Abstract
This is the preface to the first issue in the new Digital Modern Languages section of Modern Languages Open. It engages with the content of the articles in the issue, and also reflects on the intersections between Modern Languages research, and digital media technologies. It highlights how the articles within the special issue, through the guidance of Spence and Wells, raise the visibility of digital research and pedagogy in Modern Languages, and also engage closely with the distinctive linguistic and cultural perspectives of digital practice.
Highlights
Having a wide remit in terms of subject matter, disciplinary approach and time period, what underpins this new section is the desire both to increase the visibility of digital research and pedagogy in Modern Languages, and to engage closely with the distinctive linguistic and cultural perspectives of digital practice, offering a corrective to the dominance of Anglophone paradigms which are often employed to explain the digital, or are assumed to be universal, one-size-fits-all models
Giving a taste of the section and the other issues to come, it brings together a wide disciplinary range of contributors, with articles taking approaches ranging from cultural studies, corpora studies and digital humanities, through to sociolinguistics and pedagogy
Their contributions provide resounding evidence of the points of interconnection that have arisen in recent years between Modern Languages and critical digital studies, highlighting not merely how Modern Languages research can ‘do digital’, and how Modern Languages research can actively transform the current debates and state of play in digital studies. We might read this through what Spence and Brandao have observed in a recent piece where they note, with regard to digital pedagogy, that there is to date “little research exploring how online/digital pedagogies are mediated by languages and distinct geocultural perspectives”, and that discussion is predominantly shaped around how “‘digital’ can transform ‘languages’, rather than the other way around” (Spence and Brandao 3–4). This launch issue of the new section proposes precisely to counteract this tendency: all the contributions to this issue are informed by the notion of languages as transformative, and the authors reveal, in their different ways, how Modern Languages-informed research contributes to, revitalizes, and moves forward the very field of digital studies in itself
Summary
Having a wide remit in terms of subject matter, disciplinary approach and time period, what underpins this new section is the desire both to increase the visibility of digital research and pedagogy in Modern Languages, and to engage closely with the distinctive linguistic and cultural perspectives of digital practice, offering a corrective to the dominance of Anglophone paradigms which are often employed to explain the digital, or are assumed to be universal, one-size-fits-all models.
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