"Martin och tiden" är i afton inställt på grund av tidsbrist...

I stället ett par snabba länkar:
Jag har nyss upptäckt språkbloggen Språkbloggen, skapad av en viss Andreas Widoff. Tyvärr är senaste inlägget mer än ett år gammalt, men även om det inte blir mer tycks han ha hunnit skriva en hel del intressant. Jag har visserligen bara hunnit läsa lite grann ännu, men det jag såg såg bra ut . När jag hinner ska jag absolut läsa mer. Andreas verkar vara en duktig person som torde gå långt och så vidare... Nu skriver han tydligen masteruppsats om wikier och gjorde en presentation på Forum för textforskning i somras (som jag missade - hela forumet alltså) där han tycks ha rett ut begreppen bra mycket bättre än jag lyckats med så här långt.

Och förbannat snygg är Språkbloggen-sidan också, och där finns också länkar till ett antal andra språkbloggar och andra sajter med språkanknytning. Bland bloggarna finns Lingvistbloggen, knuten till Institutionen för lingvistik på Stockholms universitet, mycket trevlig att följa om man är lagd åt det (språkliga) hållet, till skillnad från Språkbloggen i högsta grad aktiv och den andra av de två bloggar jag täkte länka till. Här är ett roligt inlägg att börja med.

Again (warning! Swedish link!) I find myself having relatively little time to meet this "exactly one post per week, with Monday as the starting day" requirement that I've set up for myself, and also being relatively tired and uninspired (but not too unhappy, I should add). I turn to the same binder which I turned to in the post linked to above, where I've collected some creative works of mine, and pick the first English text not already on the blog.

Ehum... I wonder if I ever gave this a title, by the way? And was there supposed to be a tune to it?

Whatever is said in latin sounds profound
so I say "carpe diem"
and hope you'll be impressed
Whatever is said in latin must be true
so I hope you will believe me
when I tell you that you're beautiful
Whatever is said in latin sounds profound and beautiful
so when I proclaim my love for you
perhaps it will be requited
and you may answer that you love me too
in whatever language you would choose.

It's not something I've said many words about  (there's a mention of it, sort of, here, and there may be something about it here) on this blog before now, but I have this idea that I'm going to do research about Wikipedia. Something sociolinguistic/pragmatic/text...y. If I get a job in Gent, Belgium, which I've applied for (quite possible though still far from sure, though I'll probably know more in a few days), that is what I would be doing when I would not be teaching Swedish as a foreign language and checking the language in various documents. Also, all of this autumn I've been meaning to start on an article for some sort of academic publication. My teacher in a course on "Text Theory and Text Analysis", Per Holmberg, actually suggested that this might be a good idea after I'd turned in my analysis of Swedish Wikipedia's article on "Göteborgskravallerna" ("the Gothenburg Riots", see also Protests during the EU summit in Gothenburg 2001 on English Wikipedia). He also offered me some help, but unfortunately it turned out that he got busier with other things than he had thought he would be and couldn't spare as much of his time as he had hoped. I'm still very grateful to Per for being a great teacher on "the text course", for encouraging me to try to publish something and that help with that he has actually given me both before and after getting "actually too busy", and for introducing me to Erik Boström, a librarian and historian of ideas who is actually already doing interesting wiki-related research at the Department of Swedish Language here in Gothenburg. Erik has been very helpful and always has very interesting things to say, and it would probably have been smart to try to have closer contact with him than we've had.

 

Anyhow... There's no article thus far. There's the original analysis of the article on the "Gothenburg riots", a research plan originally written when I applied for a job in Linköping but which I also sent to Gent, and some methodology notes that were cut out of the final version of that document (keyword is notes, very elliptical). All in Swedish. Those are the things I've put on the web because I thought/hoped some people, primarily Wikipedians, might be interested. And then there's my little ongoing project on my user page on Swedish Wikipedia, a Wikipedia bibliography. And 1, 2, 3 little recommendations on this blog about things to read for fun on English Wikipedia. And now this post, meant to be my return to working actively on getting something together for publication... which I guess it can still be, even though I think I'll let this little summary of what I've done so far be enough this week save actually discussing Wikipedia and wikis, what kind of research one might want to do on them and so on, to another week. Not on the web for now are the things I cut out from the "riot analysis". (It may be surprising to those who have seen how long that is that things have been cut from it, but that is the case.) And that's about it with things I've written about wikis and Wikipedia - so far. As should already be apparent, I hope to be returning to the subject shortly.

