Following on from my post Collaboration with professional in linguistics philology and phonetics I connected with Viktor Pekar on LinkedIn, currently Research Scientist at University of Birmingham, but who in the past has been an Independent Consultant and Language Data Engineer for the Oxford University Press. He kindly agreed to work with me on this project:
“Thank you, this sounds like an interesting project. I am happy to provide consultations on linguistics in general, and on influence and change of the language on social media.”
Interestingly he too requested my assistance on some web work so all round collaboration! 
I emailed him over details of my findings so far and how I planned to structure and go about this project. He responded really prompted with initial pointers recommending that I should focus on a branch of linguistics called sociolinguistics and provided me with a link to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics. On reading this it immediately opened up my thinking in to how we interact with each other through social media. I have created a separate post in this and it can be found at Sociolinguistics.
He continued on to suggest to take a look at “…a particular problem in sociolinguistics, called language change” and he shared a wikipedia link to get me started on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change. This area focuses on how language differs and changes throughout time and from place to place with change in society and change in dialect. It also discusses how language changes with new inventions. I continue to discuss this further in Language Change – Lexical Change. In conjunction to this he also highlights that Lexical Change in particular would be an area to focus on. This too is discuss in the post Language Change – Lexical Change.
To continue with the wealth of knowledge he is sharing with me he also mentions social network anaylsis and influencer analysis. Both looking in to the behaviours within the environment of social networking sites and the influencer within such scenarios both which are areas of great interest and relevance in this project. I take a look at these further within the post Social Network and Influencer Analysis.
And if that is not enough he highlights that he may be able to be of some assistance with regards to understanding the criteria for word submissions “…I have worked at Oxford University Press, the publisher of OED, and I could describe the general process of how new words are included into a new edition of the dictionary – unless you want to talk to actual editors.”
In a later email he continues to discuss the process of including new words into a dictionary. “OUP maintains “Oxford English Corpus”, a collection of texts representing the modern English language. You can read more about it here: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/the-oxford-english-corpus . The corpus is collected from the web from selected sources (popular newspaper websites, scientific publications, etc, including social media sites) in order to represent all the different genres of the language currently in use. The corpus is regularly monitored for the occurrence of new words and expressions. If a certain word starts to be used significantly more often in recent times, then editors of the dictionary include them into a list of potential additions, revise it and make the eventual decision as to which new words will be included in the next edition of the dictionary.”
