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Article published In:
10th Anniversary Issue: Engaging with LL futures
Edited by Robert Blackwood and Elana Shohamy
[Linguistic Landscape 10:4] 2024
► pp. 425–452

Authorship, ownership, and ethics in datafied discourse on Instagram

New perspectives for online linguistic landscapes

ORCID logo | University of Strasbourg
Datafication, or the translation of our everyday actions into quantifiable metrics, underwrites a wide set of contemporary discursive practices. With a specific focus on the social media platform Instagram, this paper analyzes mediatized landscape signs as ‘datafied discourse’ enmeshed in an entangled apparatus of platforms, algorithms, and online networks. Using a corpus of 404 public Instagram posts gathered from the Café de Flore geotag, I examine how the vernacular practices of geotagging, mediatization, and remediatization reflexively construct this ostensibly ‘user-generated’ landscape. I then consider the implications of these and other discursive practices occurring at the ‘online-offline nexus’ through the dimensions of authorship and ownership. Finally, amid a confluence of new LL work, I propose to orient scholarship toward an ‘infrastructural’ perspective, in which datafication, online platforms, and algorithms are understood to exert considerable influence over our landscapes, thus emerging as relevant to scholars engaged in any genre of LL analysis.
Keywords: online linguistic landscape, Linguistic Landscape, Instagram, multimodality, mediatization, datafication, platformization, ethics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Online Linguistic Landscape: Retrospective
    • 2.1Exploratory: Landscapes in virtual space
    • 2.2Expansionary: Fluidity and recontextualization in the OLL
    • 2.3Infrastructural: Platformization, datafication and mediatization at the online-offline nexus
  • 3.Ethics-as-methods for LL research on Instagram
  • 4.(Re)Making place: Tagging practices and permission structures
    • 4.1Entering the frame: Geotagging as stancetaking
    • 4.2Permission structures and remediatized uptake
  • 5.Aftermath: Implications for authorship, ownership, ethics in the LL
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 3 December 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.24078.mci
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