Page 51 - Cyberculture and New Media

42 Formalisms of Digital Text
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Lexical Density

17.2%
20%

10.7%
15%
9.0% Speech
6.0% Blogs
10%
Emails
5% Texts

0%
Speech Blogs Emails Texts
Lexical Density 6.0% 9.0% 10.7% 17.2%

Figure 8. Relative lexical density in text, speech, email, and blog samples

4. Conclusion
This analysis of four distinct communicative modes – speech, blogs,
emails, and printed text (as fiction works) – exposes sufficiently significant
differences in sentence length, pronoun usage, and lexical density between
them so as to support the assertion that blogs and emails, as instances of
conversational writing, conform to stylistic and structural characteristics
somewhere between speech and print. This may suggest that usage of
different communicative media appears to respond to fundamental
differences between them, with the most marked contrast being observed in
sentence length and the least, for usage of pronouns. We might say that
sentence length is the most structural of our three metrics, and pronoun usage
the most stylistic, with lexical density in a region lying between both. In that
the observed differences were largest in the structural variables of
observation, further research might similarly examine structural variables in
corpus samples across these or similar communicative modalities in relation
to the new expressive practices developing synthetically within digital media.