Digital Literacies

With our increasing use of digital and online media, the way we interact with these forms of communication is having an enormous impact on our literacy and learning. In Digital Literacies, Julia Gillen argues that to a substantial extent Linguistics has failed to rise to the opportunities presented by studying language in digital contexts. Assuming no existing knowledge, and drawing from a wide range of research projects, she presents a range of approaches to the study of writing and reading language online. Challenging some of the existing concepts, Digital Literacies traces key ideas through both the history of literacy studies and contemporary approaches to language online, including linguistic ethnography and corpus linguistics. Examples, taken from real life studies, include the use of digital technologies in everyday life, online teenage communities and professional use of Twitter in journalism. Within each chapter, the relevant research methods used are explored and then tied to the theory underpinning them. This book is an innovative and essential read for all those studying and researching applied linguistics, particularly in the areas of literacy and multimodality, at an upper undergraduate and postgraduate level. The title will also be of interest to those working with new media in the fields of Media and Communication Studies, Cultural Psychology, and Education.

1."No need to build caves," – Digital literacies: an introduction 2. "Linguistics is a discipline with its own history," - Language, linguistics and digital literacies 3. "Different people understand different aspects of it, but nobody knows it all," - An autoethnographic approach 4. "Hello" - A dialogical approach to researching learning by new users of communications technologies 5. "SPbT whispers: Unsquishing Rowan SParker," - Approaches to the discourses of Schome Park 6. "I fall in and out of love with Twitter," - A case study of the development of Twitter in a professional, public media ecology: Jonathan Agnew and cricket 7. "Knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the whole world," –Conclusions

Julia Gillen is Director of the Literacy Research Centre and Senior Lecturer in Digital Literacies at Lancaster University, UK. She is co-editor of Virtual Literacies (Routledge, 2013).