 Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities have a specialised research project. So if you're registered anywhere in Arts and Sciences, it's two courses you can have. Mapping for Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities, and Data Visualisation for Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities. And then we're running the seminar, Conflict Urbanism, which is a four-year sequence each time collaborating with someone else in the head. Since time ago, it's been fun with Lydia Lou, who is working on this project, Language Justice. Conflict Urbanism, as I've told you, you're very familiar with the topic of conflict. And even though the last semester, our seminar was called Conflict Urbanism in Lapo, the project has not only gotten more, but about the everyday conflicts that emerge in cities because of globalisation, immorality, migration, political structures such as post-partite South Africa and pre-partite South Africa. And so, do you want to talk a little bit about Language Justice? Yeah, just a few words. And you can look at it like if you go to the Centre for Spatial Research, which this grant helped establish, and just search the term Conflict Urbanism, you'll find all the work from last semester, and also all the tutorials. Open to the public. Just a few words. Welcome. And you flew all the way from Cape Town. She couldn't. Is it the end for you? No, it isn't. Welcome from Amsterdam. This is a rare occasion when we get to hear from someone from a scholar from South Africa. This is, as Laura said, this is a lecture series that goes with our course, a seminar that we jointly conduct. The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, which I direct, received a different grant, also a melon grant, to support a seminar that we're going to pick up in the fall of this year. This is a very new project that emphasizes the need to pay attention to the problem of English monolinguism, and its connection with globalization. We are very interested in questions of linguistic diversity that are closely linked with questions of biodiversity. And we're also very much interested in the digital technology and its connection with all of these issues, having to do with conflict organism, the immigrant communities, refugee populations, and things like that, as you can see how urgent these issues are. So, Michelle, do you want to answer your questions? As both Laura and Lydia mentioned, this is a highly interdisciplinary seminar and course and all of this. And because of that, it's with special excitement that I have the honor to welcome Dr. Anna Doemmer to the conflict urbanism of the Justice seminar. Anna is a professor at the University of Cape Town and is one of the leading researchers of the sociolinguistics of computer-mediated communication. Her work in globalization, mobile communication, and multilingualism brings together the themes of the seminar and situates it very much in a multilingual and multicultural world. So, while her work is often considered sociolinguistics, it also spans anthropology and sociology and economics and much, much more. And there are a few researchers I know who tie these themes together, as seamlessly as Anna does. So, the title of the seminar tonight is Together We Can Create a Freer Future, Digital Language Activism, Challenging and Reproducing Hadronomies. And please join me in welcoming Dr. Doemmer. So, first of all, I would like to thank you all, and especially you, for coming and for inviting me to speak here. It is my first time in New York, and I really wish I could have come under different and happier political circumstances. Yet it is particularly apt under these circumstances to speak about language justice, activism and digital media, a potent combination when it comes to resistance to politics. The title of my talk comes from a digital activism project. The Runa Simipi project, which aimed to create open software in Keshara, a South American language. The project's manifesto is keenly aware of the fact that multilingualism in new media contexts entails not only functional expansion, in this case the development of software as well as associated terminologies, but also transforms the ideological valuation of a language. Diverse languages emerge as part of the contemporary world and is relevant for the future. And this move towards digital multilingualism is positioned as politically transformative. The manifesto states, the very act of using Keshara puts something happening. How did that happen? This is very strange. Okay, this is art. This is digital. This is visual art. This is part of the manifesto. I can send you my slides, which have the full manifesto. I'm going to just hope that Mac doesn't decide to delete things suddenly. I was just wondering if everybody's looking kind of strangely at the slides. Okay, I'll read the important part. Do you have a resolution? It actually is on this one as well, so maybe like we may just try if I can get it out. And just start because here it's there. Slide show, place where I'll start. And now it's there. That seems to be doing these things. The important part here is the very act of using Keshara software is a political statement. Together we can create a free of interest. This is where the title comes from. In 2012 the initiative was taken up by Mozilla, who partnered with the project to translate the web browser Firefox into Keshara. Fast forward five years. Mozilla is still not translated into Keshara. Or rather it is, as is the case for many languages online, partially translated. I hope you can see it there. A few words have been localized. Images, the one word, settings, the other word. All the other words remain in English. For those wishing to access digital media in a non-dominant language, this kind of partial translation is a well-known experience. A visually arrested interface, trade traces of activity and activism, but remaining quite far removed from the desire for full localization. And if you just want to have this experience yourself, go to your Facebook profile and put it into Keshara. It's in Pasa or it's in Zulu. And you will see exactly this kind of partial experience in multiple ways. Always mixed up with lots of English. At the end of 2016, so just a short while ago, Mozilla started a new initiative to translate the interface into Keshara. And things might be changing, which is one of the things about the digital space, or there might not be changing since then. Keeping this example in mind, the core question I wish to explore the next 40 or so minutes is, can digital technology, its historical bias notwithstanding, become a tool for the political empowerment of the speakers and writers of hitherto marginalized languages? In answering this question, I want to take a closer look at everyday university practices online, as well as the various types of social linguistic activism that help speakers and writers to claim, that is to stake out visibility for their languages and ways of speaking in the global arena. In the final section of the paper, I will look at a specific example, which talks more directly to the focus of the broader lecture series, how urban spaces and their ways of speaking can leave traces online, not only across space, but also across time. An