Digital Orality

This volume showcases innovative research on dialectal, vernacular, and other forms of “oral,” speech-like writing in digital spaces. The shift from a predominantly print culture to a digital culture is shaping people's identities and relationships to one another in important ways. Using examples from distinct international contexts and language varieties (kiAmu, Lebanese, Ettounsi, Shanghai Wu, Welsh English, and varieties of American English) the authors examine how people use unexpected codes, scripts, and spellings to say something about who they are or aspire to be. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the impact of social media on language use, style, and orthography, as well as those with a broader interest in literacy, communication, language contact, and language change.

Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilised as a consequence of being archived. Fieldwork reports by linguists and anthropologists in three continents provide concrete examples of overcoming barriers -- ethical, practical and conceptual -- in digital documentation projects. Oral Literature In The Digital Age is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.

This volume invites the reader into the world of pragmatic and discourse studies in Japanese popular culture. Through “character-speak”, the book analyzes quoted speech in light (graphic) novels, the effeminate onee kotoba in talk shows, narrative character in keetai (mobile phone) novels, floating whispers in manga, and fictionalized dialects in television drama series. Explorations into conversational interaction, internal monologue, rhetorical figures, intertextuality, and the semiotic mediation between verbal and visual signs reveal how speakers manipulate language in performing playful “characters” and “characteristics”. Most prominent in the discourse of Japanese popular culture is its “fluid orality”. We find the essential oral nature in and across genres of Japanese popular culture, and observe seamless transitions among styles and speech variations. This fluidity is understood as a feature of polyphonic speech initiated not by the so-called ideal singular speaker, but by a multiple and often shifting interplay of one’s speaking selves performing as various characters. Challenging traditional (Western) linguistic theories founded on the concept of the autonomous speaker, this study ventures into open and embracing pragmatic and discourse studies that inquire into the very nature of our speaking selves.

The AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report is a publication which looks at the impact of the internet on our society. Its aim is to delve into the transformation happening within the arts and culture sector and to help entities and professionals create experiences that are in line with the expectations of 21st century consumers. The first part of the 2018 edition brings together texts from professionals in the arts and culture sector as well as from experts in the digital field, in order to get up to speed on important issues regarding main trends. Every year the second part of the edition (Focus) looks at the changes happening among readers and reading material. The aim is to outline a map of digital reading material. Mario Tascón takes a close look at our most connected cities that have been created by the latest interconnected devices and the Internet of Things. He then analyses the role that cultural spaces are destined to perform within these cities. Next, JosО Manuel MenОndez and David Jimeno Bermejo describe the latest challenges faced by immersive technologies and its growing role within the ecosystem of digital content. The Experimental UNIT of the University of Valencia reviews its experience with the use of digital design and analyses how the latest possibilities of mobile devices can offer resources for the construction of the museography debate. Jovanka Adzic discusses a burning issue. In her analysis on the evolution of social networks and their continuously expanding influence on our way of life, she also takes a look at the problem of fake news on the internet. Jovanka goes on to refl ect on the competitive advantage of FANG obtained through large volumes of social data, within an economy driven by Big Data. Elena Neira takes a look at the impact of consumption of on-screen culture and the business models that are based on subscriptions— the so-called “Netfl ix model”. And Emma Rodero – in line with this year’s central theme of Focus – examines the theme of orality and analyses the growing influence of sound and voice in the digital era. Pablo GervЗs builds on the concept of computational creativity and its impact on literary creation. We have a total of seven articles by renowned experts to help us learn and reflect on the changes affecting our society as a whole and to give us a glimpse of new opportunities for the sector of arts and culture. Every year the second part of the edition (Focus) reflects and explains – through the use of best-practice examples both nationally and internationally – the biggest changes happening among readers and reading material in the digital era. The main objective of this section is to present a unified view on the matter. Authors Luis Miguel Cencerrado, Elisa Yuste and Javier Celaya outlines a map to help us navigate with ease through all types of texts; highlighting the role of the reader in the current context of hybrid literature (paper, digital, audio, visual, transmedia, etc.) which is favoured by the digital era we live in. The annual review is published in both Spanish and English, in PDF and EPUB format and can be downloaded for free under the licence of Creative Commons. The publication can be downloaded on the AcciЧn Cultural EspaЦola website in the section digital publications. A copy can also be obtained from major distributors of national and international digital books.

Audiobooks are rapidly gaining popularity with widely accessible digital downloading and streaming services. This book engages with the digital form of audiobooks, framing audiobook listening as both a remediation of literature and an everyday activity that creates new reading experiences that can be compared to listening to music or the radio. Have and Stougaard Pedersen challenge the historical notion that audiobook listening is a compensatory activity or a second-rate reading experience, while seeking to establish a dialogue between sound studies and media studies, comparative literature, aesthetics, and sociology.

This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other. This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.

Historically, or so we would like to believe, the story of everyday life for many people included regular, definitive moments of news consumption. Journalism, in fact, was distributed around these routines: papers were delivered before breakfast, the evening news on TV buttressed the transition from dinner to prime time programming, and radio updates were centred around commuting patterns. These habits were organized not just around specific times but occurred in specific places, following a predictable pattern. However, the past few decades have witnessed tremendous changes in the ways we can consume journalism and engage with information – from tablets, to smartphones, online, and so forth – and the different places and moments of news consumption have multiplied as a result, to the point where news is increasingly mobile and instantaneous. It is personalized, localized and available on-demand. Day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year, technology moves forward, impacting more than just the ways in which we get news. These fundamental shifts change what news ‘is’. This book expands our understanding of contemporary news audiences and explores how the different places and spaces of news consumption change both our experiences of journalism and the roles it plays in our everyday lives. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

Orality formed us. Orality forms us. Orality will forever form us. Orality is a central theme of our lives. In this fast-paced world, few Christian workers take the time to look back to learn and build on the lessons of the past. Wise Christian workers, however, do not forge ahead into new horizons without first investigating past horizons. They understand in this complex world there are too many strong shoulders of the past to be overlooked. The dozen practiced researchers contributing to New and Old Horizons in the Orality Movement offer such inquirers wisdom from the past that can boldly and boundlessly improve the future of the modern-day orality movement.