Le développement massif des pratiques d’agir avec et de vivre ensemble, instrumentées par les réseaux socionumériques, ainsi que l’usage abondant de l’expression « web social » et de ses dérivés peuvent être vus comme les indices d’une nouvelle étape de l’industrialisation numérique de la culture et du symbolique qui s’empare désormais du social. Afin d’en préciser les effets et les dynamiques, l’ouvrage propose une approche du social comme un construit en mouvement fait d’associations entre êtres (humains, techniques, symboliques, etc.). Il analyse les dispositifs socionumériques en tant que « machines d’écritures », puis il se penche sur des collectifs mus par des buts communs et articulés par des plateformes dédiées. En mettant ainsi en tension l’analyse des dispositifs et celle des pratiques, ce livre collectif dresse un tableau contrasté de la pharmacologie numérique du vivre ensemble.

From a cluster of interconnected HTML pages to online service platforms, websites are constantly changing in form and function. These transformations have led, on the one hand, to human and social sciences renewing or inventing analytical methodologies; and on the other hand, to a reconsideration of the practices of non-specialists and digital professionals. The Web factory is equally included on the agenda of communication training, according to an alternative approach that is complementary to the one that has been implemented for computer scientists. From these two perspectives and drawing upon several case studies, Analyzing Websites presents epistemological and methodological contributions from researchers in Information and Communication Sciences exploring websites as sociotechnical, semi-discursive and communicational devices. This study covers website design as well as their integration into the digital strategies of organizations in the public, associative and private sectors.

This book investigates how social media are reconfiguring dying, death, and mourning. Taking a narrative approach, it argues that dying, death, and mourning are shared online as small stories of the moment, which are organized around transgressive moments and events with motivational, participatory, or connective scope. Through the different case studies discussed, this book presents an empirical framework for analyzing small stories of dying, death and mourning as practices of sharing which become associated with specific modes of affective positioning, i.e. modulations of different degrees of distance or proximity to the death event and the dead, the networked audience(s), and the affective self. The book calls for the study of affect as integral to narrative activity and opens up broader questions about how stories and emotion are mobilized in digital cultures for accruing audiences, value (social or economic), and visibility. It will be of interest to researchers in narrative analysis, the anthropology and sociology of emotion, digital communication, media and cultural studies, and (digital) death and dying.

This volume provides the first comprehensive reference work in English on the French language in all its facets. It offers a wide-ranging approach to the rich, varied, and exciting research across multiple subfields, with seven broad thematic sections covering the structures of French; the history of French; axes of variation; French around the world; French in contact with other languages; second language acquisition; and French in literature, culture, arts, and the media. Each chapter presents the state of the art and directs readers to canonical studies and essential works, while also exploring cutting-edge research and outlining future directions. The Oxford Handbook of the French Language serves both as a reference work for people who are curious to know more about the French language and as a starting point for those carrying out new research on the language and its many varieties. It will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students as well as established scholars, whether they are specialists in French linguistics or researchers in a related field looking to learn more about the language. The diversity of frameworks, approaches, and scholars in the volume demonstrates above all the variety, vitality, and vibrancy of work on the French language today.

This book explores representations of social media in European media discourses across different socio-historical contexts, demonstrating how such analysis can illuminate the tension between global and local in media discourses in today’s globalised world. The volume draws on data from a trilingual corpus from different editions of the free daily Metro from Finland, France, and Greece spanning a five-year period, with a focus on Facebook and Twitter. Adopting a French discourse analysis approach, which takes as its point of departure the notion of “discourse as the social practice of representing”, the book integrates qualitative and quantitative analyses to investigate the social and political role depictions of social media play in specific socio-historical contexts. This approach brings to the fore both commonalities and differences in the popularity of specific platforms and coverage of specific news topics and hot-button issues. In so doing, the volume elucidates the ways in which global practices become integrated and immersed into local contexts, offering avenues for future research on social media in news discourses. This book will be of interest to scholars in applied linguistics, intercultural communication, discourse analysis, media studies, and cultural studies.

Although Jews lacked a political locus standi for a communication system in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods, their involvement in trade and the close relations among Jewish communities fostered the development of effective channels of communication. This process responded primarily to security and socio-economic considerations but it has important implications for the development of communication systems as well. Written by some of the most outstanding researchers in the field of Jewish history, this collection offers a rich and consistent picture of the main developments in communications in the Jewish world before the era of mass-media. This pioneering research reconsiders the principal means of communication among the Jewish communities in the Islamic world, Christian Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the New World, from the seventh until the nineteenth centuries.