Weblogs, genres and individual differences

Weblogs, Genres, and Individual Differences Scott Nowson (S.Nowson@ed.ac.uk) School of Informatics; University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, UK Jon Oberlander (J.Oberlander@ed.ac.uk) School of Informatics; University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, UK Alastair J. Gill (A.Gill@ed.ac.uk) School of Informatics; University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, UK now being discussed as both a topic (Cohn, Mehl, & Pen- nebaker, 2004, Rosenbloom, 2004) and a tool for study (Mortensen and Walker, 2002). This paper discusses the place of blogs within a range of genres, and investigates some aspects of individual differences between writers. A corpus was gathered by asking authors of per- sonal weblogs—‘bloggers’—to complete a sociobio- graphic questionnaire and an on-line implementation of an IPIP Five Factor Personality Inventory (41 items scored from a 5 point scale, Buchanan, 2001). A cor- pus of text was created by asking each blogger to sub- mit text they had previously written, for a whole month preceding the date of the questionnaire. The month was specified so as to reduce the effects of subjects choosing their ‘best’ or ‘favourite’ month. The resulting corpus consisted of 71 subjects (24 males and 47 females), with ages ranging from 15-50 (mean 28.4). When all text con- sidered ‘personal,’ that which discussed individual con- cerns rather than general ones, was collected from the larger HTML files, it amounted to over 410,000 words. The rest of this paper is structured as follows. The next section discusses previous work on individual dif- ferences in language production, following Dewaele and Furnham. It then introduces a unitary measure of a text’s formality (as opposed to contextuality): the F- measure, due to Heylighen and Dewaele. The section following this considers blogs as a genre, using the F- measure to compare the corpus with sub-corpora from the British National Corpus. The paper then turns to the impact of individual differences between writ- ers on their texts’ contextuality/formality. The paper concludes by considering which dimensions of individual variation are most worthy of further study. Abstract Blogs are personal online diaries, and a relatively recent form of computer-mediated communication. What kind of writing do they contain? This paper adopts a measure of linguistic contextuality/formality, due to Heylighen and Dewaele, and applies it to a corpus of weblogs. It first compares the corpus with sub-corpora from the British National Corpus, and weblogs are shown to be more formal than e-mail, but less formal than biogra- phies. Then, the paper explores the impact of individ- ual differences between writers on their texts’ contextu- ality/formality. It appears that Extraversion and Neu- roticism are less influential than previously supposed, and it is argued that gender and Agreeableness account for more of the variability in the extent to which weblog writers take their readers’ contexts into account. Blog It All 27% of internet users read weblogs, but 62% still don’t know what they are. This is in spite of the fact that an estimated 8 million weblogs have been created in the US alone (Rainie, 2005). A weblog is a frequently updated website which contains news and views on a variety of topics, from politics to gossip. Weblogs are already be- ing seen as a powerful news-gathering medium (Belo, 2004). The term ‘blog’ is more widely used, and is most commonly used to refer to the sub-category of online personal diaries. Mirriam-Webster named ‘blog’ as their Word of the Year 2004. The internet is increasingly considered as a resource for linguistic study (Keller, Lapata and Ourioupina, 2002; Volk, 2001), and a number of studies have focused on the nature of various types of computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as asynchronous e-mail and synchronous chat. A key reason for studying these gen- res is to determine how they differ from non-computer- mediated analogues. In addition, however, CMC has the great virtue that it can make available large amounts of naturalistic language use, at relatively low cost; in par- ticular, transcription costs are small compared to those associated with spontaneous speech. As a result, CMC environments offers an excellent arena in which to study the projection and perception of individual differences (Hancock and Dunham, 2001; Markey and Wells, 2002; Gill and Oberlander, 2002, 2003). To date, however, rel- atively little work has considered blogs though they are Background Extraversion and Neuroticism are the two dimensions of variation which are common to the two major trait theories of personality: Costa and McCrae’s five factor model (Costa and McCrae, 1992); and the three factor model of Eysenck (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1991). Level of Extraversion is associated with how outgoing and as- sertive a person is; level of Neuroticism is associated with how anxious, self-conscious and temperamental a person tends to be (Matthews, Deary and Whiteman,