Wiki

Actor-Network Theory is a theoretical and methodological approach that sees all social phenomena as the product of network interactions. It is unique in that it recognizes both objects and technologies as network nodes equal with human actants.

Adaptation implies the ability to evolve and change according to changing environments and demands. It is an ongoing process in all parts of the world and can be applied to many different fields. The term arises in regards to, for example, biological processes, technological advancements or reworkings in the arts (film or literature).

Affordances refer to the properties of an object that define its possible uses. The concept can be used to analyse the possible uses and constraints of an object or technology. A particular object or technology call for a certain form of interaction and use and at the same time places limitations on that use. 

Agency is the ability of individuals to act independently and of their own volition.

Agency in children's literature refers to the empowerment and independence of children's characters. It involves portraying children as active participants in their own lives, capable of making choices, influencing their surroundings, and shaping their destinies.

Algorithmic activism, when intentional, presupposes that the activists not only subscribe to the message they interact with, but also understand the affordances and the algorithmic construction of the medium.

Algorithmic culture refers to the ways in which the logic of big data and large scale computation (including algorithms) alters they culture is practiced, experienced and understood.

Algorithmic populism refers to a new manifestation and form of populism in the digital age in which politicians use algorithms to construct, claim and redistribute the idea that they are articulating the voice of the people.

Animal rights is the idea that humans "do not have a right to use non-human animals for our own purposes, which include food, clothing, entertainment, and vivisection. This is based on a rejection of speciesism and the knowledge that animals are sentient beings." (Lin 2019)

Arts is originally related to art and as such refers to a skill and to creativity. In antiquity and in medieval European universities seven artes were considered important: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. From the 18th and 19th centuries on – the period of Romanticism and upcoming bourgeois society - the artist, the one who makes art, was regarded as someone with a special talent and authentic character.

likes, shares, clicks, comments, views, posts, only data to gain more visibility in the hybrid media system (Maly, 2020)

The ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’ (AHD) is a concept that was introduced by Laurajane Smith in 2006 to describe how attention is focused on “aesthetically pleasing material objects, sites, places and/or landscapes” through the dominance of “technical and aesthetic experts, and institutionalized in state cultural agencies and amenity societies”.

BookTok is a sub-community of TikTok that caters to book enthusiasts. Here, they can share their book reviews, recommendations, and other book-related content.

BookTube is a community on YouTube that focuses primarily on creating content, specifically videos, around the subject of literature and book-related subjects.

Cancel Culture encapsulates the acts of withholding support or endorsement from individuals or institutions on social media due to a collective disagreement or disapproval of their actions, beliefs, or behaviors.

The term canon, or canonicity, describes the rules of what is presented as true and what has happened within an imaginary world.

Censorship focuses on placing restrictions on activities that bring conflict in human relationships. Censorship has always existed in some form in all societies and is simultaneously viewed as positive or negative (O’Leary et al. (2016).

Childhood is a broad term usually applied to the phase of human development between infancy and adulthood. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, childhood is the period between the end of infancy (about 2 years of age) and the onset of puberty, marking the beginning of adolescence (10–12 years of age).

Children’s Literature (often abbreviated as CL) is literature written specifically for children, about children, consumed by children and even written by children. It is often also referred as Children and Young Adult Literature because its general audience is less than eighteen years old but also often addresses people in their mid twenties. For instance, picturebooks and YA novels are important book publishing formats in this literature. However, it is mainly adults who are responsible for the production, distribution and reception of children's books. 

Choreography of assembly (Gerbaudo, 2014) refers to 'the mediated 'scene-setting' and 'scripting' of people's physical assembling in public space' as a key-ingrediënt of 21st century social movements.

A chronotope, as defined by Bakhtin, is a specific spacetime context enabling a plot, characters, and rules for action and meaning.

The term coevalness refers to sharing the same timeframe. Much like 'medieval' refers to the middle ages, co-eval refers to a shared age.

Comics (generally referring to comic books and comic strips) are a popular form of visual storytelling that combines still images and text.

Counter-mapping refers to the effort of mapping against dominant power structures with the aim of creating social or political change. 

