Discourse, Context and Media 7 (2015) 1–2
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Discourse, Context and Media
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dcm
Editorial
Discourse, Context & Media: Retrospect – Prospect
As the incoming Editor, it is with great pleasure that I look back
on the work that has been established in this journal in its first
years. Discourse, Context & Media was launched in 2012, creating a
publishing venue that has brought together scholarship with a
shared focus on the themes reflected in the title of the journal. In
his inaugural editorial, Greg Myers (2012) defined the first and last
of those key terms, which I reiterate here:
Discourse is language as social practice, so we are interested in any
analysis that deals with how people use language, rather than
simply describing grammar or lexis. […] Media are any means that
extend possibilities of communication, from phones and broad-
casting to Internet media, street signs, computer games, or graffiti.
In its first three years, Discourse, Context & Media has published over
60 articles, with papers that have consolidated and pushed forward our
understanding of language as social practice and which have explored
a rich diversity of communicative media. Studies of mainstream news
and television genres have sat alongside the analysis of emerging
media sites and platforms, such as blogs, forums, social network sites,
video-sharing sites, online chat streams, games and reviews to name
but a few. Diversity is also reflected in the national and linguistic
contexts which have been explored, including case studies from
African, Asian, American, Australasian and European cultures. Nor has
the analysis of discourse in these various mediated contexts been
limited to a single methodological approach. As Bolander and Locher
(2014) pointed out in their recent overview in Discourse, Context &
Media, the methods for analysing computer-mediated discourse in
particular are varied and often need to be combined in ways that
account for the reconfigured and innovative language practices which
can be interpreted in relation to both localised interactional contexts
and broader, socio-cultural contexts. The papers in Discourse, Context &
Media over the last three years have thus employed qualitative,
quantitative and mixed methods and demonstrated the many ways
in which existing frameworks from the study of discourse from the
fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, sociology and media
studies continue to be relevant but also open to revision in the light
of new (and old) media contexts. Bednarek and Caple (2012) for
example, revisited the familiar notion of news values, but showed how
these were discursively constructed not only through verbal choices
but also the visual resources that are increasingly considered important
in the dissemination of the news reports in different formats. Within
this diversity, it is perhaps no surprise to find that the papers in the last
three years have increasingly drawn attention to the complexity of
what is entailed in the analysis of discourse, context and media, where
the flows of information are not easily contained and where bound-
aries are not easily drawn between textual, cultural or national contexts
or between the online and offline forms of communication. For
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2015.02.001
2211-6958/& 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
example, in Androutsopoulos and Jufferman's (2014) Special Issue on
Digital Superdiversity, the complex negotiation of identities and the
very nature of what counts as language and languaging come under
debate from a range of different perspectives.
Looking ahead, the articles which will appear in this first issue
of Discourse, Context & Media in 2015 continue to reflect the
disciplinary, methodological and medial diversity of the journal's
scope. The papers draw on data from different types of media
(news magazines, Twitter, Facebook, printed pamphlets and web
pages) and use different kinds of approaches, from the micro-
analytic detail put forward in Giles and Stommel's paper through to
the large scale overviews enabled by ‘big data’ approaches used by
Puschmann. Following this, there will be a Special Issue on
Authenticity and Normativity in Social Media and several more
special issues are planned. We welcome more scholarship along
the lines of what you have seen in the first years of this journal and
with a broad range of foci on the discourse(s) that are found across
media and contexts. There are still areas that are under-repre-
sented, and if you feel that there are topics that would benefit from
bringing together research from different disciplines concerned
with discourse, please contact me, and we can consider commis-
sioning a special issue in that area in the future.
I am also delighted to announce that Discourse, Context & Media is
now affiliated with the Special Interest Group for Language and New
Media run by the British Association for Applied Linguistics. Like the
journal, this Special Interest Group was launched in 2012 with the aim
of building a sense of community amongst scholars carrying out
empirical analysis of the language practices which take place in
mediated contexts, especially computer-mediated contexts. The Lan-
guage and New Media Special Interest Group holds regular events,
which thus far have been based in the United Kingdom. Our workshop
in 2013 explored research methods used for different kinds of digital
discourse. In April 2015, the group's workshop will focus on the ethical
challenges that arise and solutions that have been put forward to
tackling the complexities of research in online contexts. You can find
out more about the group and its events on the web pages hosted by
the British Association of Applied Linguistics (http://www.baal.org.uk/
sig_lnm.html). The affiliation between the group and this journal
consolidates this area of enquiry as a burgeoning field of research;
one marked by high quality research that is developed in the context of
research communities and conversations that often shape that research
in its early stages. You can look forward to reports of events run by the
group in future issues of Discourse, Context & Media.
The process of editing a journal and producing the papers that are
published therein is by no means a solo endeavour. Let me take this
occasion to thank key people, without whom the development of the
journal and indeed, this very issue, would not have been possible. Most
2 Editorial / Discourse, Context and Media 7 (2015) 1–2
importantly, I am grateful to our outgoing editor, Professor Greg Myers
for the tireless efforts and the work he has invested in establishing this
journal during its early years. The scholars who have served on the
Editorial Board or been involved with the journal thus far as authors
and reviewers will know that Greg has served as Editor with generosity
of spirit and great care, not only for the quality of the papers that have
been published, but also for the people who have authored, reviewed
and produced those papers. He has set a high standard; I can only do
my best to follow likewise. I also want to thank Christopher Tancock,
Sten Hansson and Swetha Soman for their assistance in producing the
journal. The scholars who provide reviews of our submissions help
maintain the quality of the work that has been published in Discourse,
Context & Media. Over 145 reviewers have commented on submissions
to the journal; I am deeply grateful for their efforts to give constructive
criticism and help authors refine their work. Lastly, without our
authors, the journal would cease to exist. So let me close by reiterating
the invitation that Greg posed to scholars when the journal was first
published, to consider contributing to the journal by submitting work
for review, to support our work by reviewing articles or by putting
forward ideas for special issues that might be published in the future. I
look forward to hearing from you.
References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis, Andreas, Jufferman, 2014. Digital Language Practices in
Superdiversity: Introduction. Discourse, Context & Media, 4-5, 1–6.
Bednarek, M., Caple, H., 2012. Value added’: Language, image and news values.
Discourse, Context & Media 1 (2–3), 103–113.
Bolander, B., Locher, M., 2014. Doing sociolinguistic research on computer-mediated
data: a review of four methodological issues. Discourse, Context & Media 3,
14–26.
Myers, Greg, 2012. Welcome to Discourse. Context & Media. Discourse, Context &
Media, 1 (1), A1–A2.
Ruth Page
University of Leicester, UK
Available online 19 February 2015