The purpose of the seminar was to bring together scholars from within linguistics and disciplines such as psychology to explore what short-form social media is, how we might practically and ethically collect and analyse short-form social media data, and what analytic possibilities are on offer for a linguist interested in examining this type of data.
The seminar, held at the University of Nottingham on 11th September 2024, was well attended, with around 20 people joining in-person or online. It ran for a single day and was split into a morning of plenaries and lightning talks about personal research interests, and an afternoon of interactive sessions which sought synergies between those research interests.
The day began with a plenary by Professor Ruth Page (University of Birmingham), who presented her work on mental health communication by influencers on TikTok. Particularly insightful were explanations of how the data were scraped using TikTok API, as well as what ethical issues arose when presenting the visuals of the data in publications and how the research term worked with these (such as producing line drawings of composite content). Since the talk, Professor Page and her team have published a multimodal analysis of stories told by mental health influencers on TikTok (Christiansen et al., Reference Christiansen, Craythorne, Crawford, Larkin, Gohil, Strutt and Page2025) which includes line drawings showing compilation visuals.
Following this keynote, four ten-minute lightning talks were presented. Dr Tamsin Parnell (University of Nottingham) began with an exploration of how young people (aged 16–25) with disordered eating experiences talk about eating disorder content they have encountered on short-form social media platforms such as TikTok. Parnell highlighted four areas of linguistic interest from the interview data, including metaphorical representations of algorithms as having agency and power over vulnerable users. A paper on this topic will appear in Journal of Eating Disorders shortly (Parnell et al., Reference Parnell, Hunt, Wilkins, Ince, Sharpe, Schmidt and Bartel2025).
Dr Alexandra Krendel (University of Southampton) then presented work with colleagues from Lancaster University on the Future of Human Reproduction project. Krendel introduced the audience to ectogenesis (gestation out of the human body in an artificial womb environment) and illustrated, using the corpus software Wmatrix (Rayson, Reference Rayson2008), how users alluded to fantasy literature such as Brave New World and made popular culture references to Star Wars when responding to the videos about ectogenesis. Since the talk, Krendel has published a paper with a colleague on these allusions (Krendel & Ryder, Reference Krendel and Ryder2025).
Dr Jai Mackenzie (Birmingham Newman University) presented some of the possibilities and ethical and practical challenges of working on short-form social media data in relation to her work on family lives and social media practices. Mackenzie has gone on to produce several papers on the topics she introduced, including on ethical practice in participant-centred linguistic research (Atkins et al., Reference Atkins, Mackenzie and Jones2025) and on grounded discourse analysis as a hybrid methodology (Mackenzie, Reference Mackenzie2025).
The final lightning talk speaker was Dr Caroline Tagg (The Open University), who presented on researching mobile conversations in context. The talk provoked much discussion around audience members’ texting practices and how different age cohorts might respond to the research questions differently. For example, while Tagg’s research was with middle-aged adults, audience members queried whether younger audiences would feel more peer pressure to be constantly available, or whether recent movements towards silencing notifications and responding to messages in one’s own time would prevail.
A panel session was held after all four talks had been delivered, and then lunch was made available. In the early afternoon, audience members heard through Teams from the second plenary speaker – Professor Nelya Koteyko (Queen Mary University of London) – who spoke about her work on autistic adults online. Koteyko offered an insightful examination of balancing agency and anonymity when conducting digital ethnography with marginalised communities. She highlighted tensions between participatory research approaches and academic ethics rules on anonymity and distance, highlighting the importance of a lay advisory board to approve information sheets and consent forms (which is then fed back to the institutional ethics committee). She also emphasised the importance of contextualised decision-making – asking the participating individuals where and when they want their contributions to be anonymised.
In the afternoon, the sessions were more interactive. Participants spent time working in small groups, answering questions about short-form social media such as, ‘What is it?’, ‘How do our research interests in short-form social media converge?,’ and ‘What can linguists offer to the study of short-form social media?’ In response to the first question, participants drew attention to the role of the attention economy, the affordances of different platforms, questions of content length, replicability, and the role of algorithms. Shared research interests included relationships as mediated by technology, identities as performed online, and stories and storytelling. With regards to what linguists can offer, participants considered the different tools, models, and methods that might help to engage with different actors’ digital practices.
The final session involved considering ‘next steps’. As illustrated by the publications cited throughout this report, many of the participants already had articles in progress or in press which have now been published. We discussed the possibility of working on a dialogic position paper on linguistic approaches to short-form social media from different subfields and thematic perspectives, such as considering the collapse of the public/private spectrum, or the metaphorisation of algorithms. We also thought about pedagogic resources that play with form to address what constitutes short-form social media from different linguistic subdisciplines.
1. Implications for applied linguistics
The session had many implications for the field of applied linguistics, particularly in terms of thinking about the social effects of short-form social media. For instance, the health communication studies presented on the day have significant findings with regards to algorithms, emerging technologies, and health and social media literacy. Parnell et al.’s (Reference Parnell, Hunt, Wilkins, Ince, Sharpe, Schmidt and Bartel2025) work on representations of the TikTok algorithm among young people with experience of an eating disorder, for example, illustrates how advances in the technology used to propel short-form social media can feel all-powerful and unknowable and can lead vulnerable people to describe feelings of powerlessness against certain types of content. Applied linguistics research like this can be used to question the role that platforms like TikTok have in strengthening support systems for vulnerable users to ensure that they do not end up in spirals of negative or harmful content.
Krendel and Ryder’s (Reference Krendel and Ryder2025) work on ectogenesis also orients towards lived experience and health communication by members of the public. Critical in their findings is the illustration that speculative fiction can be an important way for lay people to make sense of new, emerging, or imagined technologies. Similarly, Page’s multimodal work on mental health influencers on TikTok (e.g. Christiansen et al., Reference Christiansen, Craythorne, Crawford, Larkin, Gohil, Strutt and Page2025) shows differences and similarities in the storytelling practices of distinct types of health professionals. The work is situated within the context of an information and support gap that could ‘lead to partial and imbalanced development of mental health literacy by adolescent users’ as ‘the content provided by certain influencer types mimics authoritative and authentic communication but promotes non-medical solutions to mental health, unsupported by evidence’ (Christiansen et al., Reference Christiansen, Craythorne, Crawford, Larkin, Gohil, Strutt and Page2025, p. 1). Here, the research illustrates how applied linguistics methodologies can help to address issues of (social) media literacy and health literacy in vulnerable populations by identifying areas of mis-, dis- and imbalanced information on emerging platforms.
Outside of research findings, the session provided important insights into methodological reflexivity, innovation, ethics, and practicalities in socially oriented applied linguistics research. With a drive towards research impact resulting in a greater number of co-production projects within applied linguistics, it is vital that scholars determine best practice in ethics and methods for working with people with lived experience. For instance, Mackenzie’s (Reference Mackenzie2025) work on the hybrid methodology of grounded discourse analysis recognises the importance of inductive design, socially situated theory-building and researcher reflexivity on the part of the researcher. Conversely, Koteyko’s work on autistic adults online leads us to consider the role of the participant-author when thinking about negotiating anonymity across different outputs and contributions. Finally, Tagg’s research encourages us to think about who we are working with and how different demographics of participants might lead to different findings.
Overall, the session allowed participating scholars to think through their contributions to applied linguistics not only in relation to content about short-form social media but also, crucially, the ethics, methods, and implications of research on emerging technologies, algorithms, and popular platforms. It laid the groundwork for several individual projects and was fruitful in considering avenues for future collaborative endeavours.
