Studies of digital communication technologies often focus on the apparently unique set of
multimodal resources afforded to users and the development of innovative linguistic strategies
for performing mediatised identities and maintaining online social networks. This edited volume
interrogates the novelty of such practices by establishing a transhistorical approach to the
study of digital communication. The transhistorical approach explores language practices as
lived experiences grounded in historical contexts and aims to identify those elements of human
behaviour that transcend historical boundaries looking beyond specific developments in
communication technologies to understand the enduring motivations and social concerns that
drive human communication. The volume reveals long-term patterns in the indexical functions of
seemingly innovative written and multimodal resources and the ideologies that underpin them
and shows that methods are not necessarily contingent on their datasets: historical analytic
frameworks can be applied to digital data and newer approaches used to understand historical
data. These insights present exciting opportunities for English language researchers both
historical and modern.
