What did you learn about CMDA?

Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CDMA) is an approach that can be used to research online interactive behavior. Any analysis grounded in empirical, textual observation of online behavior is CDMA. CDMA is a language-focused discipline such as linguistics, communication, and speech-making. CMDA is used to analyze the logs of verbal interaction such as characters, utterances, messages exchanges, threads, and archives. The analysis is done by surveys, ethnographic observation, interviews, or other processes, and together qualitative and quantitative research can be analyzed.

CDMA was initiated as people started interacting in chat rooms, listservs, web forums, email, instant messaging environments, and the educators looked to their behavior to understand the nature of computer-medicated communication. The research analysis is possible because they leave an online textual trace when people engage in socially meaningful ways. The interaction can be accessible to inspection and reflection than the brief spoken communication.

What appears to be useful?

This approach is helpful to research the online interaction behavior of a spoken or written text. The method can help uncover the motivation behind a text allowing the researcher to view a problem from a higher standpoint. It also considers the social and historical contexts and helps understand the function of language to achieve specific effects (to create emotions, to create doubt, to evoke emotions, or to manage conflict). CDMA also can be used to foster positive social change.

What may be challenging? Why?

As all groups of people communicate and interact online, an important task is identifying and defining the online occurrences in culturally meaningful terms, based on observing empirical behavior. As textual communication will remain an essential online activity, the researcher needs to analyze computer-mediated behavior alongside social science methods. As Androutsopoulos et al. (2008) mention, ethical issues such as anonymity and privacy protection may relate to the size and description of the data samples, the processing techniques, the limitation of categories, and the amount of background information. Also, there is a lack of standard guidelines for Computer-mediated discourse (CMD) corpus design. It also mentions that CMD affects understanding critical concepts such as interaction logic, participants framework, language-identity relationships, intertextuality, and community.

Are there specific settings in your own life as a researcher/practitioner where this may be the right method to answer your questions? Why or why not?

Yes. As I do qualitative research methods through humanities and social science disciplines, CDMA will be helpful to analyze the interviews, conversations, websites, social media posts and comments, forums, and open-ended questions from questionnaires. Through these, I will be able to closely examine various elements that reflect or relate to my research questions. These could be through words, sentences, paragraphs, and the overall structure while connecting them to attributes, themes, and patterns to understand the social groups and how they communicate and analyze the sources in multiple ways.

References

Herring, S. (2004). Computer-mediated discourse analysis: an approach to researching online communities. Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning. DOI:10.1017/CBO9780511805080.016

Androutsopoulos, J., & Beißwenger, M. (2008). Introduction: Data and methods in computer-mediated discourse analysis. Language@ internet, 5(2). https://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1609

LTEC 6516, Spring 2022