Keynote Speakers
Mikko Laitinen
Mikko Laitinen is Professor of English Language at the University of Eastern Finland. His research explores language variation and change through social network theory and the study of World Englishes, with a focus on Finland and the Nordic region. He specializes in computational and data-intensive approaches to language, combining large-scale social media data with traditional corpora. Laitinen leads major projects on digital humanities infrastructures (FIN-CLARIAH) and on the diffusion of linguistic innovations in online networks (COMET).
Ego Networks and Computer-Mediated Communication
This talk presents research conducted in two projects funded by the Research Council of Finland. The first project aims to develop digital infrastructure solutions for research, while the second investigates language change in large-scale digital social networks, focusing on how linguistic innovations emerge and spread. Research across disciplines has highlighted the fundamental importance of social networks for human behavior (Granovetter 1973; Dunbar 2020; Waldinger & Schulz 2023) and for understanding linguistic variation (Milroy 1987). Yet, the role of social networks in linguistic innovation is often underexplored, and studies of innovation have typically relied on relatively small samples. This talk argues that large-scale CMC data can provide new opportunities to investigate linguistic innovation and diffusion across social networks at scale.
The first part of the talk discusses the theoretical concepts of innovators and early adopters in sociolinguistics and introduces methods for constructing ego networks from interactional metadata in CMC. It proposes a framework for quantifying ego networks that is applicable to any social media platform where interactions such as replies, friendship patterns, and other forms of engagement can be observed (e.g., Bluesky and Twitter). Developed within the infrastructure project, this methodology combines expertise from sociolinguistics and computer science.
To illustrate the potential of network-based approaches, the second part of the talk focuses on recently emerging lexis in English. Previous research has shown that new lexical items often originate in urban centers (Grieve et al. 2018), but little is known about the social settings and networks in which innovations emerge. Using three large CMC datasets (3.42 billion words, covering the period from 2020 to mid-2022) from American, Australian, and British English, we trace the diffusion of recently emerging lexical items, such as rizz (‘charisma’), oomfies (‘one of my followers’), and girlies (a general term for people analogous to guys), across social networks. The quantitative analysis demonstrates how social network information can enrich existing accounts of geographical variation in lexical emergence. The presentation offers methodological insights into how large-scale social media data can be integrated with interaction-based social network information.
Sofia Rüdiger
The research of Prof. Dr. Sofia Rüdiger, from the Freie Universität Berlin, bridges World Englishes, sociolinguistics, and computer-mediated communication. Her work focuses on Asian Englishes, especially those used in South Korea and Taiwan, and explores how multilingualism, language contact, and code-switching shape English in global contexts. She combines corpus-based and ethnographic methods to investigate digital discourse, persuasion, and variation in both spoken and online language.
Food Discourses on YouTube: Exploring a Corpus of Excessive Consumption Videos
Online food content is a true evergreen and can be found in abundance in the digital sphere. Restaurant reviews and contributions in culinary forums, recipes and pictures in social media posts, cooking shows and eating shows, what-I-eat-in-a-day vlogs (see, e.g., Tovares and Gordon 2021, Bagli and Corrizzato 2025 for an overview) – food is likely to show up whenever we are browsing through our virtual worlds. In the virtual realm, food has truly transcended its role as nourishment and become a source of entertainment across platforms. While some formats focus on the competitive nature of cooking (e.g., in cooking shows available on streaming and video-sharing sites) or instructional value (e.g., in TikTok recipe demonstrations), a distinct subset centers on the particular aesthetic of excessive consumption (Lupton 2020) – what can be termed ‘feasts of spectacle’. These videos feature transgressive food consumption and production practices and include eating shows (mukbang), cheat day vlogs, food challenges, and excessive cooking shows.
In this talk, I explore the discursive dimensions of English-language food videos that celebrate overindulgence. Drawing on corpus-based discourse analysis and digital linguistic ethnography of 400 video artifacts drawn from 40 YouTube channels, I examine how ‘carnivalesque food videos’ construct eating as entertainment and food as a spectacle. In this presentation, I highlight how language (e.g., pronouns, extreme case formulations), physical eating processes (e.g., chewing and swallowing), and visuals (e.g., arrangement of food items, use of utensils) are deployed to create narratives of indulgence, to negotiate (at times conflicting) identities, and to foster online community. Finally, I reflect on how these insights deepen our understanding of food performances in computer-mediated interaction and digitally-mediated publics and intimacy.