Discourse, Context & Media

Discourse, Context & Media is an international journal dedicated to exploring the full range of contemporary discourse work into mediated forms of communication in context.

What does DCM seek?

• Original articles that deal with systematic analysis of discourse in mediated context.

• Articles that provide new insights and broaden our understanding of mediated discourse.

• Papers that are primarily interested in mediated discourse, language and communication, rather than in the operation of digital / news / social media solely from the points of view of journalism, communication studies, psychology, cultural studies, history etc.

What is Mediated Discourse Research?

• Emphasizes the impact of media affordances on shaping discourse.

• Explores technology’s influence on communication.

• Goes beyond media transmission to understand how mediated contexts affect discourse interpretation.

• Seeks broader implications of mediation on discourse practices. Mediation refers to how media, platform affordances and/or technology affect the creation, transmission, and interpretation of discourse and communication practices.

• Engages in actual discourse analysis of linguistic (including multimodal) data collected from mediated contexts.

• Uses various methods with the aim of understanding mediation.

What is NOT Mediated Discourse Research?

• Merely focusing on media without considering their influence on discourse.

• Superficial analysis of discourse data that just happen to be collected from a media platform.

• Solely critiquing media coverage without addressing the role of mediation.

• Neglecting the influence of mediation on ideological and cultural dimensions of discourse.

• Merely applying existing methodologies to new sets of discourse data on a new platform.

• Discussing theoretical notions without carrying out actual discourse analysis of data.

• Focusing on specific (linguistic) concepts (e.g. hedging) rather than seeing how such concepts can help us understand the processes of mediation.

• Simply using content analysis, sentiment analysis, appraisal analysis, statistical analysis, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, etc. to describe sets of data without paying regard to the broader issues identified above

• Comparative studies contrasting two or more datasets (linguistic, cultural) that deal with a particular feature without linking the findings/explanation to mediation

General recommendations

• While various types of technology-mediated discourses, typically originating in social media, digital media, and news media, will provide much research data for papers that are within the scope of the journal, the journal is not limited only to such types of data.

• Similarly, not all research on digital media will be automatically relevant for the journal.

• We encourage authors to pay close attention to “What is NOT mediated Discourse Research” above as not clearly understanding this has been the major source of rejections.

• Please note that we no longer publish studies that compare news reports on the same topic from two regions/news outlets.

• If you are in doubt, please contact the editors prior to submission to check whether your paper is generally in scope of the journal.