important concept when thinking about language online is visibility and its counterpart is invisibility. Writing, which is core to digital language engagement, makes languages not only hearable or present, but grants them a form of much reality and thus to its language into visual culture. And in understanding invisibilities and invisibilities, I further draw on Nancy Fraser's work on the politics of recognition, of social culture and linguistic resources, identities and beings, and the politics of redistribution of economic resources. Fraser sees recognition and redistribution as a duality, a dialectic. There can be no recognition without redistribution and vice versa. Both recognition and redistribution are vital for full social participation, for overcoming subordination, and thus also for visibility online. The connection to questions of maldistribution and redistribution to the political economy of the communication helps us to develop what Adele Heinz envisaged as the goal of the ethnography of speaking. In the 1970s, that is, and this is how he formulated the goal of the work of social and linguistic anthropologists, to understand the origins and foundations of inequality between speakers. A similar line of thinking was pursued by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu when he argued that it is not enough for linguists to merely study the human ability to speak and communicate, rather than quote him, an adequate science of discourse must establish the laws which determine who, the factor when the juror, may speak to who and how. And in communication studies, Vincent Bosco has argued that all communication, all sign making, all symbiotic activity is economically structured and that people have to use physical resources to engage in such activities. That's what a talk is never cheap. It is especially costly when it comes to digital media. Participation and recognition depend directly on having access to and being able to purchase hardware, software and data. And this ability of access in the digital media is unequally distributed among people. The inequality of access to digital artefacts has been referred to as the digital divide or more accurately as digital social inequalities. The term which emphasises the interlinking of global social inequities and digital access. In the first instance, digital access is a function of economic prosperity. Wealthier countries show higher levels of technology access. poorer countries show lower levels. The pattern is similar with in-countries. Individuals with higher incomes have more access than those with lower incomes. Access is further structured according to variables such as age, education, disability, language, rural and urban residents as well as race and ethnicity. In addition, general literacy skills, computer literacy skills as well as opportunities to practice these skills are important for using the technology successfully. These carriers are important when considering the techno-utopia rhetoric of scholars such as Henry Jenkins, who has argued that a new participatory media culture emerged online, characterised by low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement. From a global perspective, we need to ask, low barriers? For whom? Who is able to speak and write online? Who participates in the new participatory culture? The International Communications Union noted in the conclusion to the 2016 annual report that at this point in time the internet is both pervasive and absent. Can I just read out this quote? People no longer go online, they are online. An increasingly ubiquitous open, faster content which internet has changed the way many people live, communicate through business. Yet, many people are still not using the internet and many users do not fully benefit from its potential. We thus live in contradictory times in times of social justice. For mobile communication, for some mobile communication is ever present in their lives and, as you know, that is the case for most of us. For others, these forms of communication remain out of reach. Global statistics show not only the continuing growth of digital access but also the persistence of non-axis. We are not talking just about limited access but about non-axis. People who have no access at all to the internet. More than half of the world's population remains entirely offline according to the 2016 data. And this is sometimes kind of hard to believe when you live in a highly connected country like the United States where you have 80% to 90% internet access. But these countries, so it's not very clear that the rest of the world is a bit dark, but you have below 10% internet access in many other countries. So these people are unable to participate in the much-celebrated network society. Left out of digital connectivity are especially countries in South-Saharan Africa, as well as countries in South Asia and Southeast Asia. And this is referred to as the archipelago of disconnection by internet researchers. And this is where we have, say, internet penetration rates of well above 10%. These global patterns are relevant when it comes to questions of linguistic visibility online. Only those who are online will be able to produce and consume digital content in the languages they speak. And those parts of the world which show the greatest diversity of languages remain also those with least access. Let us turn our attention to the practices of those who are online. And my focus will be on Africa because this is where I live and work and do my research. Despite over all low levels of access, there exist important pockets of connectivity in Africa, especially among urban professionals and students. What do people do when they are online? As noted earlier, I want to look at everyday practices as well as more deliberate language activism. The idea of the everyday has been important in media anthropology and social linguistics. The digital is seen not simply as a space for regular interaction and sociability, but also as a space for alternative aesthetic moments and semiotic creativity. The everyday is self-evident and elusive at the same time. Crucially, as noted by Eureka Saito, the everyday is that which we experience and construct ideologically and interactually as everyday. She writes, the most important factor for the purpose of everyday aesthetics is not so much an inventory of objects and activities, but rather the typical attitude we take towards them. For many of us, this includes digital media, objects and practices that, for those who have access, are no longer exceptional or special but ordinary, deeply embedded in the routine flow of life. To recall the earlier description, we no longer go online. We are. In texting Africa, myself and my colleague, Jean-Paul Laxando, approached everyday digital creativity from the perspective of verbal art and performance. And in this, we follow other media researchers such as Jadon Santorozopoulos, who wrote about heteroglossic performances, Brenda Dahman, who did performance and play, and Jenny Sundin, who looked at the performance of identity. In theorizing performance of verbal art, I draw like many others on the work of the folklorist and linguistic anthropologist Richard Bellman. In early paper in the 1970s, fundamentally, performance