Intro to Digital Stylistics

Hello, dear students. Today we are going to talk about digital stylistics. This is new thing for all of us because we have been studying stylistics and what is that digital stylistics that we are going to explore in this video. stylistics, you know, is concerned with language, meaning, and power in the whole text, whatever it has been created. And here as the text is going to be digital, so we shall be attaching digital text in the finding of meaning power in the age of digital text here. why it is necessary? Because these days it has become norm for us that we are going to talk most of the time in the digital way. And the text which is created through digital way, that has also become different as compared to traditional human-based text. So, that is why its analysis should be done. And therefore, digital stylistic response to the blogs, the tweets, the memes, AI-generated text, and multimodal platforms. So, in that way, this is what we shall be doing in this whole video. The question is why should we go for digital stylistic analysis? It is necessary because it integrates linguistic analysis, corpus tools, and critical theory combined together to make the people understand what is and how to conduct digital stylistic analysis. And it goes further to examine meaning, ideology, and identity not in the simple text, but in the digital text. In the traditional form, if we go forward to see what is the basic difference, in the traditional form of stylistic analysis, we had stable text. But in case of digital text, these are not only fragmented, but also hyperlinked. These are multimodal and are algorithm-driven text. So, that is why they're not stable at all. And in order to analyze them, we need different form of analysis, that is digital stylistics. If we see how theoretically it can be combined with the analysis, here we can see that the theoretic theoretic theories given by Halliday are very important because he talks about the functional view of language. And so, it can be added with the computational computational and critical methods to understand how theory can be associated with that. Normally and basically, this theory talks about the functional view of language. So, that is why what language is performing there in case of digital text, that needs to be understood. The theory given by him is most of the time what we call as the systemic functional linguistic. It means that there has to be discovered three things. Number one, ideational. Number two, inspirational. Sorry, interpersonal. And number three, textual meaning. These three things when are seen in the generation, in the production, and in the understanding and analysis of the text at that time, it becomes systemic functional linguistics. But in case of digital text, we need to add the hashtags also. Sometime the emojis are used by the people and the layout of the text along with the modality. And all these things when combined together to give us the meaning online, this thing we need to understand when we go forward. So, in that way, theoretical framework of Halliday can also be applied to have digital stylistic analysis of the text produced in the digital format by AI or by human being. Not only this, corpus linguistics also becomes important here. And that can be understood in terms of the corpus stylistics, that is corpus stylistics. For example, corpus most of the time uses very large data sets, not just one sentence or two sentences, in order to identify the patterns. And when we supply the large data sets, it reveals ideological framing, how it has informed, for example, war metaphor in the health discourse, how it has been used, it teaches to us. So, in this way, corpus linguistics also becomes corpus stylistics. And that becomes very really significant kind of thing in order to understand the digital stylistics analysis. For example, when we conduct digital stylistics in order to find out ideology, we see that how discourse analysis can be done here, how critical discourse analysis can be done. In that way, the digital text and their analysis reaches very close to critical discourse analysis. But only difference is that we shall be looking at the language along with the algorithms jointly which jointly exercise power and control. And if we do so, definitely we will be conducting digital stylistic analysis in order to reach the ideology preached there. It is also big issue that when the text is generated by artificial intelligence, what is the role of multimodality? In this regard, we can understand that digital text combine images, sounds, layout, and text all together. Artificial intelligence text appear fluent, but are stylistically totally flat. There are deviation signals only because of the human presence. Otherwise, artificial intelligence does not provide us the deviational signals. So, traditional method of stylistic analysis is not capable of analyzing the digital text. We have to use digital stylistics. So, we can conclude in the sense that digital stylistics redefines stylistics inquiry. It is essential for understanding digital culture, power, and identity. Dear students, here it all ends. Hope to see you in some next video. If you like it, understand something out of it, do not fail to hit the subscribe and like button. you can further get enlightenment from the notes provided by me. Thank you for watching.