We Tweet Like We Talk and Other Interesting Observations: An Analysis of English Communication Modalities

Josiah P. Zayner

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arXiv · 1403.0531

We Tweet Like We Talk and Other Interesting Observations: An Analysis of English Communication Modalities

Josiah P. Zayner

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Abstract

Modalities of communication for human beings are gradually increasing in number with the advent of new forms of technology. Many human beings can readily transition between these different forms of communication with little or no effort, which brings about the question: How similar are these different communication modalities? To understand technology$\text{'}$s influence on English communication, four different corpora were analyzed and compared: Writing from Books using the 1-grams database from the Google Books project, Twitter, IRC Chat, and transcribed Talking. Multi-word confusion matrices revealed that Talking has the most similarity when compared to the other modes of communication, while 1-grams were the least similar form of communication analyzed. Based on the analysis of word usage, word usage frequency distributions, and word class usage, among other things, Talking is also the most similar to Twitter and IRC Chat. This suggests that communicating using Twitter and IRC Chat evolved from Talking rather than Writing. When we communicate online, even though we are writing, we do not Tweet or Chat how we write books; we Tweet and Chat how we Speak. Nonfiction and Fiction writing were clearly differentiable from our analysis with Twitter and Chat being much more similar to Fiction than Nonfiction writing. These hypotheses were then tested using author and journalists Cory Doctorow. Mr. Doctorow$\text{'}$s Writing, Twitter usage, and Talking were all found to have very similar vocabulary usage patterns as the amalgamized populations, as long as the writing was Fiction. However, Mr. Doctorow$\text{'}$s Nonfiction writing is different from 1-grams and other collected Nonfiction writings. This data could perhaps be used to create more entertaining works of Nonfiction.

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Josiah P. Zayner. 2014-03-03. We Tweet Like We Talk and Other Interesting Observations: An Analysis of English Communication Modalities. https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.0531

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