The following materials were prepared and assembled for a half-semester freshman seminar about language and the internet which I designed and taught at the University of Michigan in Fall 2014. The goal of this course was to broadly examine the ways in which the internet has impacted the way we interact with language. We discussed the ways we use language online, the ways computers have changed the way we do language science, the ways we can teach computers to use human language, and the parallels between the way the online revolution has impacted language use and the ways previous information revolutions have changed the way we interact with language.
Lesson 1 - Introduction and the Changing Lexicon
Lesson 2 - Txtspeak as a Dialect
Lesson 3 - Emoticons and Nonverbal Communication Online
Lesson 4 - The Internet and the Accessibility of Text
Lesson 5 - Communications Revolutions throughout History
Lesson 6 - Visit to Special Collections (Communication Revolutions)
Lesson 7 - Teaching Computers to Do Language
Lesson 8 - What Can Computers Teach Us about Language?
Lesson 9 - Final Presentations
Licensing Statement: All instructional resources on this site are being released under a Creative Commons 2.0 BY-NC license, so you should feel free to use them or remix them, with attribution, if you're preparing your own class!