as a mode of verbal communication consists in the assumption of responsibility for an audience for the display of communicative competence. Performance calls forth a special attention to and heightened awareness of the act of expression. Responsibility to an audience and heightened awareness to the act of expression are key phrases in this definition. Adopting a poetic and performance perspective means that we consider digital communication not simply as communication about things and about the world, which we as linguists call the referential function of language or the dilutational function of language. Digital communication is much more than an exchange of information. It is also a form of communication and interaction that is experienced as expressive, enjoyable and pleasing, where language is on display for others to see, to appreciate and to evaluate. It is visual culture, as I said earlier, as well as global culture. This is a Facebook example from South Africa. It was posted in 2008 to a group called How Many Possesses Are There On Facebook. It is a process, one of South Africa's main languages. It has official recognition at around 8 million speakers. The stance of the post is activist. We must talk is impossible. The language is carefully chosen to portray the persona of a pure impossible, mixing with other languages, especially languages avoided. And the performance of linguistic skill, as well as its anti-colonial political styles, is appreciated by the audience. Quail group. Wow. Digital writing, like all writing, is often crafted and displayed for an audience. This is the case especially in public spaces, Facebook, but also Twitter. Consider this example. Posted just a few weeks ago during the Africa Cup of Nations, I don't know how many soccer fans we have here, I didn't watch the Africa Cup. The writer hashtags four Senegalese languages, Mandiko, Olof, Fula and Zuninka, in a multimodal performance of national unity and celebration. Hashtags and emojis are central to the performance frame, as well as to the visual enjoyment of digital writing. Aesthetic crafting is also visible in the directional data. This exchange comes from a private interaction between university-educated Mayfraids and Akragandan. They are all in their flutes. This particular segment involving only two participants in the larger group chat is about a spelling mistake. An extra O was added to a name on a public announcement, so that's what happened before this exchange. And the tone is playful. Samson sees a squackeau who responds with laughter and mock denial. Na. The exchange is filled with conversational interactions. O, Cora, Ha, Ha, Ha. All length of her emphasis and expressivity. We also see creative and visually marked re-spellings. Herit, forget it, and Peepee for peer pressure. As well as the use of the garbage in expression, hubar shot, to make a mistake. But with this explanation, we should be able to understand what's happening there. Audience appreciation is not overly articulated here, but it is evident there's no cheering, there's no quake, there's no laws for the beauty of what is being produced, but it's evident in the ways in which the banter is picked up and continued in which expressivity is echoed and intensified. The three examples come from different countries, South Africa, Senegal, and Ghana. They're illustrative of the kind of data we see when we study everyday mobile communication. Interactions and post-its, such as these, make diverse ways of speaking visible and live. We see Pasa, French, Senegalese languages, Guerni and Pigeon, and our current discourse markers. They also draw attention to an important aspect of linguistic visibility. Linguistic forms are not necessarily visible as languages, bound and well-defined entities with names such as Pasa, English, and Gakan, but they are frequently mobile and fragmented. They appear as linguistic resources, as bits of language, but can be moved around. Another example is given on this slide. A Facebook status from South Africa, combining local slang, modern sutu, and English. The writer is a young South African woman who posts exclusively by a mobile phone. All these examples reflect what Ophelia Garcia at UI called trans-language. This term refers to the ways in which people draw in their entire sign language while expressing themselves. Speakers and writers create meaning and diverse forms of verbal art, not by speaking a language. So this example, the speaker cannot be said to be speaking a language. She's not speaking other sutu, she's not speaking English, and she's also not speaking slang. But she trans-languages, she's doing language, and it's in this doing language, so the idea of language has doing language. So this, I think, is a shift which is happening in linguistics where we move away from people speaking a language to people doing something, their language, creating language as they speak. And the trans prefix is important. It emphasizes the ways in which multilingual practices transform trans-systemic that is integrated into one symbiotic system and not seen as belonging to different demarcated languages, as well as transformative and transgressive. These trans-lingual practices bring about new representations of language and are literally on the other side of what linguists, since fairly not the susure thought language to be. An object, long, that was the idea of, is the idea of traditional linguistics and not a practice. At other times, however, we see processes of reification, that is ideological positionings of what a particular language is, what it looks like, sounds like, its boundaries, and its identity. Reification was visible in the Easy Possa example from Facebook and it's something we see regularly on Wikipedia, a multilingual online project that is deeply invested in the ideology of languages as well defined objects. Wikipedia, which is among the top 10 websites globally, has been described as a commons. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, it is a non-profit and thus located outside the capitalist markets of most social media application. Wikipedia is also an important multilingual space, providing content in close to 300 languages at the moment. Because of its popularity and presence, Wikipedia provides an important testing ground for understanding the challenges of creating a global multilingual online space. As noted by Amal Graham and his colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute, Wikipedia has an important platform from which we can learn whether the internet facilitates increased participation across cultures, provided that people have some access, or reinforces existing local hierarchies and entrenched power . Wikipedia is a rich source of research also because of its extensive archive history and discussion pages and able researchers to trace the emergence of each article and debates on community pages allow for analysis of undermined discourses and ideologies. This archive, the archive that Wikipedia provides us with, makes it possible to understand how articles are edited and revised, how fact sources and authorities are debated and agreed how different choices including language-related ones are made by different contributors, how different ideological stances compete with