List of Topics for upcoming meetings:
Language Choice and Use
I would like to suggest a couple of excerpts from the following book, for one of our fall semester meetings:
Title: Words of the World
Author: Abram de Swaan
Year: 2001
Publisher: Polity Press (Blackwell)
Google Books: http://books.google.com.br/books?id=YV4jIQAACAAJ
It discusses language choice and use around the world as a hierarchically structured network, in which language is a 'hypercollective good' and choice of language is governed by the 'Q-value', that is, the communicative advantage bestowed by using it (based on having higher centrality by including it in one's linguistic repertoire).
Some good excerpts would be
Chapter 2 (15 pages): The political economy of language constellations.
Chapter 8 (30 pages): The European Union (case study)
The language is very nontechnical and easy to read. And I think it is an issue that affects us all personally as scholars, as well as of intellectual interest to us.
Mary Ann
Language Evolution (complementary or as a continuation of the previous topic)
Quantification of large social networks
- (using cell phones): Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks, J.-P. Onnela, J. Saramaki, J. Hyvonen, G. Szabo, D. Lazer, K. Kaski, J. Kertesz, and A.-L. Barabasi, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0610245104
- (using IM)
Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network, Jure Leskovec, Eric Horvitz, http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0939v1- (using blogs)
Linking without thinking: Weblogs, readership, and online social capital formation'', Cameron A. Marlow, http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/2006-linking-without-thinking
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