Design: the rhetorical work of shaping the semiotic world

The chapter offers a distinctive perspective on the world of meaning: namely that of ‘design as semiotic work,’ which underlies all and every action of making meaning. It assumes that the work of design is ceaseless, changing the world in the course of that work. We start with a world which on the one hand is already fully designed, and which, on the other hand, is constantly re-designed in and by our semiotic actions, in relation to constantly changing social requirements. The designed world of semiotic resources furnishes us with both the material and the immaterial semiotic resources needed to deal with the semiotic demands of the social world day to day. In our actions, in redesign and in the production of designs, we constantly transform both kinds of resources: the material resources – the modes – and the non-material resources, which emerge in the materiality of modes

Skrivning og læsning i nutidens verden med multimodalitet og sociale medier

Der er mange forhold der trænger sig på i den aktuelle sproglærings- og undervisningsverden i Europa. De falder i to kategorier: sociale og kulturelle problemstillinger, og teknologiske problemstillinger. (...

Reading, learning, and 'texts' in their interaction with the digital media

How do we ‘read’ when we read in the environment of the digital media? How do we approach and engage with entirely ordinary, usual ‘objects’ such as those shown in the screen-shots below? What ‘tools’ can help us understand the changes in “reading” which have taken place over the last two or three decades, changes which have made such objects entirely common, and, for very many people, especially ‘the young’, unremarkable, common-place, normal? What practices and habits of reading do they produce? And what effects might we expect these to have, in all kinds of different ways, and, prominent among these, on ‘learning’

Soziale Kontexte der digitalen Kommunikation und Probleme der Begrifflichkeiten: „New Literacy Studies“, „Multiliteracies“ und „Multimodality“ als Beispiele

Dieser Beitrag thematisiert, inwieweit der aus der Schriftlichkeitsforschung stammende Begriff "Literacy" bzw. "Literacies" auf den Bereich der digitalen Kommunikation übertragen werden kann. Gegenwärtig wird so mit einem Begriff ein konzeptuelles Wirrwarr benannt: Die Literacy-Metapher verweist auf Ressourcen, Fähigkeiten, Technologien und ihre Potentiale, Funktionen, Kontexte usw. Zudem stellt sich die Frage, inwieweit disziplinäre und theoretische Hintergründe von traditionellen Literacy-Konzepten die aktuelle Auseinandersetzung mit neuen Phänomenen, die mit diesem Begriff bezeichnet werden, beeinflussen. Um dieses Durcheinander zu klären, differenzieren wir zwischen der sozialen, der technologischen und der semiotischen Ebene der Veränderung der Produktion von und des Umgangs mit Texten. Das Soziale steht dabei als generative Kraft im Vordergrund – eine Grundannahme, die auch die Ansätze der New Literacy Studies, der Multiliteracies und der Multimodality charakterisiert

Multimodal social semiotics: Writing in online contexts

Understanding the changing function of writing in online contexts such as blogs is central to understanding contemporary notions of literacy. This chapter describes and analyses the features of writing in online contexts, specifically in food blogs, from both a social and technological perspective. The decision to focus on food blogs is two fold: firstly food is a significant site for how individuals and societies form and express social identities, and secondly blogs are a significant digital form that involves writing – and food blogs are a common area of blogging. The chapter discusses writing as a resource for meaning making in the contemporary landscape of communication, the changing place and uses of writing, and writing genres in the context of websites and food blogs. Keeping a close focus on writing as mode it explores the complex mix of social, cultural, technological, and economic features of writing in online contexts and how these shape the function of writing. Throughout, the chapter draws on examples of food blogs to addresses questions of a social kind, including how notions of authorship and reading have changed, and the changes in relations of power between participants in online communication. These questions are intertwined with issues of a technological kind, such as, what kinds of texts and genres are produced on the site of different screens, and how the affordances of blog platforms are taken up. The ways in which the social and the technological are inextricably intertwined is pointed to throughout the chapter. For instance, contemporary principles of composition point to a melange of social and technological factors, in which the relations of authority and authorship, of power and knowledge, are being newly defined and ‘embedded’ in blog template design. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of current and future trends in relation to writing online

Development of methodologies for researching online: the case of food blogs

The expanding reach of the Internet has opened new sites for conducting social science research. More recently, attention has been given to weblogs – or blogs, as they are more commonly known – as a generative data resource. Blogs are a contemporary digital authoring platform widely kept and read across different social and cultural groups for a range of different purposes. They have become a significant aspect of online engagements; their widespread adoption has been attributed to user-friendly template designs in free access blogging platforms. In this paper, we explicate on our combined multimodal social semiotic, ethnographic and narrative methods to provide a more encompassing approach: one that is able to attend to the unique, online material, which might not be wholly illuminated by any one of the three methodologies used independently. This involves coming to terms with the different epistemological perspectives that guide and shape the cross-disciplinary collaboration. We explain the framework we developed and the research processes, including data sampling, collection, archival and analysis; provide an overview of key findings from the substantive focus of this project; discuss the overall possibilities and constraints of working with combined perspectives; as well as offer suggestions for future online research in blogging platforms

Development of methodologies for researching online: the case of food blogs

The expanding reach of the Internet has opened new sites for conducting social science research. The prominence of blogs in combination with their varied areas of focus makes them a rich source of qualitative ‘user-generated data’. However, there are significant practical challenges in empirical research on digital material online. Central among these are ethical, archival and methodological issues. We highlight these in the development of our cross-disciplinary approach. We combine multimodal social semiotic, ethnographic and narrative methods to examine blogs, in our case here, food blogs, created on Wordpress platforms. ‘Food blogs’ are a prospective source of information about parenting, feeding and caring for children, given blogs’ wide use among parents, particularly mothers, in the UK. This relatively new digital environment of the blog, in which often quite intimate portraits of family life are materialized through public ‘multimodal narratives’ of mothers, provides the context for our online research. In this paper, we explicate on our combined multimodal social semiotic, ethnographic and narrative methods to provide a more encompassing approach: one that is able to attend to the unique, online material, which might not be wholly illuminated by any one of the three methodologies used independently. This involves coming to terms with the different epistemological perspectives that guide and shape the cross-disciplinary collaboration. We explain the framework we developed and the research processes, including data sampling, collection, archival and analysis; provide an overview of key findings from the substantive focus of this project; discuss the overall possibilities and constraints of working with combined perspectives; as well as offer suggestions for future online research in blogging platforms

The mechanisms of “incidental news consumption”: An eye tracking study of news interaction on Facebook

This exploratory study examines how participants incidentally consumed news on social media through an eye tracking analysis of their visual interaction with posts on Facebook. By interaction, we refer to the attention participants gave to news (measured through the time devoted to looking at the content); how they read these news items (measured through ocular movements on the screen); and the way they engaged with this content (measured through forms of participation such as liking, commenting, or sharing news). The data were triangulated through interviews with Facebook users and an analysis of the metrics of posts from Costa Rican news organizations on Facebook from 2017 to 2020. We draw on scholarship in communication studies and multimodal discourse analysis. We argue for a more nuanced approach to what study participants did when they incidentally encountered news on social media that focuses on mechanisms, that is, the specific procedures and operations that shape user interaction with news on Facebook (such as visual fixations on parts of news posts; the visual entry points through which they begin to interact with the news; the sequences that characterize how they navigate content; and the time they spend assessing various multimodal elements).Universidad de Costa Rica/[]/UCR/Costa RicaUCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM)UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Artes y Letras::Facultad de Letras::Escuela de Filología, Lingüística y Literatur