Critical cartography refers to the academic field in which products and processes of cartography are critically analysed in order to reveal hegemonic power-relations.

Cultural heritage is a “social and political construct encompassing all those places, artefacts and cultural expressions inherited from the past which, because they are seen to reflect and validate our identity as nations, communities, families and even individuals, are worthy of some form of respect and protection.”

Aleida Assmann defines cultural memory as a "system of values, artifacts, institutions, and practices that retain the past for the present and the future”.

Culture is shorthand for the stuff that makes human interactions meaningful and comprehensible.

A data double is a data-generated profile of an individual based on aggregated online surveillance.

Data voids are engine queries that turn up little to no results.

Datafication refers to the transformation of human life and social interaction into quantified data, which in turn is transformed into different kinds of value, for example capital through monetization. 

Dataveillance is ‘the monitoring of citizens on the basis of their online data’ (Van Dijck, 2014).

Digital activism is a digitally mediated form of social activism and an umbrella term that contains ‘algorithmic activism’, ‘slacktivism’ and other practices that can be seen as digital activism.

Digital culture refers to culture shaped by the emergence and use of digital technologies.

Digital ethnography is a specific approach to research ‘on online practices and communications, and on offline practices shaped by digitalisation’

The digital interaction order invites scholars to have attention for the fact that the interactional rules and expectations online are not just informed by the social occasion, or the socio-cultural context but also by the socio-technical context.

Issue mapping is a concept to study the social connections made when actors interact and create bonds. It asks how a matter of “fact” becomes a matter of “concern” when connections are made, and can be an especially fruitful way to study online culture and phenomena.

‘Diglossia’ is a concept coined by Ferguson (1959) and refers to a situation in which one language is spoken in domestic domains and another language is spoken in public domains.

Discourse can be seen as language-in-action, something that is effectively used in communication.

Dual Readership refers to the process of constructing a work or text, also called crossover literature, which can play to two different levels of understanding for various audiences. This practice is most commonly employed in children’s literature.

Dual screening can be described as "the complex bundle of practices that involve integrating, and switching across and between, live broadcast media and social media” (Vaccari, Chadwick, & O'Loughlin, 2015). 

Ecofeminism, as a theoretical framework, delves into the intricate web of oppression, examining the linkages between the subjugation of marginalized communities and the exploitation of the natural world (Warren, 2000). At its core, this perspective underscores the interdependence of various forms of injustice, weaving together the threads that connect the mistreatment of nature, women, animals, and the environment (Gaard, 2009).

The economy of virality grounds in the commercialization of our society. The content is not sold anymore, but our attention is (which has to be quantified in clicks, likes, etc.)! 

ELLA stands for "Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis", and 2.0 points to the fact that offline signs are followed through to their online dimensions. ELLA 2.0 is, thus, online-offline Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis.

Enoughness is a theory of contemporary identity that states that identities are constructed out of a particular portion ("enough") of emblematic identity features.

Ethnography can be defined as the small-scale study of human behavior through "clinical" observation and intersubjective participation.

A fairy tale is a work of literature that is set in a fictional world and typically incorporates magical elements.

Etymologically, the word “fiction” is derived from the Latin word “fictus,” which means “form.” According to Searle (1979), works of fiction result from an author's intention to perform a particular sort of illocutionary act. In the same vein, fiction is produced when authors of stories intend that readers may believe the stories are true (Currie, 1990). In literature, fiction is significant in describing imaginary events and people.

The filter bubble is a personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by algorithms.

Finstagram refers to the creation of Fake Instagram accounts to post content one would not post under one's real name.

Formats are recognizably patterned forms of behavior, subject to norms and judged accordingly by others.

A frame is a set of meaningful signs connected to specific types of social action. Together they create a 'logic' of action and make the action understandable for those involved in it.

Generative AI refers to deep learning synthesis technologies that create computational content such as images or memes from text.

Globalization refers to the process of increasing interconnectedness between different parts of the world, creating global modes of organization and conduct. 

Graphic novels are a contemporary literature form of long stories told in comics format. They have the same characteristics of comics: multimodality, cartooning techniques and elements (panels, gutters).

