Digital Communities and Social Media in Research

​Join our 2021-22 Scholar-in-Residence Rianna Walcott for a talk focused on her PhD research, where she will discuss the mechanics and ethics of researching social media communities. Here she will discuss the ethical and citational requirements for social media research, the need for self-reflexivity when researching your own community, and how to write about and analyse social media spaces as a text.

Thesis abstract: In Black British digital networks an ever-changing, hybridised way of speaking has emerged that synthesises aspects of Black dialects from across the diaspora. This language is used both as part of a performance of self and to signal belonging to a Black group identity, as linguistic choices are a way that online actors are able to curate their narratives of self-representation. Through observation of different digital social spaces, this study will investigate how language is disseminated between geographically and culturally disparate people who self-identify as Black, and how Black British social media users perform linguistic acts that contribute to an articulation of a group ‘Black British identity’ online.