Congratulations to Dr Jonathon Adams, who was recently awarded his PhD for a thesis entitled “Analysing the construction of meaning with mediating digital texts in face-to-face interactions”, examined by Professor David Barton and Dr Sigrid Norris.
Jonathon’s research examined how people communicate using a variety of different modes when they are interacting around a mediating digital text, combining literacy studies with multimodal interaction analysis and mediated discourse theory. He video-recorded Japanese learners of English talking about digital texts they had chosen themselves, ranging from Youtube videos to news pages to still photographs, and analysed in great detail the different modes and combinations of modes that were employed to make meaning around these texts.
His work shows the characteristics of such digitally-mediated communicative events, exploring how the digital text people interact around can be seen to impact upon mode use, language use, and proxemic relations between participants.
Since most of my interactions with my family members now involve putting our heads closely together around screens showing Minecraft, Twitter, or Angry Birds Star Wars, I think of his work often!
Literacies Log 