Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Síða 156

knows how to collect different types of data and that she can reflect on their
advantages and disadvantages. She also addresses ethical issues related to the data,
which is essential for any study that deals with potentially sensitive data such as
this.
Data and methods for each study are dealt with in separate chapters in con-
nection with the analysis. As a result, there is no holistic and integrated discus-
sion related to these issues in the first part of the thesis.
Due to this combination of different approaches, there is not much room for
going in depth into some of the theoretical issues that are addressed in the thesis,
in particular regarding language contact. It is not always easy to determine
whether a lexical item could be considered a feature associated with Icelandic or
not, and a more detailed discussion of the gray areas along with examples of
problematic cases from the data would have made the arguments in the thesis
stronger.
To summarize, in this dissertation, Vanessa Isenmann has conducted and
completed an original and scientifically sound study. She shows that she is an
independent-minded scholar and that she can address research questions by using
both quantitative and qualitative methods to give us new insights into complex
issues related to the growing field of social media.
So, now we turn to the next part of this defence, which will be my conversa-
tion with the Ph.D. candidate. I will focus mainly on the first part of the thesis,
in particular regarding the background and the first two studies, the matched-
guise test and the quantitative analysis.

2. Background
I want to start with a discussion about the object of the study, which is men-
tioned in the main title of the thesis, digital practices on Facebook. I am thinking
about the adjective Icelandic and what it means in the world of social media. As
you talk about in the thesis, social media has no clear geographical boundaries
and your informants have friends in different places and speak different lan-
guages. The informants themselves do not all live in Iceland either, and the
posts do not always include Icelandic features. If we were talking about the real
world, and one of our informants was living abroad and speaking with other
people in another language, we probably would not see the interaction as
Icelandic practices. So I am interested to hear you elaborate on the following
question:
How do you define Icelandic digital practices? What makes your data
Icelandic? Should we still use such categorizations when we are dealing with
the digital world, and if so, why?

Helga Hilmisdóttir156