Academic interests
Linguistics, social semiotics, multimodality, discourse analysis; scientific/medical discourse, the discourse of social movements, critical animal studies
Recent and forthcoming research
For a full list of publications, see below.
Courses taught
Background
I teach English at the Department of Languages, Literature, and Culture. I have a PhD in linguistics from the University of Gothenburg and master degrees in English language and publishing studies from the University of Oslo and the University of Stirling. I also have a bachelor degree in physics from the University of Liverpool.
Appointments
Partners
Co-supervising John Currie's PhD thesis
Member of Nordic Society for Systemic Functional Linguistics and Social Semiotics and International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association
Peer review work for Text & Talk, Functions of Language, Language and Communication, and Social Semiotics
Tags:
linguistics,
social semiotics,
multimodality,
scientific discourse,
social movements,
critical animal studies
Publications
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2021).
Forming a New Song within the Shell of the Old: Processes of Transformation, Recontextualization, and Prefiguration in the Lyrics of Joe Hill’s “The Preacher and the Slave”.
In Franzon, Johan F.I.; Greenall, Annjo Klungervik; Kvam, Sigmund & Parianou, Anastasia (Ed.),
Song Translation: Lyrics in Contexts.
Frank & Timme.
ISSN 978-3-7329-9334-5.
p. 351–366.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2020).
Grieg in the Henhouse: 12 Seconds at the Contested Intersections of Human and Nonhuman Animal Interests.
In Hannan, Jason (Eds.),
Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial.
Sydney University Press.
ISSN 9781743327104.
p. 59–77.
Full text in Research Archive
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2019).
Smell as Social Semiotic: On the Deployment and Intersemiotic Potential of Smell.
In Kaltenbacher, Martin & Stöckl, Hartmut (Ed.),
Analyzing the Media: A Systemic Functional Approach.
Equinox Publishing.
ISSN 9781781796252.
p. 189–204.
doi:
10.1558/equinox.32955.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2016).
Cut and Paste: Recontextualizing Meaning-Material in a Digital Environment.
In Gardner, Sheena & Alsop, Sian (Ed.),
Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age.
Equinox Publishing.
ISSN 9781781792384.
p. 151–165.
doi:
10.1558/equinox.26113.
Show summary
Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age explores the insights that SFL offers to help us understand and explain the new meanings afforded through digital channels and how they are shaped by and shape their digital contexts.
SFL offers a sophisticated architecture for exploring how meanings are construed in context, and this volume focuses on three specific perspectives. Part 1 examines texts that are ‘born digital’ or digitally conceived, such as tweets and blogs. Part 2 focuses on texts that ‘achieve digitality’, or have come to replace or supplement non-digital texts with similar functions, such as an online university lecture or medical consultation. Part 3 examines and interprets texts singly or in corpora using digital tools and allows us to see patterns within and across texts that are generally not visible in single texts.
The volume offers contributions from international scholars which both initiate new and sustain current lines of enquiry in SFL research within the unifying context of digitality.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2015).
Sonifying the Higgs: Choice and Coding Orientation in the Recontextualization of Quantitative Data.
In Kvåle, Gunhild; Maagerø, Eva & Veum, Aslaug (Ed.),
Kontekst, språk og multimodalitet: Nyere sosialsemiotiske perspektiver.
Fagbokforlaget.
ISSN 978-82-321-0433-8.
p. 123–137.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2014).
Story of an image: notes on the recontextualization of a digital research-article figure.
In Alsop, Sian & Gardner, Sheena (Ed.),
Language in a digital age: be not afraid of digitality.
Coventry University.
ISSN 9781846000515.
p. 50–56.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2013).
Exploring the dialogism of academic discourse: heteroglossic engagement in medical research articles.
In Andersen, Gisle & Bech, Kristin (Ed.),
English corpus linguistics : variation in time, space and genre : selected papers from ICAME 32.
Brill|Rodopi.
ISSN 978-90-420-3679-6.
p. 183–207.
doi:
10.1163/9789401209403_011.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2012).
Analysis of the generic discourse features of the English-language medical research article: A systemic-functional approach.
Functions of language.
ISSN 0929-998X.
19(1),
p. 5–37.
doi:
10.1075/fol.19.1.01fry.
