Messaging in the Midlands

New project supported by IRiS

written by Caroline Tagg and Esther Asprey

Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Birmingham

The first week of March saw us spending our afternoons sitting at our stall in the foyer of the new Library of Birmingham. We were ‘Messaging in the Midlands’, a research project funded by the Institute of Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) to explore the diversity of identities performed through online messages and the ways in which people pick up and exploit a variety of locally-available resources to do this. Our aim was to attract people to our stall, get them to fill in a short questionnaire on their background (where they were from and where they had lived), the languages they spoke and the online platforms they used, and then ask them to contribute examples of their online messages.