Hegemony refers to the dominance of certain ideas, images, discourses and ideologies, either generally or in specific domains.

Heritage participation refers to a variety of practices that focus on involving the public in relation to cultural heritage. Some of these practices might support co-creation and empowerment, while other practices might merely inform or consult the public — two activities that are not always considered 'genuine' participation.

Hidden transcripts is a concept often used in discussions of power and resistance, and it refers to forms of resistance and dissent that are kept out of sight for those in power.

The hybrid media system highlights that different types of media not only co-exist, but form a system that evolves through mutual (inter)actions among older and newer media logics.

Hyperlinks are links from one hypertext document to another and usually consist of a highlighted word, phrase, or image. The term was used and elaborated on by Juliette De Maeyer in her article, 'Towards a hyperlinked society: A critical review of link studies'.

Identity refers to various aspects of how we see ourselves, how we show ourselves to others, and how we perceive others.

Ideology is any set of socially structured ideas guiding behavior and thought in particular domains of life.

Meaning that emerges out of text-context relations. Apart from (often) having a denotational meaning, linguistic and other signs are indexical in that they suggest metapragmatic, metalinguistic, metadiscursive features of meaning. Thus, an utterance may indexically invoke social norms, roles, identities.

According to UNESCO, the concept of ‘intangible heritage’ can be described as “the practices, expressions, knowledge and skills that communities, groups and sometimes individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage."

Intertextuality occurs whenever we observe material from one text occur in other texts, explicitly as well as implicitly.

Jeugdliteratuur is literatuur die vaak speciaal voor kinderen is geschreven.

Junk news is news that is consumed and goes viral not because it is relevant or appreciated, but because it is addictive (Venturini, 2019).

Linguicism is language discrimination or language racism, the discrimination of speakers of a certain language.

Linguistic landscape is an object of sociolinguistic analysis and comprises publicly visible language samples displayed in a certain area.

Literature is a lively and complex negotiation of text, author, reader and society.

The manosphere is a multifaceted online subculture that centers around discussions of masculinity, gender dynamics, and men’s issues, drawing from a diverse collection of websites, blogs, and online forums that promote masculinity, often in opposition to feminism. While the specifics of each group’s beliefs sometimes conflict, they are generally united in the belief that society is biased against men due to the influence of feminism, and that feminists promote misandry (hatred of men).

Media frames in the context of mass-media communication refers to the way interpretations of a message are encouraged or discouraged. It was first introduced by Erving Goffman in 1974 through his book, ‘Frame Analysis’.

Mediatization can be described as the dependency between media communication and sociocultural change, in which the media are becoming increasingly powerful (Hepp, 2013).

Memes are “a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form; created with awareness of each other; circulated, imitated and transformed via the internet by many” (Phillips, 2016).

A metaphor is a trope, or a figure of speech, that directly refers to one thing by mentioning features of another one; an object, or an idea, is viewed as a metaphor which offers people new ways of examining ideas and viewing the world.

Metapolitics started from the idea of ‘the primacy of culture over politics as the premise to a revolution in the spirit of ‘right-wing Gramscism’ (Griffin, 2000).

One who gains a significant following through digital media.

Micro-hegemonies (also written as microhegemonies) is a term developed to describe the multiple sets of norms that govern the details of social life.

Micro-populations are the material expression of temporary and emerging micro-hegemonies. They group people together by their ‘style’, by the places where they hang out and the places where you can’t find them.

Multimodal discourse analysis is a method that takes into account multiple modes of communication and how they interact with one another.

Multimodality is frequently characterized as either the interaction among semiotic modes or the integration of semiotic modes or resources (Poulsen, 2014). It approaches comprehending communication and representation to be more than about language.

New Adult (NA) fiction is a literary category and genre that commonly refers to narratives that explore the transition from late adolescence to adulthood. It is a relatively new concept, and its definition has been developing and changing since its inception.

What is Culture?

Culture is people’s way of life. It could be communicable, which has to do with language, music and greetings, and non-communicable, which is in terms of food, and dressing, among others.