each other and how some of them become temporarily or more permanently encoded in encyclopedic entries. When looking at Wikipedia from a social linguistic perspective, global hierarchies and entrenched power dynamics are clearly visible. English and other large languages dominate article statistics. This is indicated in column 2 and 3 on this slide. However, European minority languages sub-ordinated, yet used by people who live in economically affluent societies with Apple digital access are also fairly visible on Wikipedia. They're actually doing quite well. Their presence supports the idea that digital media can in principle provide new spaces for the representation of linguistic diversity if people have access. Yet for those parts of the world where access is restricted, we see the opposite pattern even large languages, especially Africa and South America, but also Asia remain underrepresented on Wikipedia. It is worth noting that the relatively high-average article number for Asia and where is Asia Asia here, so it looks quite high, but it's largely the result of averaging from the Chinese and the Japanese Wikipedia's which are huge. So all the other Asian languages in the Chinese are a statistical issue there. The last column is quite interesting. It presents statistics, it's a typical Wikipedia type statistic of editor familiar speakers. While editor numbers are high in Europe for both minority and majority languages, so this is especially interesting how many editors you have familiar speakers for minority languages in Europe. So there's a huge activism going on for European minority especially with statistics for Africa. So they are low in Africa, South America, Australia and importantly this brings you to the middle local context, also North American languages, and North American Indian languages which are spoken in communities of First Nation languages where patterns of access mirror those of the global South. And in the following discussion I want to zoom in on two Wikipedia projects the Wikipedia and Masry, written in Egyptian Arabic and the Easy Process of Wikipedia. Launched in 2008 Wikipedia and Masry is the first and so far only Wikipedia and a colloquial variety of Arabic, Egyptian Arabic. Ivan Pallovich described Wikipedia and Masry as an ideological project that seeks to forge discursively an Egyptian national identity that is neither Arabic nor Muslim. And in doing so it has expanded vernacular writing into a new domain online collaborative knowledge production. However to be allowed to do so to start a new Wikipedia Egyptian writers first had to prove that they spoke indeed a language and not a dialogue. And when it comes to languages Wikipedia only allows one kind of proof. One needs an ISO 6393 code. Unless you are linguist you probably don't know what an ISO 6393 code is. The history of these codes, of ISO codes for languages is closely linked to missionary linguistics especially the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, SIL which in turn has ties to Whitecliffe Bible Translators. It was outgoing into details here there are intriguing parallels between missionary localization project the Bible in every language and knowledge based localization projects Wikipedia in every language. The authority for the assignment of ISO codes is the Esmeralda which is published by SIL International. The Esmeralda works together with international organization for standardization ISO, so that's where the ISO comes from in creating an international standard for language names. So ISO codes which are signed by the Esmeralda which belongs to SIL and which in turn works together with an international organization for standardization. So these are just administrative labels. They are meant to create order in a multilingual world. It is an example of what James Scott calls seeing like a state. A discursive ideological project which interpolates collectives makes them legible and therefore governable. Social linguists have always been skeptical about languages as bounded entities as things. Ruth Weinreich famous linguist quipped already in the 1940s that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And today from the perspective of Wikipedia we can say a language is a dialect with an ISO 6393 code. Egyptian Arabic has an ISO 6393 code and requesting a Wikipedia edition was thus in principle possible. However when the request was issued in 2008 there was resistance. A number of Wikipedia's I would strongly that an outvalued ISO code was notwithstanding. The standard Arabic Wikipedia should be the reference point for everyone. Otherwise it would open the door for an endless number of Arabic Wikipedia's. One participant in the discussion articulated his concern by drawing up such a list of the great sense of worry. A site is list. Tunisian Arabic Wikipedia Algerian Arabic Wikipedia Saudi Arabic Wikipedia Emirati Arabic Wikipedia and even more we have a Tunisian Arabic of Tunisian Wikipedia the Tunisian Arabic of Jerba Wikipedia and the Tunisian Arabic of Swax Wikipedia. What we see here is the fear of fragmentation, social and linguistic that raises its head. The desire for unity and anxiety as to what might happen once we allow diversity free rein. Supporters of the Wikipedia must be countered by declaring Egyptian Arabic a language that is distinct from Arabic combining Egyptian Coptic Greek Italian Turkish and of course Arabic. The meaning of Arabic is thus refrained and critique and reflections on how to write Egyptian were part of the early discussions. In 2008 the following article and the first one was suggested writers should use lay persons terms and a mixture between Egyptian slang and Arabic. This is an interesting statement. For all its nationalist impetus the language activism of Wikipedia and Masry is open to diverse ways of writing. There is no detention to define or unify Masry. While the dialect of Cairo is acknowledged as prestigious it is not prescribed. Translingualism so translanguage and translingualism I would like to suggest is one of the forms that language activism takes in lay modernity especially perhaps in the post-colonial. We see a broad acceptance of heteroglossic practices in absence of policing cultural linguistic expression. Discourses of purism and authenticity are conspicuous by their absence. The only strategy that writers seem to follow consistently is to distance themselves from standard Arabic. Boregs from English or creative neologisms are generally preferred over established Arabic words. Let me move from the Wikipedia Masry the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia a growing Wikipedia with over 6,000 articles to the small Wikipedia with only around 600 articles. Is it possible to repeat is not a small language. As I mentioned earlier it has official status in South Africa and is spoken by more than 8 million people. The Is it possible Wikipedia was established early already in 2003 two years after the start of Wikipedia and the contribution pattern for the Is it possible Wikipedia is very different to that Wikipedia Masry where its contributors to Wikipedia Masry are speakers of Egyptian Arabic. Many of the contributors to Is it possible Wikipedia live in the global north and acknowledge on their talk pages that they have