I’ve been encountering scholarly work on Virtual distance learning and library service since my library tech program – in particular articles about Second Life. It seems to be the common thread on the topic. Second life sticks out in the search strategy Dennis Beck and Ross Perkins report in their 2016 “Review of Educational Research Methods in 3D3C Worlds” in Handbook on 3D3C Platforms.

“Online worlds, virtual worlds, Multi-User Virtual Environments, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games,Virtual Reality, Second Life, Online worlds, role playing games, Cyberspace, and Immersive Worlds“ (217)

This kind of research is probably the only area where Secondlife overshadows World of Warcraft. My experience in “virtual worlds” tends to be more of the WoW sort, so what really struck me in Beck and Perkin’s conclusions was their call for more longitudinal studies of programs in virtual spaces.

Second life is unusual in a lot of respects, but most so in that it is over ten years old. Virtual worlds are unstable environments. I am reminded of the ESRB’s (the American rating agency for computer games) universal boilerplate for these environments: “game experience may change during online play.” They probably mean somebody might swear, but there’s a deeper truth in it. Developer Brad McQuaid, godfather of EverQuest, was quoted in an interview 2007 interview with the New York Times summing this feature of online worlds:

“People ask me, ‘are you launching a finished game?’ and the answer is ‘no, we’re launching a game that is good enough to launch, but it’s not finished.’ And that’s why I love these games: because they should never be finished.”

This is as true for virtual worlds that are not “games”, Second Life as the prime exemplar, which still depends on new content over time – second life’s model is simply more “social” in the sense that the users provide this content.

Not only does the nature and population of a virtual space change from year to year, often it disappears entirely. Servers are expensive! MMORPG.com maintains one of the more complete lists of lost worlds. For those with dates, many did not last even a year. How do you designed a reproducible study in an environment that might not exist by the time your study is published? By the time your study is completed?

When the servers running a virtual world ultimately go down, by and large that world – and your access to it – ceases to be with no real record except memories and screenshots. There was a joint effor in 2010 between the Library of Congress, Sanford, and Champaign-Urbana to create archiving standards for Preserving Virtual Worlds. Ironically, almost nothing survives online of the project except the final report. While they established initial standards and methodologies for archiving virtual worlds, the report emphasized the continuing difficulties in doing this. Second Life was a major test case for the project, aiming to archive a single island from the game and while the methods developed “could potentially allow us to reinstantiate the island in another virtual environment platform, in practice our efforts can only be described as partially successful at best” (96).

I feel remiss that, in a blog called “socially speaking” with a computational linguistics joke up there in the banner, that I haven’t actually touched on any of the linguistics of social media. Let’s fix that:

A major field in the study of language is corpus linguistics. Its methodology revolves around the creation and use of large databases, called corpora, containing thousands if not millions of transcribed utterances and passages of written material. Copora are typically indexed down to the word and heavily encoded with metadata to allow researchers to search for subsets in the data that can be used to test a hypothesis about the use of language.

One of the largest handcrafted corpora is COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary America English. COCA was developed around 2008 by researches at Brigham Young University, and continues to grow. The size of COCA is only possible because of the volume of American English text available online — it was originally built with, of all things, Internet Explorer — but COCA doesn’t actually include any natively online content. The corpus was built as a retrospective, balanced, and American corpus. The corpus archives data from back to 1990, and splits the data in each year evenly between the five genres it includes. In 1990 there simply wasn’t enough internet communication to make up an equal percentage of the data, especially if you limited to American sources (if you could even tell), so it was declared out-of-scope for the project.

Still, the COCA is a behemoth.  It has 520 million words from sources spanning 25 years, divided evenly between transcribed speech, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. The corpus comprises some 190,000 texts in total. The use of the data is free to the public, you can check out their search interface here. For most of my linguistic training, it was one of the best — if not the best — English-language corpora.

Compare that to this Facebook corpus a group of researchers generated just for their own research. It comprises 700 million words in it contributed from 75,000 volunteers (15.4 million facebook status updates). They also got every volunteer to take a personality test. I can’t even.

They’ve published some neat visualizations for their data on the links between word use, personality, age, and gender. It brings new meaning to “word cloud.”The power in these corpora is how easily they can be produced, and how easily their contents can be statistically manipulated and compared. Researchers are not only distributing their data sets, they’re sharing the code they used to collect them!  (one such code release amusingly attempts to coin the term ‘tworpus’ for a twitter corpus)

Recently, my capstone course exposed to the concept of Enterprise Social Networking (ESN). Right now I’m elbow-deep in helping a local organization set up what you might traditionally call an intranet, except that intranet looks like something between Facebook and LinkedIn.

