When I want to find out what a new phrase in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) means, I am most likely to search for it on Twitter (now that Vine is gone). On Twitter, I can track the original memes, observe the adoption of the phrase and trace linguistic innovation in realtime. On Twitter, I can get a sense of what this new phrase means.
Making sense of what a phrase means on Urban Dictionary is different. Urban Dictionary is a profitable, bootstrapped company which relies heavily on Black internet culture’s content production and linguistic innovation to remain relevant. In this post, I offer a critique of the paper, “Emo, love and god: making sense of Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced online dictionary”. This is part of my work on culturally relative artificial intelligence, digital ephemera and orality.
Who, what and where is Black Twitter?
Although the phenomenon’s inflection point differs depending on whom you ask, respondents in this research described Black Twitter’s development as a space in which black people discuss issues of concern to themselves and their communities — issues they…