only very limited or even no knowledge. They are not members of the Is it possible of the Amapasa diaspora but white Wikipedians who are driven by a curious desire to assist in the growth of the Is it possible use of the is one such uses. Hi, my name is V and I'm an English speaking American from Chicago. I'm interested in improving the Casa Wikipedia. I can look up names in the Casa in the dictionary and start pages for the start tag and add a photo and link it to existing languages. And below this quote is a language she created. I hope you can see it. It's a picture of I don't know who wears such pajamas. They look a bit old fashioned but it's Ipijama, completed with an added photo. And such steps entries are not unusual. They are very common. Now you get your first lesson in the Casa. Iqati and Iqo for Ronald Reagan and television. These entries resemble an illustrated dictionary for second language learners rather than an encyclopedia for native speakers. It is a curious case of other limited language activism. While Wikipedia can be described as a project of linguistic emancipation, contested and challenged but nevertheless moving along with the involvement of native speakers, the Iqo Posa Wikipedia is in large part similar to an image that bears only an indirect relationship to reality. In this case the realities of Iqo Posa is spoken, experienced, desired and performed by its speakers. And in doing so the Iqo Posa Wikipedia reduces relations of power and inequality. It re-enscribes existing hierarchies, affirms that the realities of global digital audience labor and re-contextualizes old colonial trumps of the white men's burden. That's why many that's why many of the contributors to the Iqo Posa Wikipedia let English knowledge and proficiency then make up for it with passion and enthusiasm and a deep-seated wish to help. And aside from another user, user A unfortunately I don't speak Iqo Posa but I'm keen to help the Iqo Posa Wikipedia's development. I'm passionate about the dream of seeing Wikipedia's in each person's mother tongue. Examples such as this show how online content creation remains embedded in old discourses and ideologies. We see discourses of benevolence which link to discourses of volunteerism and the colonial white savior industrial complex. Not only do we see benevolence but also its counterpart frustration and annoyance when those who are being helped don't behave as they should. In 2013 a proposal was made to close down this Iqo Posa Wikipedia. The reason? Barely behaved and ungrateful speakers. User J writes in the motivation in five years nothing has changed no mother tongue speakers, no progress nothing. I think it is safe to say that speakers of this language, some six million of them don't want to write an Iqo Posa. Does sometimes the digital space reproduces old hegemonies, sometimes it creates new forms of expression, allow the sense of freedom at the end of creativity. Wikipedia is not one thing. The Egyptian contributors challenge to have Arabic hierarchies the white contributors to the Iqo Posa Wikipedia reproduce all hierarchies. And things are changing as well. In 2014 a new voice joined the editors of the Iqo Posa Wikipedia. That was user N a female, a Mokosa corpse language writer. She was part of the university project which aimed to grow Wikipedia in African languages. User N contributed close to 400 articles in just two years. Articles which are competently written and substantial. So it's worth keeping an eye on this Iqo Posa Wikipedia to see what will be changing in the future. And even though broad patterns of inequality and participation appear fairly predictable, the digital space is also full of surprises of little and bigger quotes. It shows an online surplus of creative action. And I want to conclude the Wikipedia discussion with one such example. The entry is to use it to our clan prices or our clan names. The page created by an Iqo Posa community workshop in 2012 quietly subverts the ideologies of Wikipedia. This Iqo Posa does not provide an encyclopedic style a definition of what clan names are. Rather the page performs visually the praises and these praises are a form of traditional greeting and recognition for the Banga, Bangula and Beir implants without any explanation of commentary. The result is a form of verbal art that addresses the cultural insider the one who knows about the importance meaning and structure of clan prices rather than the cultural outsider who would in good encyclopedic fashion require a glossary definition of explanation, something like clan prices are dot, dot, dot. On this page we see Guillaume Artful as Iqo Posa and not simulated as Iqo Posa. The author treats Wikipedia creatively as a public archive and repository for the preservation of the language, not as an encyclopedia. In the last part of the talk I want to stay with the locally meaningful and the archive looking at urban spaces and their digital traces while keeping the question of language in focus. What are languages of the city and how are they remediated digitally? I take my inspiration from the preface of the recently published pamphlet Digital Rides to the City in which Joe Shaw and Mark Graham write the following The cities have become more than bricks and mortar. There are the digital presences and they are constantly performed and reproduced as such. The example I want to note is Sophia Town also known as Guillaume. The multi-ethnic and multilingual neighborhood of Johannesburg which was destroyed in 1955 when the apartheid government forcefully moved its residents to Netherlands and Soviet. Sophia Town was hatched into South Africa's memory landscape. The hub of music, literature and art and politics in the 1940s and early 1950s Sophia Town was one of the few places where Africans were allowed to own property at an influential middle class development. At the same time, Sophia Town contained parts that were sublime, overcrowded and impoverished plagued by high levels of crime. Drozhin Balini, a Kokolkoy, a former member of the Americans' gang in Sophia Town, compared the edgy atmosphere of this vibrant neighborhood to New York. And he says, it's like New York, there's fighting all the time and Sophia Town, you can't stay if you can't box. I don't know if that is the case in New York but it seems to be in a parallel. Sophia Town inspired artists as in this poem by Bravini. Bravini links the walk of the city, the name for a small-scale criminal and social rebel, a figure of fear and apprehension as well as of desire to that of his hard brother walking down Lenox Avenue. Metropolitan Imagineers. A transnational urban setting is articulated here from our Zulu musical traditions to American blues, from Johannesburg to again New York. Sophia Town was artistic inspiration and political activism. The political symbolism of Sophia Town was beautifully articulated in Lewis and Coasey's book, Home at Exile, published in 1965 10 years after the forced removal. He writes, Sophia Town was a symbol of black people's capacity to endure the worst. It was also a symbol of the arrogance, resilience and score for the white suburb from which it was prudent. Sophia Town has many digital traces of representation or were digital researchers called augmented realities. The