One of the Department’s research foci is Digital Literacy and faculty members are involved in both research and teaching projects that explore ‘Big Data and eLearning’. Below are some indicative examples of work by Faculty members in this area:
Big Data and eLearning Research
- Carmen Lee’s main research interest lies in the area of internet linguistics, with a specific focus on multilingual practices on the internet. Her on-going work has been interested in how the affordances of digital media allow people to produce and consume new forms of multilingual and multimodal writing, and how these practices are increasingly embedded in people’s ‘offline’ everyday lives.
- Jookyoung Jung explores how to promote eLearning in the context of second language instruction. Within the gaze-contingency paradigm, her research project investigates if eye-tracking can be used as an educational tool to trigger learners’ attention to target second language constructions. In addition, she also explores if gamification and multimodal input can promote second language learning.
- Haerim Hwang explores (second) language development by analyzing both written and spoken data produced from learners. For this line of work, she creates a learner corpus, proposes novel linguistic indices explaining learner development, such as syntactic diversity, and develops a natural language processing application in Python. She expects her work in this line to contribute to improvement in the automatic assessment of learner production data, education of learners of English, and professionalization of language educators.
- Joanna Mansbridge’s research analyses the use of digital technology in theatre and performance, focusing especially on how artistic applications enable a rethinking of technology as a universal concept and provoke questions about how technological practices are changed by creative and cross-cultural experiments. "Choreographing the Nonhuman," for example, analyses a telematic performance that connected dancers in Hong Kong and Zurich, using live streaming, motion capture, and avatars to create a performative dialogue between East Asian and European mythologies, aesthetics, and philosophies.
- Collier Nogues’s research explores the immersive and interactive possibilities of poetry written inside 360˚ photographs using A-Frame, the VR web framework. In her creative writing courses, she teaches hybrid and multimodal forms including Tumblr poems, interactive fiction in Twine, and digital erasure poetry. Students not only read works in these media but also compose their own.
- Prem Phyak explores how teachers in higher education in under-resourced contexts can integrate technological tools in their pedagogies. He has worked with teachers in Nepal on action research projects to integrate digital tools in teaching.
- Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales is compiling a contemporary sociolinguistic corpus of Englishes and other linguistic varieties in East Asia. The corpus will utilize a mix of machine learning and Deep Learning methods to annotate the text for part-of-speech and dependency parsing as well as impute missing social information.