Now to finish with a little list of non-writing things that I've done related to the Wikipedia thing: Applied for two jobs - one of which I may still get - where I've hoped to be allowed to do my Wikipedia research; read stuff, much of which is listed in the Wikipedia bibliography linked to above; been to this conference and this one; done a wee bit of editing on Wikipedia and also on Wiktionary while keeping up some illusion that it's "work"... sort of. Right?

This is Elbot. Elbot fooled 3 out of 12 judges in the 2008 Loebner Prize contest. There are articles about it all over. This one, for example. At least two Swedish sources seem to make the claim, or at least imply, that this is a better result than any robot has gotten in a Turing test, at least while competing for the Loebner Prize. It seems pretty clear looking at the different articles that there has been no better result, but I'm having some trouble finding sources for Elbot being the first to manage 3 in 12. So I won't say that, but I do think that's how it is.

If that wasn't clear, you can chat with Elbot here. It's sort of fun.

I promised I'd make an English translation of the abstract of my role-playing paper - and here it is! It was quite fun, at not entirely as difficult as I'd imagined. I still don't really have a translation of "kombinerad c- och d-uppsats i Svenska språket", so I'll just have to try and explain... It's an undergraduate level paper... a pretty big one. It counts as two papers, actually. It started as my obligatory "special study" on a level one step down I won't even bother to search for an English/American equivalent of. The project grew a bit larger than was originally intended, and I eventually got the offer to also let it count as my "special study" on the so called "D" or - officially - "advanced" level (and the advanced thing is actually an internationally recognized designation, thanks to the Bologna process) - what would sort of be my exam paper if I decided to get either a Master's degree or the old Swedish "magisterexamen" (which is sort of the same but just almost). (I haven't actually got either yet, though I qualify for the "magisterexamen" and I'll apply for it when I get around to it... it'd probably be a good thing if that was sooner rather than later.) "Svenska språket" is the study field, "Swedish language". Now, the abstract:
 

Role-Playing Games as Language Games – A study of language use in a tabletop role-playing game

 

Abstract

 

In tabletop role-playing games, or simply role-playing games, one creates a fictive world using language and acts in this world. The participants take on the role of one character each and describe what these characters do. One participant, the gamemaster, instead describes what the characters see and what happens around them, and plays the roles of persons they meet. The purpose of this paper is to describe how role-playing games work from a language perspective, focusing on how the participants collaboratively build a fictive world and how they later act in this world, and also on how the role-players avoid misunderstandings involving the domains of reality and fiction and how these are ”held apart” in the conversation. This purpose is achieved by an analysis of a recording of a role-playing session.

A chronological description of the session, with special focus on the first part, shows how the session can be divided into different phases, and how the gamemaster moves ”the plot” forward in a way reminiscent of a book or a film. This chronological description also gives a clear image of how the gamemaster and the players build the world of the game together and act in it through the characters. As in other kinds of oral fiction-creating, utterances which describe the fictive world also create it. However, for additions brought in to the fiction to become a part of the shared image of the game world, they need to be accepted by the other partcipants, and the conversation can be described as a negotiation about what description of the game world is to be regarded as ”true”. Decisive for this acceptance is that an utterance follows the formal and informal rules of the role-playing game. The game's most basic structure is that of the gamemaster's descriptions of environments and events being followed by the players' descriptions of what their characters do. Often, however, various kinds of questions and the answers to these can be as important a part of the game. Jokes and out-of-character (and seemingly non-game related) discussions can also have an impact on the construction of the game world. An interesting part of the game is dialogues, where players and gamemaster directly take on the roles of the game-world characters and say what they say, rather than primarily describing their actions.

Reality and fiction is primarily kept apart (and misunderstandings avoided) by letting only one domain,at a time, the game world or our reality, function as the ground for the conversation (to be where the conversation ”is” in some sense). With a term borrowed from Sven Strömqvist's Make-Believe through Words (1984) it becomes the background domain. Ambiguous expressions are by default assumed to refer to something in the background domain. This, for example, is true of personal pronouns as jag (I) and du (you, sing.), since these are used to refer to the player characters. Switching between the domains can be done in many ways and for different reasons, often analogous to shifting between various topics in a ”normal” conversation. Questions such as which is the current background domain, or whether a particular expression has its referent outside the background domain, can often be decided by assessing what is meaningful and reasonable, or with the help of the strong intralinguistic cohesion maintained throughout the game. Various kinds of more or less explicit ”domain markers” also play a part, as do the typical structures found in many of the ”game utterances”. Combined with an avoidance of ”returning to reality” once the game world has been taken as background domain, these factors make misunderstandings rare. When they do arise, repair strategies are available, and the problems are quickly solved.

