Introducing ‘New Directions in Digital Modern Languages Research’: A Digital Modern Languages Open Special Collection

We are delighted to introduce ‘New Directions in Digital Modern Languages Research’ the latest special collection from Modern Languages Open. These articles result from an open call that sought out new and emerging research at the intersection of Modern Languages and digital culture, media, and technologies. The Collection is intentionally wide-ranging and transdisciplinary in focus, and it includes research on a range of geographic, cultural and linguistic contexts in Latin America, Europe, Africa and the Arabian Peninsula that falls broadly into three areas: digital archives and memory studies, language use in the digital space, and digital storytelling and literature.

Here, the co-ordinating editors of the collection, Naomi Wells (School of Advanced Study), Paul Spence (King’s College London), Orhan Elmaz (University of St Andrews) and Saskia Huc-Hepher (University of Westminster) discuss the creative and diverse ways Modern Languages researchers are responding to a rapidly changing digital research landscape.

Read the the collection Open Access >

Q&A with the Guest Editors:

This is your first issue created through an open call for submissions. What was the most rewarding and/or surprising part of actively incorporating a trans- and interdisciplinary approach to research for this Collection?

One of the most rewarding aspects of this call has been providing a platform for early career researchers to disseminate their exciting work, particularly through the open access format of MLO. Seeing the new insights and sensibilities that these language researchers bring to the digital and knowing that they have the potential to reach a wide audience thanks to the paywall-free publishing environment has been a hugely gratifying aspect of the editorial process. The researchers’ deep cultural understandings and their training in close reading present new layers of meaning that would likely be missed by digital humanities scholars approaching the subjects from a monolingual anglophone perspective. Perhaps the most (pleasantly) surprising aspect of the open call was the breadth of languages represented in the contributions. While some of the usual suspects, such as German, are missing, we were delighted to receive submissions from an unusual linguistic range, covering Arabic and Emilian to Esperanto and Irish, not forgetting the romance languages along the way! And while the absence of Asian languages and other non-European “minority” languages represents an undeniable limitation of the Collection, we are pleased that its geographical reach serves a positive decentring function. In short, the scope of the collection is testimony to modern languages having a life well beyond the usual literary and/or historical canon, and well beyond the core languages often included in disciplinarily narrow interpretations of “modern languages”.

Woman and man sat at a table looking at a computer monitor together. — Woman and man sitting in front of a computer monitor, Desola Lanre-Ologun Unsplash.

In the introduction to this collection, you describe the desire to avoid privileging particular linguistic and cultural perspectives within its contents. In the light of this, can you describe some of the challenges you perceive facing multilingual and transcultural studies and practices going forward?

While we believe the Collection demonstrates that digital languages research is a vibrant and diverse area of study, there are undeniable challenges facing multilingual and transcultural researchers, particularly in the UK context in which the editors and many of the contributors are based. As we highlight in our introduction, while doctoral and early career researchers are often at the forefront of the digital research landscape, we need to ensure they have access to more sustainable career pathways that allow them to advance their research. Ongoing threats to languages education are a particular concern, but it is also important to foster an inclusive understanding of Modern Languages research that is open to a broad range of languages and transdisciplinary approaches. More widely, monolingual and anglophone biases in digital research and infrastructures remain a major obstacle. However, we are encouraged by the increasing international interest in strengthening multilingual Digital Humanities research, to which we hope this Special Issue can contribute.

In what ways do you think modern languages research more broadly can build on existing methodological and analytical approaches in more accessible ways?

One key aim of this Collection has been to show the range of tools and methods now available for modern languages research. In addition to demonstrating how they may lead to new approaches to existing research questions – or lead to new kinds of research questions – in many cases the contributions to this special collection also have a pedagogical impact in making the research methods themselves more accessible to researchers who do not necessarily have strong training in ‘technical’ matters.

Aerial view of a lecture theatre, looking downwards at the people sat in the chairs below. — Aerial view of a lecture theatre by Mikael Kristenson, Unsplash.

In other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences (HSS) there are already strong networks exploring the use of digital methods – as evidenced by publications and events with labels such as ‘digital classics’ or ‘digital history’. What we have attempted to do here, and what the ‘digital modern languages’ section as a whole attempts to do, is to foment a network of theory and practice associated with the critical application of digital methods in modern languages. In some cases, this will merely involve using digital methods used throughout HSS, but we believe that there are particular affordances and challenges in applying such methods to languages-focused and/or multilingual spaces, which this special collection highlights.

Articles contained within the Collection:

‘Introduction: New Directions in Digital Modern Languages’ by Saskia Huc-Hepher, Paul Spence, Naomi Wells and Orhan Elmaz

‘Developing a Crosslingual Database in WissKI: a Transcontinental Research Collaboration’ by Rüdiger Seesemann, Britta Frede, Myriel Fichtner and Philip Eisenhuth

‘Speculative Black Digital Territories in Brazil’ by Edward King

‘The GIF that Cries: Digital Representations of Peru’s Post-conflict Condition’ by Jessee Leonard

‘Animated Storytelling: Student-Created TALES in Irish-Language Learning’ by Rose Ní Dhubhda

‘Instapoesía: a ‘prestigious’ literary practice?’ by Louise Evans

‘wRapping traditions into modernity: the negotiation of the Emilian and Esperanto identities in YouTube rap videos’ by Jessica Hampton

‘Digital and Communicative Affordances in the Translingual Online Space: Insights from Brazilian food discourses in the UK’ by Francielle Carpenedo

‘Extended Reality Language Research: Data Sources, Taxonomy, and the Emergence of Embodied Corpora’ by Abdulrahman Alsayed

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