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This article focuses on four methodological issues which raise challenges for sociolinguists working with online data: (1) ethics; (2) multimodality; (3) mixed methodologies and the relationship between online and offline settings; and (4) web corpora and annotation. While there are currently numerous publications dealing with questions of ethics, data and methodology from within communication studies and social scientific research more generally, there are only a handful of publications which specifically focus on empirical linguistic research. In addition to delineating the diversity of computer-mediated data, in the course of the article we review each of these methodological issues in turn, thereby discussing key terminology and reviewing relevant literature.

This paper functions as the introduction to the special issue on ‘relational work in Facebook and discussion boards’. We position our research endeavors within interpersonal pragmatics (see Locher and Graham 2010), by reviewing literature on politeness, impoliteness and relational work in the context of computer-mediated communication. Foregrounding the relational aspect of language, we are particularly interested in establishing the connections between politeness, face and linguistic identity construction. We then position the four papers that form this special issue within this field of research. Two papers contribute to the study of relational work on discussion boards (Kleinke and Boes; Haugh, Chang and Kádár) and two deal with practices on Facebook (Theodoropoulou; Bolander and Locher).

Jensen (1968) and Labov (1970) Jensen (1968) and Labov (1970) , in particular. Exploring whether the international criticism of Bernstein was justified entails both an analysis of articles written by