Culture, Language and the New Media

Research Area 5: Culture, Language and the New Media

The key concept of this research area is the dual functions both of language and of the new media. Language is, on the one hand, a communicative instrument by means of which we refer to cultural entities in the process of verbal interaction; on the other hand, it is a vehicle of culture and a cultural product in and of itself. In a similar vein, the new media provide channels for communicative processes (leading, for example, to new forms of written speech in Internet-based communication), but also influence cultural processes and shape cultural entities (as the emergence of book-printing did in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries).

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Interdisciplinary Approach

In terms of the material dimension of culture, linguistic and medial forms and structures function as semantic systems and repositories of cultural entities. Issues of politics and education and their cultural relevance (for example, multilingualism in Europe), as well as their pedagogical implications (such as the use of digital media in e-learning scenarios), constitute the social dimension. The cognitive dimension refers to the description of language and media as vehicles of cultural identity (as in language contact situations). The activities in this research area foster an interdisciplinary approach to culture, language and the new media in which linguistics and research into the new media are interlinked to contribute to a better understanding of a wide range of relevant dynamic concepts, such as the evolution of scholarly communication as a specific and linguistically marked practice of encoding cultural knowledge, or the emergence of creolized genres in the World Wide Web.

Looking back

In July 2009, the Research Area "Language, Culture and the New Media"  hosted the international conference Web as Culture. Ethnographic, Linguistic & Didactic Perspectives. This international symposium tackled the processes and practices of constructing and perpetuating memories, knowledge, language, social structures and cultural narratives in the World Wide Web.

Furthermore, the Research Area presented research-related activities at Justus Liebig University's Open Day on 20 October 2007: visitors were invited to join in for a game of scrabble on a huge Smartboard, linguistic corpora were made accessible to visitors so that visitors could generate their own concordances of English words in authentic and typical contexts, and the chances and problems of learning foreign languages with learning software were discussed by referring to video recordings of classroom interactions at German grammar schools.

Members of the research area were involved in the Symposium "Norms in Educational Linguistics" (1.-2. September 2008). It brought together scholars from linguistics, language teaching and cultural studies to allow a comprehensive view on the concept of norms in Educational Linguistics.

In the current semester, the Research Area 5 organized the workshop "Corpus - Communication - Culture: Linguistics as Study of Culture" which took place on 4 November 2011, bringing together methodologies from linguistics and cultural studies. Currently, we are working on the publication of the findings of the workshop.

Participating scholars

• Ivana Barkijevic
• Natalja Bekhta
• Nora Benitt
• Tobias Bernaisch
• Sarah Dejanovic
• Prof. Dr. Helmuth Feilke
• Prof. Dr. Thomas Gloning
• Marianna Hebborn
• Prof. Dr. Mathilde Hennig
• Amy Huang
• Christopher Koch
• Viktoria Künstler
• Prof. Dr. Katrin Lehnen
• Prof. Dr. Henning Lobin
• Prof. Dr. Joybrato Mukherjee
• Katharina Müller
• Gabriela de Oliveira Marques
• Prof. Dr. Dietmar Rösler
• Sven Saage
• Lisa Schüler
• Vera Stadelmann
• Marja Zibelius

Speakers

• Christopher Koch
• Sven Saage
• Prof. Dr. Henning Lobin

Forum

stud.IP group of the Research Area 5