Transdisciplinary research is research not only on, but also for and, most of all, with practitioners (Cameron, Frazer, Rampton, & Richardson, 1992). In the research framework of transdisciplinarity, scholars and practitioners collaborate throughout research projects with the aim of mutual learning (Perrin & Kramsch, 2018). This presentation shows the value such transdisciplinarity can add to media linguistics. It does so by investigating the digital literacy shift in journalism: the change, in the last two decades, from the predominance of a writing mode that we have termed focused writing to a mode we termed writing-by-the-way(Hicks & Perrin, 2014). Large corpora of writing process data have been generated and analyzed with the multi-method approach of progression analysis in order to combine analytical depth with breadth (Perrin, 2019). On the object level of doing writing in journalism, results show that the general trend towards writing-by-the-way opens up new niches for focused writing in times of social media and robot journalism. On a meta level of doing research, findings explain why transdisciplinarity in general and combining emic and etic perspectives in particular allow for deeper insights into the medialinguistic object of investigation.
Cameron, Deborah, Frazer, Elizabeth, Rampton, Ben, & Richardson, Kay (1992). Researching language. Issues of power and method. London: Routledge.
Hicks, Troy, & Perrin, Daniel (2014). Beyond single modes and media. In Eva-Maria Jakobs & Daniel Perrin (Eds.), Handbook of writing and text production (Vol. 10, pp. 231-253). Boston: De Gruyter.
Perrin, Daniel (2019). Working with large data corpora in real-life writing research. In Kirk Sullivan & Eva Lindgren (Eds.), Observing writing: insights from keystroke logging: Brill.
Perrin, Daniel, & Kramsch, Claire (2018). Transdisciplinarity in applied linguistics. Introduction to the special issue. AILA Review, 31, 1-13.
