Analyzing layering in textual design : a multimodal approach for examining cultural, linguistic and social migration in digital video

This paper explores the nature of layering noisy and moving features in video to better understand how the movement of people, their ideas, and their texts are shifting functions of design and circulation within digital contexts. Drawing from video collected as part of an ethnography of digital literacies in urban contexts, features of textual design in a music video will be examined to demonstrate how youth today produce and circulate digital products as an expression of their diverse social identities. I sketch an approach for analyzing design as embedded in the layering of image, language, gesture, color, visual, and sound effects in a participant’s music video

Linguistic Layering: social language development in the context of multimodal design and digital technologies

In our contemporary society, digital texts more readily circulate that extend beyond page-bound formats to include interactive representations such as online newsprint with hyperlinks to audio and video files. This is to say that multimodality combined with digital technologies extends grammars to include voice, visual, music, among other modes for articulating ideas beyond written language. In this paper, I discuss these multimodal designs in relation to a group of transcultural youth and their multilingual exchanges online. I examine patterns that reveal how their linguistic exchanges both drew from and extended beyond in-schools literacy practices. Using discourse and multimodal analyses, I examine data from a three-year ethnography that documents specific ways in which their multimodal design migrated across contexts and facilitated their social language development. In so doing, I describe their artistic approach to attending to language variety beyond code-switching through a process I identify as linguistic layering

Transnational Language Flows in Digital Platforms: A Study of Urban Youth and their Multimodal Text Making

In an increasingly diverse and digital society, understanding changes in contemporary communication practices that both draw from, and extend beyond, traditional principles of composition serves as an apt construct for exploring the nexus among youth, literacy and technology. This article will examine instances of urban youth exchanges in digital platforms; and, within that, consider the shifting role of authorship and writing among transnational youth. Drawing from a three-year ethnography, attention will be given to digital platforms as sites of their text making and explore how such spaces provide opportunities for social language development. As digital platforms increasingly involve ‘transduction’ and ‘transformation’ (Kress, 2003) of text making, the multimodal means for meaning making and the social factors shaping multimodal ensembles will be highlighted. The analytic approach will combine ethnographic, multimodal and sociocultural theories, method and description for accessing digital data and environments. Findings from this study will be used to explore implications for pedagogically working with students of varied participation backgrounds and to generate curricular potentials that integrate digital tools for developing collaborative and differentiated learning environments

‘User Generated Data’ from Online Patient Forums: Potentialities and Constraints for Social Research

The relationship between patients and health care professionals has changed significantly in the past two decades or so in the UK and beyond. Today’s patients are ‘consumers’ of ‘services’ who can read reviews of health care professionals and increasingly also ‘performance measures’, such as mortality rates of surgeons, before choosing where to go, and ‘rate’ (Lunich, Rossler & Hautzer 2012) the care they received, on the National Health Service’s ‘NHS Choices’ website and other online spaces. They are also at the same time increasingly recognized as ‘experts’ in their own right (Fox et al., 2005; Shaw & Baker 2004), who ought to participate in decisions previously made by doctors and other health care professionals alone. Where previously many patients relied primarily on doctors for information about symptoms, conditions and treatments, they now also turn to online health information sites and social networking sites, where they can ‘tell their stories’ and talk to other patients, discussing experiences, learning from and advising other

Pre-tertiary engagement with online learning : Exploring uses of online learning environments and digital technology for progression into and through Higher Education

This report outlines work undertaken by the Institute of Education to explore how pre-tertiary experiences of online learning influences students’ successful transitions into and through Higher Education. The work was commissioned by Pamoja Education, and the studies that were undertaken focused on the experiences of students and staff taking part in Pamoja Education courses offered as part of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. The work involved reviewing previous literature about the role of technology in preparing students for University study; undertaking a survey of International Baccalaureate students (including Pamoja Education alumni) to explore their experiences; interviewing Pamoja Education alumni as a way of explaining and elaborating these patterns of experience; and asking teachers to reflect on how they worked with learners to support them online. Each of these areas of work is reported in a separate section of this report

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

‘I enjoyed it because … you could do whatever you wanted and be creative’: three principles for participatory research and pedagogy

The complexity of many children’s lives can result in their ideas being neither understood nor included in mainstream opportunities for learning, particularly children who are living with disadvantage. With a focus on developing ethical and inclusive principles for participatory research and pedagogy, this paper reports on a pilot project where we worked with young, hard-to-reach individuals across four sites in England to enable them to design and carry out research about their experiences and views of disadvantage. Here, we present snapshots of the young participants’ choices of research topics and methods, which reflected their own lives and interests, and led to powerful visualizations of the complexity of child and youth disadvantage. Reflecting back on the project, we discuss effective ways to initiate and sustain participatory research that can enable young researchers to be involved as active and empowered agents at every stage of the research process. We also consider the implications for developing participatory pedagogy, with researchers working alongside educators to create school cultures that foster belonging and genuinely support all students’ expertise and ways of knowing by looking beyond the school buildings and into their lives in the wider community