Author Description

The new-media revolution has led to a comprehensive digitization of our textual universe and the pervasive incorporation of the media into our everyday lives (from mobile telephony to social media). This calls for a concerted research effort uniting linguistics and other disciplines involved in language-related research. The massive growth in the amount, diversity and availability of textual and multimodal language data for many of the world's languages poses several challenges. In terms of theory and methods, it forces us to rethink traditional notions of what linguistic corpora are and what role they play in linguistic description. Established corpus-linguistic methods such as concordancing and textual statistics are increasingly being complemented by visualization and geolocation of digital language data. Empirically, there is a growing need to document and analyse what people do with language in the increasingly technologized communicative ecology of the 21st century. Language and Computers - Studies in Digital Linguistics invites contributions which - explore innovative, intelligent and creative ways of using digital language data, resources and infrastructure for linguistic description - contribute to the development and refinement of usage-based models in linguistics, using both quantitative and qualitative methods - analyse all aspects of digitally mediated communication, from orthography to pragmatics and sociolinguistics.