When smartphone users in Germany pick up their mobiles, they use them mostly for chatting. Katharina König and Marcel Fladrich are researching into how users communicate with one another via WhatsApp & Co.
"You missed something yesterday. Tim fell in our pool!" "Now really @Tim?- Thought you didn't want to drink anything"? "Haha tim :D" What sounds like banal chit-chat among a group of young people about what happened at a party is of great interest to linguists at the Institute of German Language and Literature at the University of Münster. By examining such chats, for example, Dr. Katharina König found out that users are inadvertently made figures of fun and that emojis play a decisive role in distinguishing between the processes of laughing with or laughing at someone. How and why do we use messaging services such as Facebook, WhatsApp and so on? For linguists, these services represent highly interesting source material for studies. For this reason, and in collaboration with the University of Duisburg-Essen and the University of Hamburg, the experts at Münster University have developed the 'Mobile Communication Database' or MoCoDa for short. The database archives chats from a variety of messaging services and makes them available for research and teaching at universities. The uploading process is simple: anyone can upload his or her chats anytime via the MoCoDa website, which has been online since 2017.
TO READ THIS ARTICLE, CREATE YOUR ACCOUNT
And extend your reading, free of charge and with no commitment.
Your Benefits
- Access to all content
- Receive newsmails for news and jobs
- Post ads
