Digital communication and social media have offered abundant new affordances and opportunities for new forms of language and literacy practices. Digital Literacies, as a key research area in the Department of English, is broadly defined as the development and application of digital resources in the research and teaching of language, literature, and communication. We also strive to engage our students through new media resources in their learning and research of English linguistics and literature. Our faculty members have contributed actively to the development of online resources for English language and linguistics. In particular, online resources have been developed to facilitate the learning and research of World Englishes. Examples include:
New forms of multimodal and multilingual texts and practices are constantly produced and consumed on social media and networked platforms. Working on multiple contact varieties in the Philippines, Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales has created an online Sino-Philippine language map that provides a brief description and references pertaining to select Sino-Philippine varieties in the Philippines. He has also developed a Lánnang-uè linguistic feature incubator, an online tool that collects innovative features of Lánnang-uè from crowd-sourcing. Wilkinson has also developed several digital platforms, such as The Lannang Archives Online Library, Interactive Lannang Orthography and Sound Dictionary, and My Language, My Heritage, a grassroots language documentation project for and by the Lannang heritage communities. Wilkinson also manages several corpora, among which includes the Twitter Corpus of Philippine Englishes (TCOPE) and the Corpus of Singapore English Messaging (CoSEM). He also created scraping, corpus-searching and annotation tools using Python, such as TweetCorp. Carmen Lee’s extensive research on digital discourse has been concerned with the ways our online activities are closely tied to and embedded in our offline lived experiences, and the possible impact of digital discourse on our everyday language use. Prem Phyak works with university teachers in Nepal on the integration of digital technologies and has published an edited volume Innovative technologies and pedagogical shifts in Nepalese higher education (with E. Carm, B. Luitel, L. Ogrim & M. Johannesen/published by Brill). Tongle Sun’s work focuses on enhancing intercultural-global citizenship, intercultural communicative skills, and digital literacies in learning through the application of digital resources and tools. In researching literature, Eddie Tay explores innovative ways to present poetry through street photography on his site Hong Kong Lucida. Joanna Mansbridge considers how digital technology constitutes the environments in which we live and work and investigates how digital spaces, such as Zoom, transform—and are transformed by—artistic practices. Collier Nogues writes digital poetry using narrative game apps and immersive VR frameworks, and partners with CUHK’s Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies to develop immersive VR pedagogical materials for Hong Kong English classrooms. She also studies the ways contemporary poets use social media for not only distribution and marketing, but also as a compositional tool. The research laboratory in the Department of English provides a wide range of software to facilitate our research and teaching. See here for other digital resources available in the Department of English.