Vol. 9 No. 18 (2022): Texts, platforms and devices. New perspectives for discourse analysis

Coordinators: Vanesa Saiz Echezarreta (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), Diana Fernández Romero (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos), Adriana Amado Suárez (Universidad Argentina de la Empresa).

In order for contributions from the social sciences to be relevant in understanding the socio-historical conjuncture and to operate as tools for social orientation in stages of uncertainty, it is necessary that an epistemological rupture - the identification of situated knowledge - accompanies the construction of the objects of study, the choice of methods and techniques, as well as the strategies for transferring potential results. Such a rupture ensures that the method does not become a mere recipe, given that "epistemology is diluted when methodology becomes technical, minimising the situated and socio-historical character of all social practice, including research" (Casado and Lasen, 2014).

The research community forms a network that co-structures its objects of study and affects what it analyses, which is why it is important to identify the areas of the socio-cultural - among others - that require greater attention, which are being left on the margins of scientific work. Networked thinking, the analysis of processes and intermediate spaces, the dynamics of hybridisation and mediatisation are not factors or phenomena alien to research in Discourse Studies. However, in contemporary digital contexts, characterised by a profound mediatisation (Hepp, 2020), there are still many aspects and approaches that remain to be explored and thought about. For this reason, we dedicate this issue to reflecting on and exposing innovations with which to adapt discourse analysis methods to digital contexts.

Through this monograph we hope to highlight the need to combine the analysis of substantive discursive content with the role played by media technologies in the deployment of discursive practices, based on the assumption that the digital cannot be considered a complementary aspect, but rather an articulating axis of our societies (Marres, 2017). Studies on meaning and discursive strategies must incorporate the role of platforms, applications, social networks, devices, algorithms, etc. that operate in the production, circulation and reception of contemporary discourses.

The discipline has tools capable of adapting to the study of complex enunciations and practices defined by shared agency (Latour, 2015), provided that the role of technical mediations is not overlooked. For example, an impersonal conception of enunciation, such as the one proposed by Paolucci (2020), can be an interesting tool to account for shared enunciative praxis in which human and non-human elements are concatenated, generating acts of mediation and passage through discourses, practices, devices and digital codes, with the aim of understanding the way in which all these elements are deployed in complex interdependent webs. In this task we can find inspiration in Gonzalo Abril's (2009) proposal to consider texts and textual processes as "factorial indexes", that is, socio-discursive practices are indexes by factoriality of the virtual totality of a culture, each element maintains a relationship with the totality, part and whole are mutually constitutive. The proposal is to share a framework in which technological mediation, the shared agency between subjects and technical devices are conceived as intrinsic aspects of the systems of meaning and the discourses they produce (Peñamarin, 2015).

The articles in this issue approach this effort to design analytical models that do not conceive of devices as mere supports -which can be ignored-, or software as a bias -often negatively sanctioned-, but rather, in a transversal manner, the monograph proposes imagining and testing methods and techniques that include them as consubstantial elements of discourse.

From there, Discourse Studies can make relevant contributions to recent areas of study such as software studies or games studies, among others.

The invited papers that open this issue take up classic concepts of discourse analysis such as writing, information and data and discursive genre and look at how these can be rethought in the light of new digital platforms.

Patricia Nigro's work "Challenges for discourse analysis in transmedia writing" addresses the fundamental features of this type of writing, the pedagogical strategies for its use from the didactic point of view and the alternatives for studying the phenomenon. His enquiry into the challenges it poses for discourse analysis refers to classic works such as Walter Ong's (1987) on orality and print culture.

Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat's article "Towards a governance of platform data. Exploring the maladjustments between data and meaning" studies the gaps in meaning that occur in the processes of production, management and circulation of digital data that are appropriated by platforms. Its approach points to Abril's (2007) concept of information as cultural formation, which appeals to the construction of meaning of data as part of cultural processes, of "complex social practices".

Ariel Gómez Ponce, in "Modulations of television memory. Questions abouyt TV series and genre in times of streaming", explores the way in which platforms manage the serial flow and propose reading contracts through digital catalogues. From Bakhtin's classic work, it explores how the conditions of production and reception in new technological scenarios can be confronted as a discursive genre that is transformed by the impact of platforms.

Some of the articles that make up the central notebook of the issue are in line with the scientific service and transfer vocation of Discourse Studies through theoretical-methodological perspectives for the semiotic analysis of digital productions or the interaction between subjects and devices.

Thus, in "L'uso di Twitter da parte dei Ministeri della Salute nell'era COVID-19. Analisi delle strategie di creazione e innovazione lessicali", written by Claudia Colantonio, studies the strategies and discursive practices of the Ministries of Health of five countries during the COVID-19 epidemic through Twitter, focusing on the lexical innovations of the discourse mediated by this digital platform.

Other papers in this issue include applied research proposals in different areas that incorporate the enunciative analysis of video games or conversational patterns and dialogism in networks.

In the article "Who are we in strategy games? An analysis of the imagined and embodied positions of Frostpunk players" by Carlos Moreno Azqueta explores, within the framework of game studies, the enunciative processes of the players of a strategy video game without avatar to understand their expressions about their virtual position.

The enunciational analysis of digital natives who use emojis in interpersonal conversations is the aim of the text "Dialogue 2.0: emojis and politeness on WhatsApp" by Ivan Kirschbaum, who concludes that this communicative resource contributes to the shaping of a specific discursive image of the speakers.

We close this issue with a bibliographical review on the study of networks through the article "Meta-study of political communication research on Twitter: methodological trends" written by Raúl Rojas Andrés, Svenne Diefenbacher and Miguel Álvarez-Peralta, which maps the scientific research in Spanish in the last two years in journals of impact in which it detects a significant number of works that show software dependency, that is, the mere computer approximation to the data.

With all this, we intend to join the mapping of discursive practices of digital platforms and productions through this new issue of the journal, to which we are grateful for having welcomed this proposal from the Section of Discourse Studies.