'Sociolects' are specialized vocabularies used by social subgroups defined by common interests or origins. We applied methods to retrieve large quantities of Twitter data based on expert-identified sociolects and then applied and developed network-analysis methods to relate sociolect use to network (sub-) structure. We show that novel methods including consideration of node populations, as well as edge counts, provide substantially enhanced performance compared to standard assortativity. We

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... ain these methods, show their utility in analyzing large corpora of social media data, and d iscuss their further extensions and potential applications. © 2013 IEEE.