No abstract

investigate the ways individuals are seen to engage with the semiotic landscape of the neighborhood and explore how the Mission itself is discursively constructed through these subjective recontextualizations. In doing so I aim to highlight aspects of the relationship between social media and physical place and the ways language is seen to mediate this dynamic. I argue geographically tagged social media is not representative of an LL but productive, viewing the selective and subjective displays found online to be as much a part of the LL context as a potential key to understanding it.

This paper considers the interplay of physical and digital landscaping in the Mission District (‘the Mission’), a gentrified neighborhood in San Francisco, California. Aligned with recent work on affect and people’s mediations of the linguistic landscape (Wee, 2016; Banda & Jimaima, 2015), I examine how the Mission is filtered – literally and figuratively – in a corpus of 16,756 Instagram posts. Comparing these digital remediated productions of place to the physical landscape, I demonstrate how both are structured semiotically along exclusionary lines. Contrary to the democratic and inclusive mythology of digital / social media, I show how users’ self-positionings and elitist stancetaking (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2009; Mapes, forthcoming) effectively reinscribe privilege and reiterate gentrification of the Mission. As mining of ‘big data’ becomes increasingly valued as empirically ‘objective’ information, my analysis demonstrates geotagged content should not be viewed as a static indicator, but as a subjective, dynamic and – at times – problematic process.

The floodplain wetlands of northern Victoria are crucial for conservation of biodiversity and the livelihoods of people. Extensive ecosystem degradation and recent extreme floods and droughts have highlighted the urgent need for more sustainable management. We draw on expertise in ecology, hydrology, climatology and governance to synthesise key knowledge and options for enhanced conservation of the floodplains. A key finding is the need for more flexible mechanisms for delivering water to the diverse array of wetlands. A key option is ‘relaxing constraints’ that involves agreements with selected landholders to enable pulses of environmental water to fill river channels and safely spill onto low-lying floodplain wetlands. This should improve conservation of biodiversity, better manage flood risk and support a diverse range of local agricultural and recreational industries. These options may aid Victorians to find better ways of managing the rich lands, waters and biota of the floodplains in the southern part of the Murray–Darling Basin.

Study of speech and written texts has provided significant insight regarding linguistic variation and its social correlates. Variation in the representation or display of language, however, remains a relatively understudied phenomenon. With this in mind, we present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the variation observed in the Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Pilsen, Chicago. A community undergoing perceived processes of gentrification, Pilsen is an active site of economic, sociocultural change as well as newly intensified language contact. To investigate Pilsen's displayed language variation, we implement a series of logistic regression models that analyze the distribution of both language and contextual framing observed on signs in four key areas in Pilsen. In doing so, we present an informed means with which to understand the sociolinguistic context of Pilsen as a community undergoing change and provide a replicable framework for future study of LLs that experience similar dynamics.