This document summarizes a seminar on analyzing specialized discourse in the digital age. It discusses how digital media has impacted discourse analysis by creating more innovation, multimodality, intertextuality, and diversity. It also notes challenges like less generic stability and rapid developments. The document examines issues for discourse analysis like context, text, interaction and ethics. It provides an example analysis of video methods articles from the journal JoVE, exploring questions about data collection and emerging practices.

1. On analyzing specialized discourse in the
age of digital media
Christoph A. Hafner
Department of English, City University of Hong Kong
Seminar presented at The Polytechnic University of
Hong Kong, November 4, 2019

2. Overview
1. Digital media and communication
2. Issues for discourse analysis in the digital age
3. Research processes: Video methods articles

3. Digital media in contemporary
communication

4. Affordances
Ways of
doing
Ways of
relating
Ways of
meaning
Ways of
being
Ways of
thinking
Jones & Hafner (2012)

5. Challenges for discourse analysis
• More innovation
• More multimodality
• More intertextual complexity
• More hybridity
• More diversity
• More rapid developments in practices
• Less generic stability

6. Interest in discourse and digital
practices in applied lingustics
Digital
literacy
practices
Reordering of
social
contexts
Research
opportunities
Virtual workplaces
Legal negotiations
Online learning
Online affinity
spaces
e.g. healthcare
(Jones, 2015)
e.g. Hafner, Li & Miller, 2015
How do we collect data in an
ethical way?
How do we analyse it?
How do we process the data
that we find?
Critical literacies
Digital genres
& interactions

7. Scientists urgently need to be able to
speak with clarity to funders, policy-
makers, students, the general public, and
even other scientists.
I’d like to try a playful experiment. Would
you be willing to have a go at writing your
own explanation of what a flame is – one
that an 11-year-old would find intelligible,
maybe even fun? The Centre for
Communicating Science is looking for new
ways to light up people’s minds with
science, and you might point the way.
We’ll try out the entries on real 11-year-
olds and see which work best. (Alda, 2012,
p. 1019)

9. Focusing on digital media
Digital media
interactions are situated
Digital media
interactions entail social
practices

10. Issues for discourse analysis in
the digital age
Context, text, interaction, ethics
Hafner (2018a)

11. Context
The physical environment The virtual environment The screen environment

12. Text
• Hypertext
• Multimodality
• Interactivity

13. Live stream Gamer
Chat area

14. Interaction
• Conversations are hard to identify, partly because they
are persistent: where do they start and end?
• Conversations are less coherent: there are 'hanging'
conversations, unanswered threads, multiple threads
at the same time
• Conversations cross platforms and spaces and
therefore context becomes harder to establish
• Conversations are multimodal and may include non-
linguistic elements like hyperlinks and multimedia
• The system becomes a participant, i.e. some messages
are generated not by the user but by the social media
itself

15. Ethics: sources of challenges
• Changing conceptions of privacy
• Persistence: tendency for digital
communications to be permanently recorded
• Searchability: the ability of users to locate
these permanent records

16. Ethics: key questions
• Can we treat publically accessible information
as public information?
• Should the human research model of ethics be
applied to research into digital interactions?
• How can we protect anonymity, with
affordances of persistence and searchability?

17. Specialized discourse
Studying a specialized genre: VMAs
Hafner (2018b)

18. Some key questions
• What emerging practices should scholars
focus on?
• What social and intertextual contexts are
these practices embedded in?
• What questions do we need to ask about such
practices?
• How can we get the answers to those
questions?
• What challenges are we likely to encounter?

19. JoVE began in response to a universally experienced problem within
the world of biomedical science: today only 10-30% of published
scientific articles can be successfully reproduced. As a result,
scientists and researchers around the world end up spending months
and years of time, effort, and funding simply trying to replicate the
findings of other labs instead of advancing toward new discoveries.
(www.jove.com, About page, retrieved January 2017)

20. Established
December 2006
Listed in PubMed,
Scopus
JCR Impact factor of
1.232 in 2016
Video methods
articles in 13 areas
Science education
section

21. [Video clip of a JoVE VMA]

22. What makes JoVE an interesting site for the study
of specialized discourse?

23. Data sources and analytical
methods

24. Multi-perspective genre analysis
• Community texts
– JoVE website texts
– Instructions for authors
• Interviews with specialist informants
– Moshe Pritsker, CEO and co-founder of JoVE
– ‘Raymond Wong’, Biologist at CityU
• Texts: VMAs in biology
– Videos (one per year, 2006-2016, highly cited)
– Written protocols
– Comments

27. [Video clip of a JoVE VMA]

28. Comments
While attempting this procedure it is important to
remember that each of the sixty-four steps is critical and
has to be performed with hundred per cent accuracy.
(VMA6, narration, Researcher’s Conclusion)

29. What does it all mean for the development of
specialized communication? What does it mean for
scholarship? What does it mean for pedagogy?

30. The intertextual communicative
context

31. Audience and purpose
By allowing scientists, educators and students to see
the intricate details of cutting-edge experiments rather
than read them in text articles, JoVE increases STEM
research productivity and student learning, saving their
institutions time and money.
(JoVE website)
It saves a lot of time.
(Wong, interview)

32. Audience
Audiences are practising researchers, practical scientists
who work in the laboratory. So everywhere between
professors to post doc to graduate students to
undergraduate, including technicians, basically everybody
who does experiments with their own hands and everybody
who sometimes has to guide these experiments. And that
both in academia but also in bio-pharma industry.
It’s a professional resource for professionals.
(Pritsker, Interview)

33. Process of text construction
1. Manuscript preparation;
2. Editorial and peer review;
3. Scripting and filming;
4. Video editing;
5. Proofing and publication.
(JoVE website)

34. The need for the JoVE team
Our first idea was that eventually, after making a few
videos and having them as an example, scientists would
submit their own, would make and submit their own
videos. And it didn’t work. And the reason it doesn’t work
is because making a scientific video is much more
complex than making a video for interview for example,
right? …So we realise that we have to do it for them… if
we want this information out of their heads, we have to
do it.
(Pritsker, Interview)

35. Animators
Authors
Principals
Scientists
Scientists, JoVE
production team,
script writers,
visual designers
Scientists, voice
actors

36. How do we reach an understanding of the context?

37. Synthesis

38. Developments in the analysis of
specialized discourse in the digital age
• A focus on discourse as social action
– Situated within a communicative context
– Studied from multiple perspectives
• A focus on affordances of media
– Diversified audiences
– Multimodal forms of representation
– Collaborative construction of genres
– Hybrid, often less stable discursive forms

39. Thank you