about it here) seems to have been widely dismissed by the linguistic community, one of Rob Lawson’s comments about it made me think about the impact of language and gender research. As he suggests,

“in the bibliography, there is no mention (and I mean no mention) of people like Penny Eckert, Deborah Cameron, Scott Kiesling, Jennifer Coates, Mary Bucholtz, or Kira Hall. There are honourable mentions for both Robin Lakoff (1975) and Labov (1972, 1973), but these are not exactly cutting edge developments any more”.

John Locke’s failure to enter into any dialogue with this research is interesting. To write a book about “language and gender” but dismiss an entire swathe of research looks like bad practice. But what if he is unaware of this research? Or, what if he doesn’t see this research as valid on a wider scale? Of course, Locke may be ignoring this research on the grounds that it would undermine his arguments (and it does). On the other hand, perhaps this research has failed to make the impact it had (or has) hoped to.

Bucholtz, Cameron, Eckert, McConnell-Ginet, Kiesling and so on are, or should be, the first names to come to mind when anyone considers “language and gender”. But do sociolinguists (including critical discourse analysts and so on) overestimate their contributions? These researchers featured prominently in research papers covered by my undergraduate degree. But, then again, I didn’t really look into areas such as child language development or cognitive linguistics. Would my opinion of these researchers be different if I had? Or, more worryingly, have these researchers failed to make an impact outside of their specific sub-discipline(s)?

I think these questions are difficult to answer and I know there is a constant issue within (socio)linguistics as to the impact of research. The question of impact has a particular relevance to Critical Discourse Analysis and, hopefully, I’ll write about that soon. But, in terms of language and gender, there still seems to be a huge gulf between the researchers named above and lay beliefs about the topic. And, as John Locke’s book shows, there is academic support for these beliefs. (Personally, I think language and gender researchers have to engage more actively, however that may be achieved, because these assumptions about gender still exist, are still maintained by the media (and, as John Locke shows, within ‘other’ academic disciplines), and won’t be dismantled by publishing a research paper in Language in Society).

The following issue is similar. In a master’s level class the other week, one of the lecturer’s asked the question “Is this text a dialect of English or another language?”. The text in question was in Scots. Clearly, that’s a dangerous question, and unsurprisingly we (the students) hesitated in answering. If you were to ask a non-linguist, would they hesitate? A similar thing* arose in an (undergraduate) language and gender class; “is this text written by a man or a woman?”. By the end of the semester, you’d expect a group of students to treat that question critically. If it was asked “out in the street”, I’d imaged you’d get the same recycled beliefs that the past two (or more) decades of sociolinguistic research has attempted to critique. Has it been successful? John Locke’s contribution to the field suggests there is work to do.

* In many ways it obviously isn’t similar, but I’ll ignore that!

Welcome!

This is (or will be) a blog about language and text, gender, media, critical discourse analysis and so on. I’m a master’s student in the West Midlands, and maybe some people will read it.

Why “festering hillock”?

Despite having absolutely no relevance to the content of this blog, the NME once said (of an Autechre single) the following:

“Autchre records are purchased solely by bald men in expensive anoraks who would masturbate to a car alarm if it was re-mixed by a German. This impenetrable curtain of misanthropic noise – released with an accompanying three-track DVD that features a squabble of hopelessly pretentious video “interpretations” – is typical of the menopausal electro-manglers’ dogged refusal to bow to convention and produce anything of interest to anyone not either a) bald or b) German. It bleeps. It skronks. It krrraaaanks. But mainly, it blows like a ruddy awful hurricane. Remember, kids; if it sounds like a festering hillock of tune-shy bum-wank, it’s because it IS a festering hillock of tune-shy bum-wank. Avoid as you would a bald German.”

I just like the turn of phrase. And here is a video of said track for those who are interested: