Evolution in Digital Discourse: Toward a Computational Tool for Identifying Patterns of Language Change in Social Media

FAIN: HAA-261240-18

University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)
Seung Mo Jang (Project Director: January 2018 to May 2022)
Elaine Chun (Co Project Director: May 2018 to May 2022)
Jijun Tang (Co Project Director: May 2018 to May 2022)
Chin-Tser Huang (Co Project Director: May 2018 to May 2022)

The development of an open access, user-friendly tool to allow scholars and the public to study and document the spread and evolution of information shared over social media networks.

As a team of humanities scholars and computer scientists, we aim to produce a computational tool for analyzing how digital dialogue originates, spreads, and changes as dialogue texts are widely circulated and shared across social media platforms. Unlike prior social media network analyses, this project seeks to develop and disseminate a tool for humanities scholars by allowing them to observe, track, and identify text-level evolutions over the spreading and sharing process in digital communities. With this tool, scholars will be able to analyze how and why the linguistic structure of social media texts as well as their authenticated status can undergo meaningful changes over the course of their broad circulation.