Digital Humanities
Digital communication and social media have offered abundant new affordances and opportunities for new forms of language and literacy practices. Digital Literacies, as a key research area in the Department of English, is broadly defined as the development and application of digital resources in the research and teaching of language, literature, and communication. We also strive to engage our students through new media resources in their learning and research of English linguistics and literature. Our faculty members have contributed actively to the development of online resources for English language and linguistics. In particular, online resources have been developed to facilitate the learning and research of World Englishes. Examples include:
- Internet Grammar of English (also available in a simplified Chinese translation and as a mobile app) and the International Corpus of English (ICE).
- Telling Stories: Linguistic Diversity in Hong Kong, English Accents Worldwide and the History and Spread of English Worldwide, developed by Jette Hansen Edwards.
- Twitter Corpus of English in Hong Kong (TCOEHK) and Twitter Corpus of Philippine Englishes (TCOPE), developed by Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales
New forms of multimodal and multilingual texts and practices are constantly produced and consumed on social media and networked platforms. Working on multiple contact varieties in the Philippines, Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales has created an online Sino-Philippine language map that provides a brief description and references pertaining to select Sino-Philippine varieties in the Philippines. He has also developed a Lánnang-uè linguistic feature incubator, an online tool that collects innovative features of Lánnang-uè from crowd-sourcing. Wilkinson has also developed several digital platforms, such as The Lannang Archives Online Library, Interactive Lannang Orthography and Sound Dictionary, and My Language, My Heritage, a grassroots language documentation project for and by the Lannang heritage communities. Wilkinson also manages several corpora, among which includes the Twitter Corpus of Philippine Englishes (TCOPE) and the Corpus of Singapore English Messaging (CoSEM). He also created scraping, corpus-searching and annotation tools using Python, such as TweetCorp. Carmen Lee’s extensive research on digital discourse has been concerned with the ways our online activities are closely tied to and embedded in our offline lived experiences, and the possible impact of digital discourse on our everyday language use. Tongle Sun’s work focuses on enhancing intercultural-global citizenship, intercultural communicative skills, and digital literacies in learning through the application of digital resources and tools. In researching literature, Eddie Tay explores innovative ways to present poetry through street photography on his site Hong Kong Lucida. Joanna Mansbridge examines performances that draw attention to our everyday engagements with digital technology and investigates how digital spaces, such as Zoom, transform—and are transformed by—artistic practices. Collier Nogues has published about the pedagogical promise of Generative AI as a creative collaborator in graphic fiction and poetry, and writes digital poetry using narrative game apps and immersive VR frameworks. She also partners with CUHK’s Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies to develop immersive VR pedagogical materials for Hong Kong English classrooms. Grant Hamilton teaches and writes in the area of computational literary studies. The research laboratory in the Department of English provides a wide range of software and tools to facilitate our research and teaching. See here for other digital resources available in the Department of English.