View all works in Cristin
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2021).
Beauty in the Streets: Attitude and Bonding in Uprisings and Riots.
Show summary
In this paper, I focus on the multi-/intersemiotic expression of attitude in uprisings and riots, considering how participants bond around shared senses of affect, judgment, and appreciation. Based on examples from the Stonewall Uprising (1967), the Battle of Seattle (1999), and the London riots of 2011, among others, I want to show that, in addition to frustration, anger, and rage, riots and uprisings can also contain moments of pleasure and joy (jouissance?), as well as a whole host of other feelings and emotions. Together, these ostensibly divergent attitudes, and the sources or targets of those attitudes, are important for creating a sense of solidarity and community. Participants can bond or rally around their support for and/or opposition to (and perhaps even ambivalence to) various people, artefacts, events, institutions, and conditions. These might include flashpoints such as an arrest or murder, as well as wider structural or systemic forms of discrimination and oppression (classism, racism, sexism, etc.). They can also include more immediate material-symbolic elements such as flags and banners, as well as emergent, on-the-fly acts of de-arresting, property damage, and looting. This paper considers how community is instantiated through patterns of ideational and attitudinal meanings and the relevance those patternings have for understanding riots as a form of collective action.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees & Moore, Alison Rotha
(2021).
Symposium: "Social Semiotics and the Animal Other".
Show summary
In recent years, the humanities and social sciences have witnessed an “animal turn”, an increasing interest in and centering of the lives of nonhuman animals and human-animal relations (Ritvo 2007, Pedersen 2014, inter alia), more recently situated within the context of social justice (Celermajer et al. 2021). We might expect this animal turn to have been taken up with gusto in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and social semiotics (SFS), given their focus on language, representation, ideology and identity, but although some important work has been produced (e.g. Benson and Greaves 2005, Benson and Thibault 2009, Knight 2006), this has not yet led to a sustained subfield of SFL/SFS such as we see, for example, in educational semiotics. Inspired by the theme of ESFLC 2021 and building on the above work, we propose this symposium to explore new ways that SFL and SFS can contribute to improving human-animal relations and the actual lives of individuals regardless of species, by critically addressing the statuses, roles and interests of nonhuman animals in society and the part that semiotic scholarship can play in understanding and acting. Our plan is to bring selected papers from the symposium together with some invited pieces to produce a special issue or edited volume.
Topics for discussion
● Inter- and intraspecies communication
● Animals and multimodality
● Language and animal agency
● Glottocentrism
● Linguistics and the moral status of animals
● Animals and social justice
● Animals and the climate predicament
● Animals, nationalism and cultural stereotypes
● Animal advocacy and animal liberation
● Animal agriculture
● Animals and the media
● Animals and education
● Ontogenetic and phylogenetic change
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2021).
“Language of the Unheard”: Riots and Rioting as Multisemiosis.
Show summary
If “riot is the language of the unheard” (Martin Luther King Jr, 1967), what do riots say, and how do they say it?
In this paper, I draw on spatial discourse analysis (Ravelli and McMurtrie 2016, McMurtrie 2017, see also Stenglin 2004, Stenglin 2009) and social-semiotic accounts of visual, verbal, auditory, and olfactory resources (e.g. van Leeuwen 1999, Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, Martin and Rose 2007, Fryer 2019) to consider how rioters (the unheard?) move through and interact with the physical environment, with each other, and with other participants.* The kinds of meanings these movements and interactions imply can be thought of broadly in metafunctional and semogenic terms (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999, 2004). Rioting is, after all, about something; it involves various actors or participants, certain actions, activities, and ways of being. Rioting is a response to something, part of an exchange, an enactment of and potential challenge to social roles and relations, as well as an expression of feelings and emotions around which communities of shared values can be co-constructed. Rioting unfolds over time and space, as a sequence of more or less interconnected events and activities, precipitated and influenced by local conditions and wider social, political, and/or economic issues.
Using historical and contemporary examples, such as the Peasants Revolt (1381), the Stonewall uprising (1967), the Battle of Orgreave (1984), the London Poll Tax riots (1990), the Battle for Seattle (1999), and the Paris riots (2005) (e.g. Dobson 1983, Burns 1992, Hilton 2003, Carter 2004, Meckfessel 2016, Moran and Waddington 2016), I map riots as multisemiotic acts of meaning-making, focusing in particular on the contested spaces and places through and in which participants move, interact, and bond.