historical documents of Sophia Town are digitized and archived at Witt's University in Johannesburg. An article of also Sophia Town is available, the English Wikipedia as well as similar articles of the African's German, French, Italian and Salmi Wikipedia. Each one created by a different set of editors and none of them are direct translation of the other. There's also an entry on Google Maps. The original houses, if you go to Google Street View, the houses you see then have however long been destroyed and what is visible on Google Street View are the houses that were built for the white residents when the area was renamed Triumph. The name capturing like few others the arrogance of white supremacy after Africans had been removed. The area was renamed to Fire Town in 2006. And then there are traces of Sophia Town in popular culture which in turn additionally re-mediated such as the YouTube release of the most recent album of the soil, Echoes of Coffini. So Fire Town was not simply a place but also a way of speaking and the speech or lingo of Sophia Town has its own digital echoes. In the 1950s Camp Tamba published a photo novella Baby Come To Us, Baby Come Close in the pages of Drone Magazine. In writing the dialogue he used what he called a new lingo of Africans, Zulu, Zulu English and brand new words. A few years later in the story The Urchin he described this way of speaking as deeply expressed. Something to be enjoyed, something powerful something intensely urban something that is performed and performative. He writes. And aside from the story Tamba, Makala who is the main character of the story, suddenly fell in the mood for the jargon of the touches. The near animal amorphous quick-shifting lingo that alarms farm boys and drives cops to all branches of the story. But it marks the city slicker with all its labels. The lingo also referred to as the language of urban streets, transports and criminals did not disappear with the anticipated. It remained a social symbolic representing the experience of boys of black women business. Artists continued to use it and with Twitter a whole process of re-contextualization took place a new layer the digital representation of the memory of supply of town. So Fire Town is present on Twitter where the language and the symbolic political universe that council fed are used in everyday encounters, everyday interactions creating everyday thoughts of verbal art and visual art. The treat on the slide, the first kofifi and slang name for So Fire Town, as well as a dress and posture that evokes the style and persona of the past while being firmly rooted in the present. Kofifi swear the title of this Twitter image links past and present verbal experiences. So Fire Town is gone but it is still there. The memory of So Fire Town cannot be thought of without the experience and trauma of forced removals to meadowlands an experience that was given voice in a well-known song written by Cassie in the mid-1950s. Songs cannot be narrated they need to be listened to and I hope this will work. Such as the different voices and experiences white say you need to go to meadowlands and the sadness and despair beginning of violent discrimination but it also captured in the second part of the song that it finds the resistance reflected in the voice and persona of the tsutsu street smart and scared of nothing on stakni on spola here we stay here. This is Tsutsu Town the lingokkan tamper wrote about a mimetic inversion that performed mimicry of Afrikaans the language of Afrikaans. This historical moment of defiance is regularly instantiated and re-performed across Twitter. On stakni on spola here remains present in its persistence retort contextualization. It is sung digitally allows for creative soccer commentary and creates a political link between past present future in the context of the recent student protest at South Africa universities. The refrain on spola here we stay here is re-semioticized to express contemporary political critique in this example critique of the president's extravagant spending on his private homestead in Karnatale. Past and present work together creating complexities of meaning in the moment and at the same time they make visible local ways of speaking in the global domain of Twitter. This is not self-conscious and deliberate language activism but playful performance which nevertheless claims space for non-dominant and indeed subversive language practices online. Tsutsu Town the mixed urban vernacular of Sophia Town is not a free floating linguistic resource but connected to and embedded in a specific social persona. In this case the persona of Tsutsu rebellious street-wise and defiance of middle-class propriety and any form of oppression and remember the writing earlier from Bravillian which also talks about this resistance to oppression. In 2002 Magesh, a South African quite musician released number one Tsutsu a song with the refrain against Tsutsu Funtuka meaning an old-style Tsutsu or an original Tsutsu which is uttered in old style of a Kant-based Tsutsu town so basically a variety of Tsutsu town which is no longer spoken except by fairly old people. Often led to numerous playful citations including Mandela often multimodal on Twitter it too became a public word so just like on Stakni and Spola here against the Tsutsu Funtuka it's kind of the idea of a public word in the sense of Deborah's bitulni that is a phrase that is remembered repeated and quoted long after its first utterance creating yet again connections between past, present and future. Linguistic representation and performances of Tsutsu town go beyond the citation of such public words. Here in 140 characters a short lesson takes place about appropriate creating rituals in Tsutsu town and I assume everybody's familiar with Twitter that you read from the back so you have to kind of read like arrowing in order to get the the sequence in which the tweets were posted. Quite common are also interactional routines on Twitter again Twitter emerges as a space of learning and performing articulating a recognizable historical voice. Tsutsu town on Twitter is a special case of language maintenance and revitalization. Tsutsu town is passed on and remains meaningful provides material for playful performances yet these performances are small partial, fragmented and momentary. Tsutsu town on Twitter illustrates what Mikhail Bakhtin calls chronotopes complex time space reconfigurations and representations in language and discourse. Before concluding I would like to return briefly to the idea of fragments. It is a notion that I see as important theoretically and as something which is worth exploring I think the social industry's future. My colleague Anna Stoll recently drew my attention to Gaston Bordillo's rubble, the afterlife of destruction I don't know if you have read it it's a fantastic book. It is an important book that looks at the ways in which rubble and ruins shape experiences and practices. Like rubble linguistic fragments are often the result of violence and destruction especially in the post colony yet they also reflect the creativity of people making meaning out of this rubble out of bits and pieces of language out of fragments. That's one way to think of fragmentation in language is as historic on