Researching multilingual practices in mediatized communication

This workshop explores the epistemological and methodological consequences of studying digital communicative practices. If communication increasingly takes place in mediated environments, how can linguistic ethnography adjust its toolkit to online contexts of production, consumption, and circulation?

In sociolinguistics, mediatization is seen as an ongoing process of socio-cultural change driven by the saturation of mediated communication (Androutsopoulos 2014, Van Hout & Burger 2015). In linguistic anthropology, mediatization is defined in the broad sense as ‘institutional practices that reflexively link processes of communication to processes of commoditization’ (Agha 2011: 163) and in the more narrow sense as ‘the representational choices involved in the production and editing of text, image, and talk in the creation of media products’ (Jaffe 2009: 572). Terms such as virtual ethnography, network ethnography, netnography, cyberethnography, and webnography indicate researchers' attempts at transferring principles and techniques of offline ethnography to computer-mediated communication.

For this workshop we bring together 4 speakers adopting a linguistic ethnographic research perspective on digital data, with a specific focus on multilingualism.