Marcin Oleksy, Jan Koco´n, Wroclaw University of Technology
Maciej Maciej, Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences Maciej Piasecki, Wroclaw University of Technology
Weblog, often called an “electronic journal”, is a simple website containing posts displayed in the reversed chronological order, which can usually be commented by other users (cf. McNeil 2003). It is not a simple recreation of a journal in the digital environment but rather a complex remediation of traditional genres (e.g. journal, diary, letter) under the influence of elec- tronic discourse, which entails such phenomena as secondary orality and interaction with the user (cf. Davis and Brewer 1997).
Although blogging is a relatively new phenomenon and the scholarly inter- est in this form of writing could be traced back to the first years of the 21st century, there is already a substantial literature dedicated to the genre analysis of blogs. We may distinguish two main threads of scholarship on this field: one focusing on the relationships between blogs and the other forms of Computer-Mediated Communication (e.g. Herring et al. 2005; De- vitt 2009), and the other tracing the „ancestry” of the genre in such forms as journals (e.g. Serfaty 2004; Miller and Shepherd 2009).
The aim of this study is the linguistic analysis of weblog genres, which would support earlier interpretative studies of the collected material (e.g. Maryl and Niewiadomski 2014). In this study we analyse the corpus of 260 popu- lar Polish blogs. Construction of the blog corpus is not straightforward as blogs can very differ in the way of using HTML structures for presenting the textual content. In order to avoid laborious manual editing, a system called BlogReader was constructed. It is dedicated to corpus acquisition from structured web sources. It was built as an expansion of a corpus gath- ering system for based on several open components, e.g. jusText and Onnion (Pomikálek, 2011). BlogReader works in a semi-automatic way: users first specify elements of the HTML structure that include text fragments that are relevant for the users. Identified fragments are next automatically acquired and saved in the selected corpus format.
The analysis concerns three aspects:
• Linguistic comparison of blogs and other forms of discourse (e.g. lit- erature, news)
• Linguistic analysis of weblog genres, i.e. linguistic differences be- tween particular groups of blogs and authors
• Linguistic variation between blog posts within individual blogs Blog corpus analysis will be based on an open stylometrics system dedicated for Polish which is built as a part of the CLARIN-PL project (www.clarin- pl.eu). The system will enable description of text documents with features referring to any level of the linguistic structure: from the level of word forms up to the level of the semantic-pragmatic structures. The system will
combine several existing components: language tools for pre-processing, Fextor (Broda et al., 2013) – a system for defining features in a flexible way, Stylo (http://crantastic.org/packages/stylo/versions/34587) - a stylometric package for English, SuperMatrix (Broda & Piasecki, 2013) – a system for building and processing very large co-incidence matrices (e.g. documents vs features) with interface to clustering and Machine Learning packages. With the help of the system we want to look for different groups of blogs and also for features (e.g. lemmas or lexico-syntactic patterns) that charac- terize different text groups.
This paper is a part of the ongoing research project “Blog as a new form of electronic writing” (2012-2014) funded by the National Science Center in Poland and conducted in the Digital Humanitites Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. This work is also partially financed as part of the investment in the CLARIN-PL research in- frastructure funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Educa- tion
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