Lindsay Blackwell LING 375 October 7, 2009

Proposal

I would like to explore the structure of narratives in blogs as compared to their structure in instant messaging by looking at sequence, backstory, the retelling of another narrative, and how context varies by social context. To analyze this, I will first collect a data set. I will ask four volunteers who log their online conversations, two males and two males, to send me a sample of their instant messages. I will also collect samples of narratives from four different blogs, two with female authors and two with male authors. My analysis will be qualitative rather than quantitative; I will physically hunt through my narrative samples and examine the sequence of certain elements in a blog narrative versus an instant messaging narrative. I will also look at the way backstory is or is not implemented in a narrative told with both registers, the way a blogger retells another story that is not the author's own versus how an instant messaging user handles the same, and how the context of a narrative varies by context, gender, and audience. I will also examine the way that a narrative is opened and closed on a blog versus in an instant message; part of my analysis of this particular facet of storytelling will include surveying my instant messaging participants on what they think the "rules" for opening and closing a story are. Sample questions: "How do you indicate to your IM partner that you are starting a story? How does your IM partner know when your story ends? Because a blog is a chunk of text directed at a wide audience which is then commented upon by a series of commenters, the conversational dynamic is quite different than on instant messaging, where two interlocutors are in real-time conversation with each other. Because instant messaging involves two parties, it will also be interesting to examine how an IM user backchannels to show to the storyteller that he or she is "listening." I will also survey my IM participants to see how they show that they are "listening" online, and whether or not the absence of a response from

their IM partner would affect how they tell a story. I will also look at how turn-taking occurs during a narrative on instant messaging. Back-channeling and turn-taking are not applicable to a narrative told on a blog because the author of a blog is presenting a text for the later review of his or her peers; there is no real-time conversing during the actual telling of a story. However, I will examine the comment threads on my chosen blogs to see if there is any evidence of turn-taking or back-channeling (or perhaps further storytelling) on the comments. I have very little experience with qualitative analysis, and thus I will be using Barbara Johnstone's book Qualitative Methods in Sociolinguistics to help me better analyze my chosen narratives. I will also be using various journal articles on narrative analysis to help me examine various features of my data and to help me recognize patterns and important similarities and differences in the way a story is told on a blog versus in an instant message conversation.