Digital Articulation: Examining Text-Based Linguistic Performances in Mobile Communication Through Keystroke-Logging Analysis

Abstract

This study examines how text-based mobile communication practices are performatively constructed as individuals compose messages key-by-key on virtual keyboards, and how these synchronous performances (Mobile interface theory: embodied space and locative media. New York, NY: Routledge) reflect the iterative process of constructing and maintaining interpersonal relationships. In doing so, this study reports on keystroke-logging analysis (see Writ. Commun. 30, 358–392) in order to observe how participants (N = 10) composed text as part of everyday mobile communication for the period of one week, subsequently producing 179,996 individual keystroke log-file records. Participants used LogKey, a virtual keyboard application made exclusively for this study to run on the Android mobile operating system. Analysis of keystroke log-file data suggest that timing processes of composing text-messages may differ as participants messaged with different categories of interlocutors, composed on different communication applications, and composed paralinguistic features—such as variants of Lol and Haha Thurlow and Brown, (Discourse Anal. Online, 2003, 1, 1); Tagg, (Discourse of text messaging. 2012, Bloomsbury, UK)—at different turn-taking positions. This evidence suggests that keystroke-logging methods may contribute to understanding of how individuals manage interpersonal relationships in real-time (Please reply! the replying norm in adolescent SMS communication,” in The inside text: social, cultural and design perspectives on SMS. (Norwell, MA: Springer), 53–73); (Beyond genre: closings and relational work in texting,” in Digital discourse: language in the new media. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 67–85), and suggests future direction for methodologically studying linguistic performances as part of text-based mobile communication.

Modeling Mobile Writing: Applying Sociocognitive Models of Writing to Mobile Contexts

“…Ruby may have felt compelled to respond quickly to Desmond’s message, which required accessing LTM, but also required more significant monitoring and reconceptualizing their text in order to do the work of both responding to Desmond’s message and maintaining their relationship. This is perhaps why, after starting and restarting the message, Ruby inserted “Hahah” into the start of the message, as this orthographic transcription of laughter may have been intended to signal to Desmond that they valued their relationship and desired to maintain face (Ling & Yttri, 2001; Schneier, 2021; Thurlow & Brown, 2003). Regardless, the compositional processes involved in each of these messages appeared highly dependent on the immediate social context (e.g., to plan an event with a friend) and motivations for potential social contexts (to maintain and advance intimacy with a friend).…”

“…Combining interviews and textual analysis is fairly common for studies in mobile communication (see Frith, 2014; Ling & Yttri, 2001; Swarts, 2016) in order to gain insights into the social meaning of specific practices. While keystroke-logging analysis on mobile devices is relatively understudied (Schneier, 2021; Schneier & Kudenov, 2018), this method has two key benefits: First, keystroke logging constructs a chronological record of all keyboard-based actions during writing, which reconstructs how texts were synchronously produced (Leijten & Van Waes, 2013). In doing so, it is possible to extrapolate about the interplay between social, psychomotor, and cognitive processes during writing (Galbraith & Baaijen, 2019; Leijten et al, 2014).…”

“…Through Brown and Levinson's framework, the very act of sending a message may be interpreted as a face-threatening act since it imposes action on the receiver (i.e., a response). Choosing if and when to respond to messages may therefore have to do with relative power (Bremner, 2006) and social distance (Spilioti, 2011), and a variety of strategies may be used in the message to mitigate face threats (Schneier, 2021;Spilioti, 2011). This may be seen in Ruby's message to Hanna, where Ruby appeared to purposefully wait 3 hours to then offer an apology regarding an apparent offense from the previous evening.…”

Extraction of transforming sequences and sentence histories from writing process data: a first step towards linguistic modeling of writing

“…They show that typing patterns can be seen as a proxy for shallow syntactic parsing of the final product on the word level and can be used to improve performance of such parsers. Schneier (2020) examines the production of discourse elements in social media contexts to understand from a linguistic point of view how individuals compose texts to achieve their communicative goals. They explore keystroke-logging data by focusing on the production of paralinguistic variables in text messaging.…”