Key words: riots, rioting, multisemiosis, spatial discourse analysis, bonding
*There is a long history of describing crowds as “senseless” or “irrational” (so-called “mob mentality”) and the members of those crowds as “thugs” and “criminals”, often as a way of delegitimising or depoliticising certain types of collective action (Moran and Waddington 2016, 2-7). I acknowledge that the term riot/rioter, as applied by the state, media, and others to certain forms of protest or protesters, carries with it some of those connotations as well as various legal implications.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2020).
#AllCatsAreBeautiful: Resisting State Power and Other Forms of Oppression on Social Media.
Show summary
“All Cats Are Beautiful” is a commonly used acrostic for ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). In this paper, I explore the use of the hashtag #AllCatsAreBeautiful on the social media platform Twitter. Analysis of c. 1500 ‘tweets’ from April 2011 to April 2019 reveals a variety of themes associated with the hashtag. These include negative evaluations of the police and a broader critique of policing, the punitive justice system, and state power, as well as comments on the commodification and exploitation of animals, gender discrimination, body image and body shaming, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) the positive appreciation of cats. The hashtag is also used by law enforcement agencies in an apparent attempt to challenge or deride anti-police sentiment. I present each of the above-mentioned themes, focusing on their verbal and visual representations, and discuss the potentially overlapping forms of oppression that are highlighted and confronted by the hashtag #AllCatsAreBeautiful. I also discuss what makes cats such an important metaphor or representamen for these interconnected struggles and for liberatory movements more generally.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2020).
Er staten løsningen?
Klassekampen.
ISSN 0805-3839.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2019).
Friske, rene, hardt arbeidende, norske kuer: dyrevelferd, miljøvern og det nasjonale på melkekartonger og pizzaesker.
Show summary
Forbruket av kumelk har gått stadig ned siden slutten av 1950-tallet (Roll-Hansen 2001, SSB 2013). Det er flere grunner til denne utviklingen (se Linné 2016, 721-722), men mange har i de siste årene redusert sitt forbruk av hensyn til miljøet, helse og/eller dyrevelferd. I denne presentasjonen ser jeg nærmere på hvordan ulike deler av denne utviklingen kommer til uttrykk på melkekartonger og pizzaesker. Jeg er spesielt interessert i de verbale og visuelle ressursene som inngår i dialog med denne utviklingen, hvor deler av produktemballasjen fungerer som respons eller svar fra produsentene på antatte bekymringer eller spørsmål fra forbrukerne. Analysen tar utgangspunkt i sosialsemiotiske tolkninger av dialogisk teori, hvor multisemiotiske uttrykk forstås som del av en større utveksling (Kress and Hodge 1979, Hasan 1992, Martin 1992, Martin and White 2005, Economou 2009, inter alia). Jeg bruker også perspektiver fra kritiske dyrestudier («critical animal studies»), hvor forholdene mellom mennesker, andre dyr og miljøet settes i både et kritisk-akademisk og aktivistisk lys (f.eks. Best et al. 2007, Nocella II et al. 2014). Som det framgår av analysen, er det flere temaer som kommer til uttrykk på disse produktene: dyrevelferd, biodrivstoff, industrielt arbeid og produksjon, tradisjoner, det nasjonale, biologisk mangfold, gjenvinning og bærekraftig utvikling. Mange av disse temaene framstår ikke bare som generell informasjon, folkeopplysning eller underholdning om melk og melkeproduksjon, men også som direkte svar på eller forsvar mot kritikk mot meieriindustrien.
Referanser
Best, Steven, Anthony J. Nocella II, Richard Kahn, Carol Gigliotti, and Lisa Kemmerer. 2007. "Introducing critical animal studies." Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1):4-5.
Economou, Dorothy. 2009. "Photos in the news: appraisal analysis of visual semiosis and verbal-visual intersemiosis." PhD thesis, University of Sydney.
Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1992. "Speech genre, semiotic mediation and the development of higher mental functions." Language Sciences 14 (4):489–528.
