Wednesday 8^th November 2023
Jointly hosted by the Centre for Research in Linguistics and The New Methods for New Media Network.
Please register for the lecture and/or the workshop here. 

WORKSHOP: ‘Research Methods for TikTok Videos’, Dr Ruth Page (University of Birmingham)
2:30-3:15, 8th November 2023, GEO 0G/033, in-person only
In this workshop, we will explore how researchers from linguistics might analyse the multimodal features of Tiktok videos.  We will consider how the verbal, visual and aural aspects of video memes might be analysed. In the workshop, we will work in small groups to analyse a small set of Tiktok videos and their transcriptions, using both participant-based and screen-based techniques to identify their narrative characteristics. Access to the Tiktok videos and transcription of the data will be provided ahead of the workshop.

LECTURE: ‘Shared stories and tending sounds on Tiktok’ Dr Ruth Page (University of Birmingham)
3:30-4:30, 8th November 2023, GEO 0G/033, in-person and live on Teams
In this presentation, I explore how shared stories (Page, 2018) are used to co-construct affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015) in the trending sounds that circulate in Tiktok.  I take a discourse-analytic approach to investigate how trending songs position their tellers within affective publics based on shared taste, personal experience and ideological stance.  The data for this project comprises 800 video-memes that responded to 20 trending sounds (mainstream songs, remixes, mash ups and movie clips), observed between October 2022-April 2023. I use mediated narrative analysis (Page, 2018) to show how new types shared stories emerge in the trends within Tiktok, which are underpinned by abstraction (Pihlaja, 2023), and foster relatability through shared scenarios. The paper expands the framework for shared stories by drawing on musicology and memetic cultures, arguing that the abstraction which underpins shared stories is particularly well suited to the context of Tiktok. I illustrate how shared scenarios emerge in three multimodal case studies from different influencers, demonstrating the aural, visual and verbal aspects of shared stories in Tiktok.