Public Lecture: Camilla Vasquez

Over the last decade or so, social media influencers have had an enormous impact on businesses in various sectors. Many social media influencers communicate their persuasive messages through a combination of language, embodied resources as well as potentially other semiotic systems.  In this interactive workshop, I guide participants in identifying researchable topics in social media influencers’ videos.  After briefly covering both practical and ethical considerations in collecting video data, I introduce participants to a framework developed specifically for annotating and analyzing video data (Norris, 2019). Although our practice session will focus on TikTok videos from one popular U.S. food influencer, workshop participants are invited to bring in and share 1-2 representative videos from a social media influencer who they follow, or who they may be interested in for research purposes.  At the end of the workshop, participants will be encouraged to share their questions, reflections and observations about the benefits and limitations of Norris’s multimodal framework.

Norris, S. (2019). Systematically Working with Multimodal Data: Research Methods in           Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Wiley.

Camilla Vasquez is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the World Languages Department at the University of South Florida. Her research spans a wide range of discourse phenomena found in digital environments. She is the author of The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews (2014) and Language Creativity and Humour Online (Routledge, 2019). Her articles about online review language have been published in Current Issues in Tourism, Discourse Context & Media, the Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, and Narrative Inquiry.

Please register for this event:
bizcomm.lectures@wu.ac.at