Although research on multilingual writing has widely explored transliteration and, particularly, Romanization practices, we know little about how related phenomena are reconfigured in social media contexts where users can manipulate a wide range of writing resources and navigate between multiple intertwining audiences. By analysing more than one thousand tokens of forms that illustrate what appears as reversed Romanization (i.e. Englishrelated forms written with Greek characters, engreek), the study aims to discover, first, how these forms are created and, second, for what purposes, and for whom, they are mobilised at given moments. In order to address these questions, I propose a translanguaging lens for the study of multilingual digital writing and draw on the notion of trans-scripting as key for understanding such writing practices as creative and performative. My findings reveal that there is a link between trans-scripting as a creative practice and digital orality, as users orient primarily to phonetic respellings of the English-related forms and associate such spellings with particular forms of stylized speech and social personas. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the study's implications to research on the role of English as a resource for multilingual writing and current debates about language diversity and fluidity in the digital mediascape.
Today more than ever, data are widely accessible, visible and searchable, and thus available for research into new media contexts. At the same time, new and diverse data types, sources and collection methods challenge existing approaches to research ethics and raise significant and difficult questions for researchers who design, undertake and disseminate applied linguistic research in and about digital environments. Interest in the topic of internet research ethics is evident in acknowledgement of internet contexts in current recommendations for good practice by applied linguistics organisations (BAAL 2016), special mention of ethics-related issues in funding bids for methodological research projects (e.g. the 2015 ESRC call for NCRM Methodological Research Projects), and an increase in themed seminars and colloquia on the subject. This special issue arose from presentations and discussions on the ethics of online research methods, during a two-day workshop organised by the BAAL Special Interest Group in Language and New Media (16-17 April 2015, Cardiff University).Despite this momentum, dedicated publications of original research papers that offer critical and detailed discussion of ethical considerations in online data collection and analysis remain scarce, particularly compared to publications on other (less methodologically-focused) areas of applied linguistic research into digital discourse and communication. This special issue fills that gap by bringing together original research papers that share three main aims: to identify key challenges in research design and practice; to situate such challenges within wider theoretical debates about research ethics; and to share critical insights into, as well as ways of addressing, ethical issues arising from ongoing research into language and new media.These challenges in research ethics, design and practice should be viewed in relation to ongoing changes that intersect with, and shape, academic research and ethical decisions making. In this introductory paper, we contextualize and locate such changes in three main areas: (i) changes associated with the increasing expansion and differentiation of communication media and technologies and the communicative environments they afford; (ii) shifts in the conceptualization of selfhood and identity, already stirring fruitful debates in related disciplines of philosophy, sociology and cultural studies; and (iii) the shifting role and status of academic research and researchers in the contemporary world.Starting with the shifting communicative environments afforded by the increasing expansion of media technologies, ethical decision-making is complicated by relatively new possibilities and constraints in accessing, recording and spreading information and content -or 'data', as most commonly referred to in research contexts. As noted by boyd (2011: 45) internet content can be automatically recorded and archived ('persistence'), duplicated and shared ('replicability'), be visible to known and unknown audiences ('scalability') an...
Abstract:The aim of the article is to build a bridge between assumptions about publicness and ethics in traditional (mass) media research and similar issues pertaining to research ethics in so-called new media environments. The article starts off with unpacking 'publicness' as defined in authoritative ethical guidelines that regulate research on (and through) media. It points to the challenges media convergence -and, particularly, the increasingly multimodal, multiauthored and multimedial content of websites -have brought to perceptions of publicness, as previously understood in mass media research. With reference to language-focused research on multilingual digital writing in such contexts, I critically engage with ethical tensions related to collecting and analysing internet data, on the one hand, and presenting and publishing data extracts from new media contexts, on the other. Drawing on modularity as a key organising principle of web design and discourse (Androutsopoulos 2010: 208; Pauwels 2012: 251), the article proposes a modular and iterative approach to research ethics that takes into account the complex and fluid configuration of web environments and attends to the conditions of multiple authorship and multiple publics that are increasingly typical of such contexts.
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