Mobile communication has an increasing impact on people's lives and society. Ubiquitous media influence the way users relate to their surroundings, and data services like text and pictures lead to a culture shaped by thumbs. Representing several years of research into the social and cultural effects of mobile phone use, this volume assembles the fascinating approaches and new insights of leadin…
“I was an ad-man once,” James Rorty writes in this classic dissection of the advertising industry. Steeped in Rorty’s leftist politics, Our Master’s Voice presents advertising as the linchpin of a capitalist economy that it also helps justify. The book set off tremors when it was published in 1934, perhaps because its author so decisively repudiated his former profession. But Rorty and …
This open access book have three themes have been central to Leydesdorff's research: (1) the dynamics of science, technology, and innovation; (2) the scientometric operationalization of these concept; and (3) the elaboration in terms of a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations. In this study, I discuss the relations among these themes. Using Luhmann's social-systems theory for…
This book shows how accessible communication, and especially easy-to-understand languages, should be designed in order to become instruments of inclusion. It examines two well-established easy-to-understand varieties: Easy Language and Plain Language, and shows that they have complementary profiles with respect to four central qualities: comprehensibility, perceptibility, acceptability and stig…
This book proposes a detailed picture of the continuities and ruptures between communication in primates and language in humans. It explores a diversity of perspectives on the origins of language, including a fine description of vocal communication in animals, mainly in monkeys and apes, but also in birds, the study of vocal tract anatomy and cortical control of the vocal productions in monkeys…
This open access edited collection examines representations of human trafficking in media ranging from British and Serbian newspapers, British and Scandinavian crime novels, and a documentary series, and questions the extent to which these portrayals reflect the realities of trafficking. It tackles the problematic tendency to under-report particular types of victim and forms of trafficking, and…
This study on language vitalization and community empowerment in the Kosovar sign language community focuses on linguistic work taking place within the framework of a development co-operation project between two NGOs in Kosovo and Finland. The long-term objectives were to improve the status of Kosovar Sign Language (KosSL) and to guarantee the human (linguistic) rights of Deaf language users …
From the first attempts at including sign language in deaf education until today, the status of sign language in deaf education has been marked by changing perspectives on deafness and the needs and abilities of deaf students. The perception of deaf individuals using a sign language and a spoken/written language as bilinguals is a relatively new phenomenon, and so is a bimodal bilingual concept…
Untangling the various approaches to language teaching and their history, Gerdi Quist maps recent thinking in language studies at university. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, drawn from educational philosophy, cultural studies, intercultural studies and language pedagogy, the author discusses the many tensions and currents in contemporary language teaching. The author puts forw…
Winner of the 2016 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize Sites of Translation illustrates the intricate rhetorical work that multilingual communicators engage in as they translate information for their communities. Blending ethnographic and empirical methods from multiple disciplines, Laura Gonzales provides methodological examples of how linguistic diversity can be studied in pra…