Have you ever wondered what meaning is intended when sOMEONE SWITCHES TO ALL CAPS IN THE MIDDLE OF A SENTENCE?

By: Scout Sojak
Course: Language and Digital Media (Ling 3800)
Advisor: Prof. Kira Hall
LURA 2020

Have you ever wondered what meaning is intended when sOMEONE SWITCHES TO ALL CAPS IN THE MIDDLE OF A SENTENCE? Or if one word in their sentence is rendered in a completely different font? Over the course of the internet’s history, as its bounds began to widen and community identities began to deepen, this practice emerged particularly in comedic or humorous messages among forums and blogging communities. One characterized by the blending of disparate typographical elements at the post or sentence level: mashing together bold type, italics, fonts, size, symbol characters, and sometimes even color. This typographical dialect, if we might call it that, has existed for almost as long as people have used computer-mediated communication. However, it is far more common now than it has been before, particularly on platforms that afford either a rich text editor with a wide range of options, or access to plain HTML formatting. 

In this project, developed for Prof. Kira Hall’s course on “Language and Digital Media,” I set out to provide evidence for recent theories of graphic ideology and font choice, with some pre-existing research into the practices of textual paralanguage (things like tone of voice, speed, and rhythm of speech as well as facial expression or gestures) in marketing contexts. To go about this, I conducted observational research and some corpora analysis of the ways that the affordance of rich text selection is integrated on the micro-blogging platform, Tumblr. If you’re unfamiliar with micro-blogging platforms like Tumblr; blogs can be curated around a particular topic, but often are simply a collection of content that appeals to the blog-owner that can include text, images, audio and video files, making Tumblr a highly visual medium. The built-in text interface comes with a selection of four main fonts: Times New Roman (TNR), Arial, Courier New (typewriter), and one stylized to look like Cursive.

I’ve been a regular user of Tumblr since September of 2012, and I used the archive of my own blog to gather the majority of the data that I examined for my project. I also collected some posts during the course of the project either from other researchers in the class or from existing academic research on textual variation on Tumblr compiled by Heather Grant for her master’s dissertation in 2015, which was a massive help. Initially, I restricted my searches to posts that exclusively featured text, and flagged instances where multiple fonts were used or where there was an element of typological variation. Later, I broadened the scope of my search to include all post-types to accommodate for the emergence of codes of stancetaking or remediation. 

By the time I finished combing through all of my samples, a number of codes (in qualitative research; organizational themes) had emerged in the data. I found most of the marked instances of typographical formatting used to achieve things like simulated tone of voice and stancetaking. In other words, users rely on changes in visual rendering to either iconically represent shifts in volume and emphasis that would be heard in hypothetical face-to-face conversation or imply things like opinion or group membership. For example, many selections of the data use either a font shift, or change size and line weight as a visual resemblance for someone speaking louder or more forcefully. In a few examples, the cursive font is used to emphasize vulgar or romantic phrases for comedic effect to flout the cultural stereotype of cursive being romantic or elegant. Likewise, other combinations of font and typographical shifts are utilized to render slowed down deliberate speech, wavering sarcastic affect, differences in narration vs. recorded speech, or even sound effects. 

Overall, this research provides an exploration into the relationship between the affordance of rich text formatting and graphical ideologies by demonstrating how typographical elements can indeed be used to model visual simulations of paralinguistic practices like tone and stancetaking. In the future, I hope this project leads to more discussion about the ways that graphic ideologies are enacted in computer-mediated contexts. As more and more generations are becoming socialized and building community on the internet, it would be fascinating to document the shifting relationship of graphical ideology and computer-mediated speech.