Please join us for the final colloquium by visiting postdoctoral fellow Dr. Tamara Bodden. Tamara, who recently became an assistant professor at the University of Koblenz in Germany, conducts research to analyze online toxicity on the streaming platform Twitch. She studies gaming discourse to investigate the positive, community-building functions of seemingly toxic linguistic behaviour.

“When people walk by my office it sometimes will seem like I am just watching entertaining streams all day. Others think it is a pain to watch the often overstimulating or toxic content that is part of my project, but it is actually very exciting for me to see the deep intertextual origin of emotes or creative play with language that can be found in Twitch chats.”

The goal of Tamara's research includes shaping a better understanding of Twitch streams as a linguistic research object by developing methodologies and creating a corpus that can be used in further research. She also hopes that an increased understanding of toxicity will contribute to preventing toxic behaviour and improving safety features for online communities on platforms such as Twitch.