A panel consisting of seven members of the research platform presented their work at the Approaches to Multimodal Digital Environments (A-MODE) conference from 20-22 June 2019 in Rome, Italy, at the University of ‘Tor Vergata’. The conference focus “from theories to practices” was addressed in a panel entitled “To teach and/or to delight? Exploring the dichotomy of "fun" and "learning" in multimodal digital communication”.
The panel included the following talks:
Barbara Göbl, Dayana Hristova, Suzana Jovicic
Between Play and Manipulation:
Tackling Persuasive Design through a Serious Game for Adolescents
Barbara Göbl, Dayana Hristova, Suzana Jovicic work together on the project Youth, Optimization and Emotion in the Digital Age (YOEDA) at the University of Vienna (2017 – 2020) as an interdisciplinary DOC-team funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Using their respective fields as starting points (social and cultural anthropology, cognitive science and informatics), they research the risks and potentials of social media, especially with regard to its underlying design principles as well as to its use among adolescents. For more information please visit www.yoeda.at.
Nadja Kerschhofer-Puhalo, Werner Mayer, Sarah Ritt, Christian Schreger
New literacies – new authors. Insights from a participatory research program on children’s extracurricular literacy engagement
The research group ‘Literacies and Multilingualism’ at the Linguistics Department of the University of Vienna, coordinated by Nadja Kerschhofer-Puhalo, investigates the many aspects of reading and writing in contexts of migration, multilingualism and multimedia. Together with the team members Werner Mayer, Sarah Ritt and a primary school teacher, Christian Schreger, she explores the literacy engagement of students aged 6 to 14. This presentation will focus on children's conceptions of a “book”, their interpretation of traditional dichotomies such as reading/writing or reader/author and on aspects of (inter-)mediality and materiality related to “books” in children's print and online reading/writing activities.
Miriam Mayrhofer
Spoiler Warning! – Unfolding creativity, performance and identity formation on BookTube
The basis of Miriam Mayrhofer’s conference contribution is her PhD project “Reading 2.0 - Creativity, Performance and Identity in the Age of Social Reading” and her interest in reading processes, multimodality and storytelling. Her talk will consider the phenomenon of “social reading” or “social book reading”, which has gained prominence on “BookTube”, a subsection of the videosharing-platform YouTube, in light of its multimodal nature. This talk examines the potential of social reading for reading processes and its impact on questions surrounding readers’ self-perception and identification.
Susanne Reichl
"I totally didn't see it coming": Exploring young readers' metacognitive skills via Goodreads
Susanne Reichl, who heads the research platform Mediatised Lifeworlds at the University of Vienna, bases her presentation on research into the understanding processes involved in literary reading, an interest at the basis of her habilitation project on Cognitive Principles, Critical Practice: Reading Literature at the University (2009). In this presentation, the focus is on how a social reading platform such as Goodreads allows for insights into various understanding processes and strategies by resorting to a variety of semiotic codes.
Christina Schuster
‘The fanon is real’ or: The transgressive potential of multimodal mediations and constructions of gender in fanfiction
Christina Schuster is a Uni:docs fellow at the English Department of the University of Vienna. Her contribution to this panel can be viewed as an extension of her dissertation project which examines representations of gender, sexuality and identities in fanfiction. This presentation will focus on the multimodality of narratives in fanfiction, fandoms and fanfiction archives and how meaning is constructed and deconstructed across a variety of modes.