Kress, Gunther, and Robert Hodge. 1979. Language as ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Linné, Tobias. 2016. "Cows on Facebook and Instagram: interspecies intimacy in the social media spaces of the Swedish dairy industry." Television & New Media 17 (8):719–733. doi: 10.1177/1527476416653811.
Martin, J. R. 1992. English text: system and structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nocella II, Anthony J., John Sorenson, Kim Socha, and Atsuko Matsuoka. 2014. "The emergence of critical animal studies: the rise of intersectional animal liberation." In Defining critical animal studies: an intersectional social justice approach for liberation, edited by Anthony J. Nocella II, John Sorenson, Kim Socha and Atsuko Matsuoka, xix-xxxvi. New York: Peter Lang.
Roll-Hansen, Hege. 2001. Mindre melk og brød. In Tallenes fortellinger. Oslo: Statistisk sentralbyrå.
SSB. 2013. Miljødimensjonen ved maten under lupen. Oslo: Statistisk sentralbyrå.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2019).
#AllCatsAreBeautiful: Visual-Verbal Representations of Cats in Online Liberationist Discourses.
Show summary
Hashtags are a form of user-generated metadata that generally indicate the content or topic of an utterance. They are also important markers of ambient affiliation, allowing users to co-construct communities of shared values and experiences around different topics (Zappavigna 2012, 2018). In this paper, I examine the use of the hashtag #allcatsarebeautiful on the social media platform Twitter. The hashtag is used as a metadiscursive marker for several interrelated topics, most commonly as an acrostic for the abbreviation ACAB, All Cops Are Bastards. It is also used in reference to pet rescue and animal shelters and, less frequently, to sexism. One of the points of connection between those different topics is their potentially abolitionist or liberationist positions, i.e. anti-police, anti-breeding/anti-ownership, and anti-sexism (cf. Vitale 2017, Dunayer 2001, 2004, Francione and Charlton 2016, Mills 2008). Across each of these topics, I look at how cats are represented visually and verbally, and the kinds of experiences and emotions expressed by users (Baker 2001 [1993], Martin and White 2005, Kress and van Leeuwen 2006).
References
Baker, Steve. 2001 [1993]. Picturing the beast: animals, identity, and representation. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Dunayer, Joan. 2001. Animal equality: language and liberation. Derwood, Maryland: Ryce Publishing.
Dunayer, Joan. 2004. Speciesism. Derwood, Maryland: Ryce Publishing.
Francione, Gary L., and Anna E. Charlton. 2016. "The case against pets." Aeon September 8, 2016.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading images: the grammar of visual design. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge.
Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mills, Sara. 2008. Language and sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vitale, Alex S. 2017. The end of policing. London: Verso.
Zappavigna, Michele. 2012. Discourse of Twitter and social media: how we use language to create affiliation on the web. London: Bloomsbury.
Zappavigna, Michele. 2018. Searchable talk: hashtags and social media metadiscourse. London: Bloomsbury.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2019).
Ludditter?
Klassekampen.
ISSN 0805-3839.
p. 21–21.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2017).
¡No pasarán! (Re)enacting the Battle of Cable Street on Social Media.
Show summary
The Battle of Cable Street is a key event in the history of the British antifascist movement (Kushner and Valman 1998, Copsey 2000, German and Rees 2012). On 4 October 1936, an estimated 100,000-250,000 demonstrators took to the streets to stop Oswald Mosley’s “Blackshirt” British Union of Fascists marching through London’s East End. Under banners of “They Shall Not Pass”, demonstrators erected barricades and fought with mounted police until the march was finally abandoned. At a recent rally to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, several speakers, including the leader of the British Labour Party, drew parallels between the events of 1936 and the apparent rise of right-wing populism and extremism in contemporary Britain and elsewhere (see also http://cablestreet80.org.uk). In this paper, I explore how some of those parallels are manifest in social media, by examining the comments section accompanying a video-documentary of the Battle of Cable Street, posted on the video-sharing website YouTube. My main aim is to examine how commentators position themselves, verbally and visually, in relation to the battle, the documentary, and each other. I use Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework (and models developed by Economou 2009, Chen 2010, Tan 2010, Feng and Wignell 2011, inter alia) to identify and compare communities of shared values and feelings, and to discuss how the ideologues and ideologemes of those communities (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978, Freedman and Ball 2004) relate to wider fascist and antifascist discourses, many of which are reminiscent of, or make direct reference to, social and political events of the 1930s.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, and Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev. 1978 [1928]. The formal method in literary scholarship: a critical introduction to sociological poetics. Translated by Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chen, Yumin. 2010. “Exploring dialogic engagement with readers in multimodal EFL textbooks in China.” Visual Communication 9 (4):485-506.