rubble. Another way to think about fragments is through the metaphor of dust more ephemeral than rubble located somewhere between the digital trace and the spoken word. The idea of dust is something that my colleague and I have been working on in the past starting a new project on it. The metaphor of dust can help us to rethink boundaries that allows us to pay attention to fuzziness to look at mobility and time and it also brings it to focus a desire for cleanliness and purity thus it's considered to be a problem. Bordillo argues that in modernity we see a bourgeois anxiety about fragmentation what he calls a cult of full objects. At the same time there exists the fetish of the ruin the celebration of the remnants of the past in order to reflect the violence of colonialism and capitalism. And this is what we need to be very careful as scholars and as social scientists the celebration of the ruin is not too far from the celebration of what has been called happy hybridity by critical scholars. Yet the fragmented creativity of the post colony is never a choice. It might be the only way to live with violence and trauma to fashion the future out of it and I think the Sophia town and the social Italian sample speaks exactly to that how these practices which are playful which are enjoyable, which are funny come out of a history of violence, this possession and destruction. Thus to recognize this history the violence and destruction that is adherently the idea of fragments is integral to the politics of recognition to return to Fraser who I cited earlier. In conclusion, language is not just a semiotic system, a presence or an absence online, it is also an object of desire. And not all online representations of language are the same. Some are to draw the work of the philosopher, Levy-Bride bright objects. They attract because they relate to other objects because they promise connectivity and relations. English is such a brightly shining object online. Dim or dark objects by contrast are those that remind isolated that seem to be outside of global networks and interventions. Shades of fluidity are thus linked to the network potential of objects and the network potential of course leads directly to digital connectivity to the ability to affect other objects on a global scale. Bride suggests that in the realm of social and political theory the notion of the supple tomb being located in the margins of the world system as much in common with the idea of dark objects. He argues that in his slide in this regard, part of political practice would consist in diminishing the darkness of quasi-dark objects of devising strategies to brighten or intensify their appearance and situations. Darkness and brightness are common metaphors and made visible, given visibility in global methods of digital connectivity. Maps such as this are common on the internet, I'm sure you have seen that before. They are accompanied by predictable and even stereotypical headings such as this was a newspaper heading which went with that particular map amazing internet map shows Africa still a dark continent. Yet why is the global South the sub-ultimate always associated with darkness? From Conrad's heart of darkness to Bride's dark objects to contemporary internet maps, persistent colonial imaginers are at work here underlying metaphors of luminosity. Brightness and darkness of languages as objects of desire and thus resources for practice and performance are historically shaped. The attractiveness of English cannot be understood without concentration on its chronotopic gestation at a global standard. Yet, the brightness and darkness of an object is in the mind of the beholder and other languages were globally much less integrated much less visible from a European-American vantage point shine brightly in local contexts where they offer relations of a different nature that is relations, connectivities solidarity of fact identity, resistance and self-realization. Digital media if one has access to them have created new opportunities for such dark objects those that have been historically invisible in global spaces to begin to shine, to gather brightness to extend beyond the local. They have created new and renewed global symbiotic flows and frictions which quite like the flows and frictions of global hip-hop are embedded in capitalist relations of production. With this, thank you and I look forward to questions, comments and protestations. Thank you. I have a question about what you think about the potential of global commons in projects like Wikipedia. So on the one hand it seems like projects like most of you at Wikipedia showed us that global commons can lead to a lot of conflict and even more personalization of language communities. But on the other hand it seems like the lack of access to internet in some parts of the world in Africa is the reason why languages are being marginalized on these global commons projects. So what's the root of the problem here? Is it that there's not enough access to language communities throughout the world? Or is it rather that the logic of a global commons will always marginalize the small and the small ones are sort of dominating the world? I think it's a mix of both in some ways. So the one of the access the internet access having internet access another problem is I don't know how many active Wikipedia are in this room who has ever tried to edit Wikipedia on a mobile phone. It is terrible. It's possible now so it used to it's only possible I think for the last two years that you can actually edit on a mobile phone but the interface is an absolute nightmare. Now we do know that internet connectivity in Africa is mostly on a mobile phone most people don't have computer access first they count if the internet is on the phone. So those are important kind of technological aspects to think about what if it would be easy to actually do something on your phone would perhaps with people edit more, do more than they do at the moment. We don't know that but the other thing of course is that one of the things behind something like the Cosa Wikipedia is this idea of people wanting Wikipedia in their language assuming that they have this one language which is their language in which they want to read everything but now we look at particularly educated people with tertiary education in South Africa or across Africa who will make use of the Wikipedia but they can choose. They can read the 600 article Cosa Wikipedia and half of the articles are nothing, create new articles or they just go to the English Wikipedia which they can read just as well and so this is also so you know we have to think of people who is multilingual, who is monolingual who needs, who has this kind of investment of Wikipedia Bible or whatever the object is in their own language so I think in that way and of course the other thing is I didn't talk about it so much I just mentioned very briefly that it matters, having leisure time so there is a lot of work particularly out of the United States on digital media and out of school literacies where the fact that you have time that people have time, that they have access that they have access, that they have easy access fast access around the clock, midnight you can wake up and do something online and there is time to do