Postdoctoral fellowship in the sociolinguistics of online communication

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My ESRC postdoctoral fellowship will have six aims.The first aim is to undertake additional research based on my PhD work. Specifically, my doctoral research led to the finding that sentences that contain emojis can convey more meaning than sentences that just use words. However, this topic was not directly relevant to my PhD research, and thus I could not explore it further at that point in time. During my fellowship, I will revisit the topic as I have the data to discover new and valuable findings about the role of emojis in human communication.Moreover, as emojis are becoming more and more prominent on social media and other websites, my work on the meaning of emojis could potentially be interesting to technology users and technology experts. Specifically, my research could change the way people understand emojis and also influence the work of technology experts who design emojis. Therefore, one of the primary aims of my fellowship will be to seek opportunities to communicate my research findings to members of the public and those working in the technology industry.Thirdly, I wish to publish three articles in leading academic journals in order to share my innovative findings with other academics who can benefit from and build on my work. Based on the research I completed during my PhD studies, I have two clear ideas for journal articles that I can realistically write and submit for consideration during my fellowship. The first, which I will submit to 'Journal of Sociolinguistics' by November 2021, will introduce to my fellow linguists a method for identifying the people who invent words online and also the people who circulate those terms to the wider online community. The second article, which I will submit to 'Language in Society' by January 2022, will introduce and model novel indicators that can be used to identify the social characteristics of online community members who introduce and circulate new terms. Towards the end of my fellowship, I will also write and submit a third article based on my additional research into the role of emojis in online communication described above. Fourthly, during my fellowship, I will apply for research grants which, if successful, will allow me to embark on an ambitious new research project that will have a demonstrable effect on society following the conclusion of my twelve-month fellowship. Specifically, I will spend time during my fellowship writing proposals for an ESRC New Investigator Grant and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship grant. Moreover, my future research would benefit greatly if I had a more thorough understanding of Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is a subfield of linguistics that is concerned with using computers to analyse large amounts of language data. I have many of the fundamental skills required to understand this topic, but the fifth aim of my fellowship will be to undertake online training to expand my knowledge to a more advanced level. My final aim is to develop an educational programme aimed at GCSE and A-Level students. This programme, which will be structured around key findings from my doctoral research, will allow young people the opportunity to undertake their own mini-research project centred on online language creativity. The programme, which will be specifically targeted at students from demographics currently underrepresented at Russell Group universities such as working class-males and students from minority ethnic groups, would also encourage young people to consider attending university after finishing school/college and highlight the advantages of studying linguistics at university level.