We are inviting contributions to an edited volume on:

Linguistic and multimodal approaches to the analysis of digital stories.

Editors:

Isabel Alonso-Belmonte (isabel.alonso@uam.es). Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain)

M Dolores Porto-Requejo (mdolores.porto@uah.es). Universidad de Alcalá de Henares (Spain).

Short Description

Digital stories are brief, multimodal narratives by which people who are not professional in literature nor computer technologies attend to a workshop and learn to create a short narrative, combining digital images and photos with their own recorded voice and then publishing them on the Internet. Digital storytelling arises as a genre from the need to share personal stories with other people and to "go digital". Digital stories were born in California at the Centre for Digital Storytelling in the 1990s and has since spread far and wide. Unfortunately, current research on digital storytelling is not abundant and has mainly focused on the study of the role that these personal narratives have in the construction of the self and cultural identity and on their analysis as a societal phenomenon with democratising potential (Burguess, 2006; Lundby, 2008; Lambert 2013). There are also studies which focus on their structure from a Post-Labovian perspective (Porto Requejo & Alonso Belmonte, 2014), their emergence as a new multimodal genre (Alexander & Levin, 2008; Alonso Belmonte et al. 2013) and on an increasing number of practical applications, especially in advertising (Gleason 2012; Handler Miller 2013) and for pedagogical, educational purposes (McLellan 2007; Roland 2006; Rossiter & Garcia 2010, among others).

Contributions

This volume intends to bring together a number of international experts working on digital storytelling from a linguistic and multimodal perspective. We invite empirically grounded contributions from any theoretical framework (Systemic Functional Grammar, Language for Specific Purposes, Critical Discourse Analysis, Applied Linguistics, Stylistics, Cognitive Linguistics, etc.) on different strands about digital stories, such as: cross-cultural approaches, intergenerational communication, the multimodal expression of emotions, voices and identities, the use of semiotic resources in digital genres… We are also interested in different methodological approaches to the study of digital narratives and in issues of transcription and annotation of multi-semiotic events. Of course, suggestions on further lines and topics of study are also welcome.

If you are interested, please send a tentative title by February 15 to isabel.alonso@uam.es and mdolores.porto@uah.es. By March 1 please send us an abstract (300-600 words) referring to framework, methods and results, and also indicating how your contribution relates to the overall contents of the volume as sketched above. We will check your contribution for cohesion with the rest of the volume and notify you within two weeks whether we will ask you to send in a complete paper.

If you need any additional information, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Isabel Alonso-Belmonte (isabel.alonso@uam.es)

M Dolores Porto-Requejo (mdolores.porto@uah.es)