In the discussion at the end of the paper, a comparison with other kinds of ”fiction creation”, like writing and reading of novels and storytelling, is made. One important point is the social element present also in these contexts. Communication of all kinds, indeed, can often be said to create a parallell world and, as in the role-playing game, a negotiation on how this world is to be described is needed. This also is discussed at the end of the paper, along with questions about how much in the language and language use of role-playing games that can be said to be ”unique”, and also how much is predictable given the basic premises of role-playing games.
 

Keywords: role-playing games, conversation analysis, pragmatics
 
Link to the full paper (in Swedish).
 
Now just one thing remains... Nothing above is really news to those of my readers who know Swedish (which I still suspect is all my readers), at least not if they checked in two weeks ago. Thinking of this I've promised a bonus of some sort. Let's see... I can't imagine that Bernardo Borgeson minds that I link to this nice short film.

Ok, that wraps it up I guess. See you in a week!

Where to begin...

The seminar (back on Thursday June 16) went well. The folks at the institution (Svenska språket, University of Gothenburg... which would be ”The Swedish Language”, but I don't think that's the official English name) seem genuinely interested in my paper on language use in tabletop role-playing games. I won't go into details on the paper in this post – it will eventually be on the institution's web site and then I'll post a link and an English summary here. I got the highest grade (of two, or three counting ”fail”), though it may have been a bit of a close shave. They liked a lot of things in the paper content-wise, but not so much certain things about the structure and language. Still, I'd certainly rather have it that way than the other way around – and of course I'm very happy about the grade. That counts for two courses and the equivalent of one whole semester of studies in itself, and could have been decisive for my ”total” grades for two different semesters (though at least one of them would have been the same with a simple ”pass” here). The ”two courses” thing is because the project got a little bigger than was the plan when it was begun – in 2005! - and somewhere along the way I got the offer to do a little polishing and have it count as two papers (on two different ”levels”). 2005... There are things about the circumstances when I began to work on the paper that I have trouble recalling now. And then, for four years, the thing's been with me during everything else that's happened. (I've done a few other things than work on the paper.) It feels good now, if a bit odd, to have it finished. Or almost finished – I'm still working on a few little things for the version that will be archived and put online.

I have this plan to be a researcher and get a PhD. I've even put in my first application for a job as a graduate student. (I don't know exactly how this compares to other countries, but in Sweden these days the places in graduate school are jobs (with pay, which is nice of course) and not necessarily very easy to get into.) The application was even put in before the seminar (so that, technically, I was quite a bit away from being formally qualified), which was not something I had planned. It was, however, necessary if I was to apply for these two particular posts (at the University of Linköping), and the same person who first suggested I apply thought I might as well at least ask if it was ok to apply and then send the grades for my paper later... With some hesitation, I was told it was. So now Linköping is waiting – holding their breath, no doubt – for that, and the final version of my paper, and an outline for the research project which would then eventually be the basis for my doctoral thesis – which would be a study, or rather several linked studies, of Wikipedia. (Mainly text- and discourse analysis, but there are also some things I'm interested in that fall outside of that.) Anyway, the part of the application I could send did get to Linköping on time, and I've got an official note telling me that it did and that I'm competing with 42 other people about the two positions, which will be given to two happy people probably in October. So that's good, I guess.

What I am very happy with is that I feel I'm taken seriously about this here ”at home”, in Gothenburg. And they're telling me to write articles, both on role-playing games and on Wikipedia, and offering me some help with that. This, of course, I'll try to do – getting published would be both seriously cool and – from a somewhat more crass perspective – not hurtful to my CV.

Yes... With the paper done, I can get an ”old” Swedish ”Filosofie magister”-exam, which I'll do. I lack some things, I'm not sure at the moment how much, for the ”international” Master exam, and I'll look into working on that come autumn. It's possible that would look a bit better, and also there's at least one course I'd read for that which I think I could learn a lot of useful things from. (Scientific writing.)

Can't write much more now for lack of time, but I got the important news about my academic life in, I think. In other news: Birthday coming up (July 8). Work coming up a bit closer than that, a bit more than an hour from now. I have not been at work since Monday, and that was three hours, so I'm a bit like... but I was having such a great time not working! But it'll be ok, I guess. Ok, bye now.