Copsey, Nigel. 2000. Anti-fascism in Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Economou, Dorothy. 2009. “Photos in the news: appraisal analysis of visual semiosis and verbal-visual intersemiosis.” PhD thesis, University of Sydney.
Feng, Dezheng, and Peter Wignell. 2011. “Intertextual voices and engagement in TV advertisements.” Visual Communication 10 (4):565-588.
Freedman, Sarah Warshauer, and Arnetha F. Ball. 2004. “Ideological becoming: Bakhtinian concepts to guide the study of language, literacy, and learning.” In Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy, and learning, edited by Arnetha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman, 3-33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
German, Lindsey, and John Rees. 2012. A people's history of London. London: Verso.
Kushner, Tony, and Nadia Valman. 1998. “Introduction: minorities, fascism and anti-fascism.” Jewish Culture and History 1 (2):1-22.
Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tan, Sabine. 2010. “Modelling engagement in a web-based advertising campaign.” Visual Communication 9 (1):91-115.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2016).
Coffee and cinnamon buns: on the deployment and intersemiotic potential of smell.
Show summary
Our sense of smell is mediated by complex physicochemical and biological interactions. This sense is part of the material basis for what we might call a mode of smell, a socially mediated semiotic system (van Leeuwen 2005, Norris 2013, Fryer 2013). The resources of such modes or systems, to the extent that they are recognized as such, are rarely if ever deployed alone, but as part of a multisemiotic arrangement (van Leeuwen 2005, Kress 2010, Norris 2013). In this paper, I discuss the meaning potential of smell by considering how social actors produce, manipulate, combine, and organize certain smells to create sophisticated ‘messages’ that can be interpreted and evaluated by others. As an example, I examine the case of a real-estate agent’s use of specific smells, created among other things by preparing coffee and cinnamon buns, as part of a house viewing. I
consider the potential meanings encoded by those smells in that particular context of situation. I also discuss the relative semantic weight of those resources as part of a multisemiotic event or activity that includes the co-deployment of verbal, visual, and spatial resources. By considering the relative amounts or degrees of meaning potential instantiated through those different semiotic systems, I demonstrate how smell might be deployed to make meanings that are potentially complementary to as well as incongruent or inharmonious with those committed verbally, visually, and spatially (see, for example, Hood 2008, Martin 2011, and Painter, Martin, and Unsworth 2013 on ‘commitment’). Reasons for making those particular semiotic choices and the kinds of values social actors might assign to them will also be discussed.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2015).
Samuel Beckett og akademisk skriving: Fordeler med å skrive på et andre- eller fremmedspråk.
In Jonsmoen, Kari Mari & Greek, Marit (Ed.),
Språkmangfold i utdanningen.
Gyldendal Akademisk.
ISSN 978-82-05-46026-3.
p. 97–108.
Show summary
Hvilken språkkompetanse trenger studenter og yrkesutøvere? Hvordan legge til rette for språkutvikling? I artikkelsamlingen «Språkmangfold i utdanning − refleksjon over pedagogisk praksis» forsøker vi å svare på disse spørsmålene. Artiklene vektlegger kritisk pedagogikk og dreier seg om temaene: pedagogikk rettet mot voksne, læringsmiljø, andrespråksinnlæring og pedagogisk tviklingsarbeid. Artiklene konkluderer med at det er nødvendig med både institusjonelle og pedagogiske tiltak for å heve studenters og arbeidstakeres språkkompetanse.