The idea is to harness the power of social media for collaboration, as well as the ability to make information in your company more explicit — I’d like to type ‘organization’ but for the most part these tools are corporate. This promotional video for Slack, a more messenger-styled enterprise social network, gives a good idea of the appeal and the promises of this type of platform. Slack also has a free option so you could try it out for yourself in a team. A classmate set up a Slack team for our SLAIS cohort attending ALA annual last year and it was an interesting tool, long before I was aware of the larger-scale corporate applications.

Our community partner in the capstone course is hoping their ESN will replace emails and phone calls for things like issue tracking for IT and facilities maintenance, frequently asked questions, and often obscure internal information like who speaks what language (or even who works where). The biggest challenge is that a social platform like this requires everyone to participate for those goals to work. If someone doesn’t keep their profile current on the ESN, you’ll still need to call them to find out what office they’re based out of now.  So far we’ve gotten good advice with how to address this by requiring use of the ESN in common workflows and making some resources (like company policy) only accessible through the ESN. Weather or not it takes hold (we’ve talked to organizations who reported several “false starts”) remains to be seen. People still routinely complain about coworkers who won’t use email!

I’ve just realized I’ve played a game about all this! Redshirt emphasizes the “enterprise” in enterprise social media is a fun little spoof of Star Trek, cronyism, and facebook. Now that I’ve learned a lot more about social intranets, the phrase “proprietary social network” in the trailer fills me with a lot more dread.

I think I picked the game up on one of those crazy Steam or GOG sales where everything is $4.99 and there is a timer counting down.

In class, while we were discussing collaborating in social media spaces, I saw one of those pastel-hued motivational phrases on a classmate’s laptop and it really resonated with me.

Of course this was one of those moments where you misread something because you only see it in the periphery of your vision. I’d gotten the text right, but missed the content. It was Safari’s connection error screen:

I still think there’s something worth thinking about in that phrase, taken out of context as it was. Put into the context of collaboration through the internet, to me it was a welcome reminder that

We talk so frequently about being plugged in (and consequently having to unplug) from the internet, technology, or what have you but it’s still figurative. Physically connecting to the internet — literally being plugged in — remains in the domain of cyberpunk. Just like the cloud is just somebody else’s computer, social media is just… somebody else.

I mentioned previously that I contributed to the tumblr of the Out on the Shelves Library for a feature called #webcomic wednesdays, and that feature resulted in a couple of creators donating copies of their books. Essentially, a fellow volunteer and I reviewed webcomics with queer content as a sort of reader’s advisory service and if we knew the author’s social media accounts, we tagged them as a sort of “hey, we like your stuff” courtesy.

The first time one of them messaged us saying they were going to drop by and donate a print edition of their comic, we freaked out in fangirl confusion and joy. Or maybe that was just me. I did happen to be the volunteer librarian on duty the day it happened and made up a couple of library cards for the writer and illustrator of the comic, and even checked out a book to one of them (all summarized in this tumblr exchange). So of course I immediately posted afterwards on facebook that “today I learned the internet is real place and shook the hands of two people that live there.” Behind Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and the comments section are real places and real people and if anything its them we’re connected to, not “the internet.”

A longtime friend whom I had originally met through MySpace immediately chided me that we had hung out on multiple occasions when he “comes from the internet,” too. Which in this framework is, I suppose, a reminder that people we’re connected to though our social media use are often (though I would think, not always) connected to us.

This blog will be the host for a few musings on social media use as an information professional.

I bought my first smartphone the same week I crossed into Canada to start my Masters of Library and Information Science. I had vague ambitious of chronicling my educational progress over social media for family and friends back home, and immediately signed up on Twitter. To date I us it to complain about transit and occasionally retweet interesting professional news. I think on the same day I signed up for an Instagram account that I have never used.

I’m most active on Facebook. I keep a relatively close social circle there, though my friend list passed Dunbar’s number, it remains fairly insular and consequently my annoyances at transit and transit passengers is most of my public social media persona except for a LinkedIn that I don’t really understand.

My one point of social media pride is through my volunteer involvement with Out On the Shelves Library, a (currently vagabond) queer library in Vancouver. Another volunteer and I started a series of queer webcomic reviews on the library’s Tumblr with the hastag #webcomicswednesdays. This project fell by the wayside when the library lost its permanent space, but while they ran they were fairly popular and even prompted two authors to donate their print editions of their comics to the library.