Elsevier has recently announced the Article of the Future project (I’ve learnt about it via Tony Hirst’s blog post) that aims to “redefine how a scientific article is presented online”. They also released two prototype articles from the field of cell research to illustrate their approach. The original article’s format follows the usual page layout and text organization.
However, the article of the future not just looks different, it also feels different. Look:
The text is broken up into more manageable bits and these are navigated by tabs. The first page features the title, authors and their affiliation (in a pop-up window), abstract as well as bulleted article highlights, author interview (audio or video) and a visualization of the article’s contents. The last three features are to assist the readers in deciding which articles to read and which not and also get more easily to the parts of the article they are interested in most.
Articles of the future will also display figures in ways that will connect them. This will allow readers to have a closer look at the ones they are interested in most and drill down through related supplemental figures.
This all sounds great. I wonder though how this will affect the language of science. How will the interaction between author and reader change? Can’t wait to find out. 
Filed under: Discourse, Linguistics
The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) is a corpus of transcripts of 151 audio-recordings of naturally-occurring, face-to-face interactions among 753 speakers of different first language backgrounds using English as a lingua franca. Impressive! And available free of charge for non-profit research purposes.
And a word about the people involved: the project director is Barbara Seidlhofer, and her team: Angelika Breiteneder, Theresa Klimpfinger, Stefan Majewski and Marie-Luise Pitzl.
Filed under: Corpora, Discourse, Linguistics
I’m leaving to Croatia for a conference in Osijek. Papers will deal with space and time in language as well as language in space and time. Space and time are of course connected but I’ll focus only on place in discourse. Here’s my abstract (thank you Lesley for the idea ):
Filed under: Corpora, Discourse
Textual priming is at the heart of a research project lead by prof. Hoey. His team (Mike Scott, Michaela Mahlberg and Matthew Brook O’Donnell) will investigate the textual primings of lexical items in hard news. You can learn more about the project at Lexical Priming.
You can also view a few presentations there and read a paper. Probably more will come in due time so it’s a site worth watching.
Filed under: Corpora, Discourse
Aston Corpus Symposium
I’ve just listened to Micheal Hoey’s presentation at the Aston Corpus Symposium last May. It’s something you shouldn’t miss if you’re interested in discourse studies. He starts by explaining what lexical priming is and then goes on to discuss examples that show how we are primed to use certain words in text initial position in a certain genre. It’s fascinating.
Interestingly, when someone mentioned how useful this method was for critical discourse analysis, Hoey suggested that CDA could be redeemed if more detailed linguistic evidence were found for its claims. I think he’s absolutely right, but then I also think that linguistic interpretation of texts could be hugely improved by providing detailed contextual evidence for linguistic claims. I’ve read too many papers written by text linguists who hadn’t researched the context of the text in question (the discursive and social practices involved) but just came to conclusions about the text’s context based on some common sense. Centuries ago common sense told people the world was flat!
Filed under: Corpora, Discourse, Linguistics
