Colloquium - Graham M. Jones
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Linguistic Anthropology in the Age of Big Data: Mixed-Methods Lessons from Digital Ethnography of #UFOTwitter
Graham M. Jones, MIT Anthropology
This talk outlines a mixed-methods framework for analyzing digital language through a study of #UFOTwitter, an online network of UFO investigators. Combining ethnographic interpretation, syntactic analysis, and corpus linguistics, our team found that tweets marked as hearsay attract far greater engagement than assertions of certainty—a pattern we call the strength of weak evidence. I describe how theoretical sampling, quantitative–qualitative integration, and team-based collaboration enabled this finding, proposing “evidential sociability” as a lens for understanding how digital publics form through the circulation of contested knowledge.
Bio: Graham M. Jones is Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Author of Trade of the Tricks (2011) and Magic’s Reason (2017), he studies how people communicate knowledge, negotiating relationships based on what they do—and don’t—know.
ZOOM link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/85725412380