Målgruppen er yrkesutøvere som har, eller vil få, ansvar for veiledning, opplæring og undervisning i et flerspråklig og flerkulturelt studie- og arbeidsmiljø. Artikkelsamlingen er beregnet på studenter i alle typer lærerutdanning, samt de som studerer norsk som andrespråk. I tillegg vil lærere på alle nivåer, både i allmennskoleverket og ved høgskoler og universiteter ha nytte av denne boken.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees & Patel, Tulpesh
(2014).
Conference organizers for Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes (NFEAP) 8th Summer Seminar.
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Gulden, Ann Torday; Patel, Tulpesh & Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2013).
Conference organizers for Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes (NFEAP) 7th Summer Seminar.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2013).
Sonifying the Higgs: choice and coding orientation in the sonification of data.
Show summary
In July 2012, the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the discovery of a Higgs-like particle, based on data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A team of researchers sonified these data, translating the visual display of data points into a piece of music, i.e. a sonification or sound-figure. In this presentation, I examine some of the choices made in the transduction (Bezemer and Kress 2008) and sonification of the LHC data. Specifically, I explore choices in timbre, pitch, duration, and intensity from a systemic-functional perspective (van Leeuwen 1999) and discuss how these might relate to a possible scientific abstract-sensory coding orientation (Bernstein 1981, Halliday 1978, van Leeuwen 1999, Kress and van Leeuwen 1996/2006, inter alia) through which certain paradigmatic and probabilistic choices (part of the “sonic register”) are more highly valued than others.
References
Bernstein, Basil. 1981. “Codes, modalities and the process of cultural reproduction: a model” Language and Society 10, 327-363.
Bezemer, Jeff and Gunther Kress. 2008. “Writing in multimodal texts: a social semiotic account of designs for learning” Written Communication 25, 166-195.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. Language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold.
Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. 1996/2006. Reading images: the grammar of visual design. Abingdon: Routledge.
van Leeuwen, Theo. 1999. Speech, music, sound. London: Macmillan.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2013).
Heteroglossic engagement and generic staging in English-language medical research articles.
Show summary
In this presentation, I investigate how medical research writers engage with the dialogic background of their discipline. Specifically, I use the Appraisal framework (Martin & White 2005, White 1998, 2003) to examine how heteroglossic engagement is encoded in a collection of highly cited English-language experimental medical research articles. I explore the patterns and variations in the types, frequencies, selection probabilities, distribution, and scope of a wide range of linguistic resources, across and within different sections of the texts (Introductions, Methods, Results, and Discussions), paying particular attention to the role of engagement in the generic stages and phases (Martin & Rose 2003/2007, 2008), structural/rhetorical moves (Swales 1990), and discipline-specific organizational requirements (ICMJE 2010) associated with this text-type. In each section, and in each of the stages and phases that comprise those sections, medical research writers engage with a background of prior and anticipated utterances in distinct ways, opening and closing the dialogic space for alternative propositions, and variously aligning and disaligning their readers as the text unfolds. For the purposes of this presentation, I focus primarily on two main features, the dialogically expansive ‘entertain’ feature (typically signaled by markers of projection and modality) and the dialogically contractive ‘deny’ feature (expressed through the resources of negation). As I will show, there are not only distinct variations in the frequencies and selection probabilities of these features across different sections, stages, and phases of the text; there are also interesting differences in the types and scope of the linguistic resources that encode these features in different parts of the text.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2013).
Story of an image: notes on the recontextualization of a digital research-article figure.
Show summary
Figures such as graphs, illustrations, and photographs play important epistemological and pedagogic roles in the communication of science. In this presentation, I take as a case in point a figure from a research article published in 2001 in the paper and online editions of the New England Journal of Medicine. The figure represents a cross-section of a blood vessel and depicts the proposed response of a certain protein in regulating inflammation and coagulation in severe sepsis. The figure includes verbal resources, and is a hybrid of schematic and (semi-)naturalistic elements. In its original digital environment, the figure (like others in the journal) is not only part of a composite text, i.e., the research article; it is also a discrete text in its own right, one that can be searched, downloaded, read, and redistributed in various formats. Since its original publication in 2001, the figure has been reused and adapted for use in a number of different contexts. In this paper, I present and discuss some of these recontextualizations by examining changes in selection, arrangement, foregrounding, and social repositioning (Bezemer and Kress 2008) and by considering variations in the field, tenor, and mode of discourse. I investigate these recontextualizations (and their inevitable “recotextualizations”) more-or-less chronologically, starting with the figure’s origins in the New England Journal of Medicine before examining online repurposing of the figure in other research articles, in blogs, and in videos. Despite there being only minor transformations of the original figure, some of the recontextualizations suggest radically different readings from those of the original publication.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2013).