so now how many young people in developing countries especially in poor countries do have that leisure time where they don't have to do work on the farm do household things so time is another thing which can availability of free time which reproduces these hierarchies as well so who can volunteer for the project even if you have access so I think it's entangled but it seems to you know whatever whether it's the technology and the relations of production whether it's the language hierarchies we have and the fact that English Wikipedia is available it all kind of works together and together it reproduces old hierarchies so it seems to be very very difficult to get away from the English dominance of the internet which keeps building work produced also by something which I didn't speak about but there is very interesting work on platform imperialism so just where are the platforms that dominate the internet and again we see a very clear pattern but it doesn't seem to be changing a long lead up to a question so it's really interesting to me and I have practices which I'm very interested in like interpersonal communication on all practices and I find it very interesting that you give the WhatsApp, the Facebook the Twitter examples that have these like very rich very interesting even language practices and then Wikipedia which doesn't people like you say people with tertiary education are oftentimes willing to just read it in English because it's the English have you found that across the board there is more of a drive more of a desire for people to use to do language in these one to one or one to few rather than this person to audience like making a distinction there between the addressee being a small group versus the audience because the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia sounds like it took off but there is an audience there as opposed to the host so Wikipedia seems to be slowly growing growing so have you found a distinction between language practices of an addressee and that's why you're putting the other spot a little bit too much because of the quick bit there is this idea in digital media research of audience segmentation although tweeting means I address the world I very often depending on local practices of the way twitter is being used you might address only your friends there was work on regularly every year there is a survey done on twitter in Africa one of the projects we have this is a big project in all social media research unfortunately for an often reliant on industry service they have access money and access to the data and of course these are not the service we really like to work with but they do tell us something so they do work with twitter they get all the fireworks they get all the data which we don't like but they get a pattern so there was a pattern for example that twitter in Africa seems to work differently to twitter in America and Europe so one of the things was in the early twitter days twitter was actually used like sms people used to arrange going out via twitter although it would address a bigger audience so the audience gets segmented the whole thing of black twitter which clearly segments the audience it's not addressed at the world it's addressed by a particular audience on facebook anybody who is multilingual when you put the status I know when I write in German which is my first language then automatically I'm segmenting my facebook audience instead of addressing whatever friends I have I'm addressing a small portion of the friends so public versus private doesn't work neatly I think Wikipedia though I know you're right Wikipedia is particular because it isn't in Wikipedia it's a traditional knowledge project so the ideas you write in languages Wikipedia must really be so interesting because it seems that there are much more fluid language practices it doesn't seem to be a standard language as long as you're different from Arabic that's the main thing you just mustn't write Arabic you must be different you must be Egyptian Arabic but in that whether you write the dialect of Cairo or something else it's okay I mean I don't speak Arabic so I'm relying a lot there on the work by my partner who is the only one I know who has written on the early days of the Egyptian Wikipedia but this would be a fantastic project and the other thing of course about Wikipedia which I mentioned briefly but it's really I mean it is a fantastic source for research because you have the articles you have the history pages I don't know if any of you have ever played with the history pages we can actually see from when the article was created how it was changed over time I think with the English Wikipedia it must be a nightmare to do that with the possibly Wikipedia because it's so small you can actually look at every article you can look at every version of each article when a bot or robot came in and changed something and tidied something up so you can actually see how articles evolve and then of course you have the talk pages of the contributors you have the discussion pages where ideologies around knowledge are being discussed so I don't think actually in digital research the potential of working with Wikipedia has been and how language might be changed if you look at article versions does someone go in and just change a little bit of the language not a fact, not add a sentence but it's just unhappy with the way it's working but that's really interesting for a language and you can kind of see these things but I don't think it has been and then you have all the community pages for Wikipedia so for example if you want to know you have to propose it for the language edition you have people saying yes I support it you know I don't support it it goes over pages and pages you get an amazing university base out of it and just one interesting thing when I was preparing this talk and I was looking through it's just such a huge archive so you can really get lost there for hours but I found that somebody has proposed a multilingual Wikipedia so I was very excited I was like wow trans-language whatever you want just throw languages together and this is going to be late modern and wonderful but actually it wasn't supposed to be something like a pigeon English Wikipedia so pigeon English became a gloss for multilingual and it wasn't pigeon in the sense of West Africa pigeon English but we have a real language it was kind of a simplified weird kind of idea anyway but it's interesting to it's a new idea so it's interesting to see on Wikipedia others particularly on proposal another thing around languages which is really interesting and also very little is written on it is with these funny ISO 6393 codes because that is also documented so the ethnologue has to document so a person writes to the ethnologue and say I think the dialect of New York is a language it's not English it's New Yorkese and it should have its own ISO 3 code and then you put it in a motivation and then it gets discussed and opinions are being solicited and all that is digitally archived so you can actually see how the decision is being taken and on the basis of what grounds that something is not a dialect but a language all being rejected so the archive is fantastic for all kind of questions around language and politics