The Digital Scholar: Academic Communication in Multimedia Environment

The forms and genres of academic communication have changed considerably over the past decades - from standardised ways of producing texts on/for paper to a (less?) standardised way of communication in Web 2.0. Published papers are now available to a greater number of readers, interaction among colleagues can take place in real time via written, audio or visual formats, and it has become much more comfortable for students as well as for those outside the scientific community to access academic information and to contact its authors. It seems, however, that many aspects of academic communication have not yet changed, and its participants - either in the 'old' or in the 'new' generation - are ill-equipped to work within the multimedia context. This volume, therefore, takes a look at academic communication in the multimedia environment, in order to throw light on how these processes are linked to new multimedia affordances, while at the same time encapsulating old genre conventions and participant interaction with the medium.

Irena Vassileva, Dr. phil. habil., is Full Professor of English and German at the New Bulgarian University - Sofia, Bulgaria. Mariya Chankova is Dr. Phil. in English Linguistics from the RWTH Aachen. She is Senior Assistant Professor of English and French at the South-West University - Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. Esther Breuer is the head of the Centre for Writing Competency at the University of Cologne, Germany. Klaus P. Schneider holds the Chair in Applied English Linguistics at the University of Bonn, Germany.