"Music is in everything": using sound to present (and perform) data in academic-literacies research.
Show summary
Empirical data, particularly quantitative data, are typically presented visually in the form of figures. In this presentation, I explore the potential for presenting data in the form of sound. As an example, I will use findings from an academic literacies (AL)-related project to describe some of the processes, choices, and challenges involved in creating “sound-figures.” With reference to similar data-as-sound projects from other fields, e.g., the sonification of data from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, I will discuss what insights sound-figures might provide that visual figures do not and how the two might complement each other, particularly in AL research. The presentation will also include a live performance of a sound-figure.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2012).
Whose voice is it, anyway? Voice, positioning, and expectation in academic writing.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2011).
Exploring the dialogism of academic discourse: appraisal in a multimodal corpus of medical research articles.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2011).
Engaging with the literature, engaging with the reader: evaluation in academic writing.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2011).
Tale + skrift ≈ sant.
Klassekampen.
ISSN 0805-3839.
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Gulden, Ann Torday; Fryer, Daniel Lees & Solli, Kristin
(2010).
'Not too happy, but I just have to do it':Challenges in using English as method of instruction.
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Fryer, Daniel Lees
(2019).
Engagement in Medical Research Discourse: A Multisemiotic Discourse-Semantic Study of Dialogic Positioning.
Göteborgs Universitet / University of Gothenburg.
ISSN 978-91-7833-334-9.
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This study investigates how medical researchers engage with a background of prior and anticipated utterances in a collection of highly cited English-language medical research articles. Taking a multisemiotic, systemic-functional approach, I examine the verbal, visual, and mathematical resources used by medical research writers to construe, engage with, and position themselves in relation to a dialogic background of different voices, positions, and propositions. I explore the dialogic functions of those resources and how they are integrated or combined. I also consider how those resources are distributed across different parts of the medical research article and to what extent their use might reflect some of the disciplinary practices of medical research.
The study shows that engagement can be realized by a broad and diverse set of verbal, mathematical, and visual resources. Verbal modality, projection, and concession, visual prominence and depiction-style, and mathematical probability, approximation, and prediction combine to construe a dialogic space that, on the whole, is more ‘heteroglossic’ than ‘monoglossic’ (i.e. multi- or other-voiced rather than single-voiced) and more dialogically ‘expansive’ than ‘contractive’; that is, it opens up rather than closes down the dialogic space for alternative positions and propositions in the discourse. From a genre perspective, engagement resources have different distributions across the various stages and phases of the medical research article, which tend to construe a dialogically ‘expansive’ Introduction and Discussion and a dialogically ‘contractive’ Methods and Results, although there is considerable variation across generic stages and phases and among individual research articles. The intersemiotic analysis shows how verbal, visual, and mathematical engagement resources are generally integrated to complement and reinforce the meanings construed by each semiotic. Less commonly, they diverge or they combine to make meanings that are not explicitly carried by any one semiotic, creating moments of potential dialogic tension. These changing dialogic spaces are crucial to building and maintaining alliances with the reader. They are also part of what makes the medical research article a hybrid text, one that, from a disciplinary perspective, construes varying writer–reader relations and knowledge structures (e.g. hard–soft, regional–singular, hierarchic–horizontal) as the text unfolds.
The implications of this study are three-fold. Firstly, the study contributes to theoretical developments in the fields of social semiotics, systemic functional theory, and discourse analysis more generally. Secondly, it contributes to the growing body of discourse- and corpus-analytic studies of medicine and medical research discourse. Thirdly, the findings may have practical applications in academic literacy programmes.
Key words: engagement, medical research discourse, social semiotics, systemic functional theory, dialogic theory, linguistics, semiosis, multisemiosis, multimodality, intersemiosis, intermodality, corpus analysis, genre, disciplinarity, ideology
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Published June 12, 2018 4:27 PM
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