The online-offline nexus is a description of social reality in the post-digital age. We live our social lives increasingly at the intersection of online and offline forces.

Orientalism refers to a long tradition of Western representations of the Orient as exotic and 'non-coeval' with the West.

The term ‘otherness’ refers to a process or situation in which a distinction is created between ‘us’ and ‘them’ — the ‘others’.

Overlexicalization refers to the repetitions of words in order to emphasise a certain concept or definition. It is a process where words are used to persuade and accentuate something within discourse. Often, these words are quasi-synonymous - referring to the same thing in a slightly different tone - and give a sense of overcompleteness. Overlexicalization can be recognised when words are placed within a discourse which aims to persuade and cause to believe in something.

The panopticon is a structure of power-knowledge, used by Michel Foucault to describe a system in which totalized surveillance can be organized.

The picturebook is a storytelling medium that presents its text in both verbal and visual language. According to Barbara Bader (1976), a picturebook is words and illustrations in a total design, “an item of manufacture and a commercial product; a social, cultural, historic document; and foremost, an experience for a [reader / beholder]. As an art form it hinges on the interdependence of pictures and words, on the simultaneous display of two facing pages, and on the drama of the turning page” (ibid., p.1).

A podcast is an episodic audio program or digital file series that can be downloaded on a personal mobile device or computer.

Post-digital refers to the social, cultural and technical condition that followed the digital revolution.

Postcolonialism in children’s literature refers to literary works created for children by individuals living in former colonies. This term can also be applied to the analysis and reinterpretation of literary works written from a Western perspective, to present diverse viewpoints.

The public sphere is the realm of communication and debate that came to life with the emergence of mass communication in the form of a relatively small-scale and independent press in the 18th and 19th century.

Refugee literature refers to literary works, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and other forms of written expression, that focus on the experiences of refugees. These works often explore the challenges, struggles, and triumphs of individuals or groups who have been forced to leave their homes due to conflict, persecution, or other forms of hardship.

Weng Marc Lim defines the ‘selfie’ as “a self-expressive photograph featuring the photographer as the primary individual” in a “background that is consciously created, modified and shared with others”.

The act of posting memes, photos, tweets or other social media content, often in response to earlier posts, that does not have any relation to the post they refer to.

Social Media is “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).

Social media celebrities are highly visible media figures whose fame is native to social media platforms.

Speciesism is the biased belief in the superiority of some species over others. According to this prejudice some animal species are favoured over others, and the human animal is favoured above all other species.

The concept of the spectacle in cultural theory is most famously articulated by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. Debord opens his work with a foundational statement: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

Subcultures consist of people who participate in a lifestyle that is typically regarded as deviant in dominant society. Engagement in such deviant activities usher people to find other like-minded individuals and interact with them in order to build a culture. This helps in the development of perspectives about oneself with relation to others in society (Becker 1963).

Superdiversity (also written as super-diversity) refers to two major changes occurring across the world after the end of the Cold War: (a) new patterns of migration causing demographc changes, and (b) the emerging internet and its generalized spread, influencing all aspects of social, cultural and economic life.

Surveillance is a mode of power based on the detailed and totalized observation of behavior. It is the prevailing form of power developed and deployed in modernity

Surveillance capitalism is an economic order and logic that claims human experience and behavior as free raw material for commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.

Transmedia Storytelling is a concept that explains the distribution of media content across multiple media platforms. In a multi-layered media landscape, content is no longer confined to one medium, but rather works across media boundaries.

The troll is a person "whose real intention(s) is/are to cause disruption and/or to trigger or exacerbate conflict for the purposes of their own amusement"

The spreading of digital content, such as images, videos, or links, in a short period of time through online media such as Social Networking Sites (SNSs) and electronic mail,  shared by a large number of people.

Being woke refers to being aware and well-informed about cultural and political issues, especially those affecting marginalized groups in society. Over time, however, woke and wokeism have taken on more contested meanings. In the past decade, the term has increasingly been used pejoratively, especially by critics of the socially progressive left.

Dowhower (1997) defines a book as wordless when the book’s primary meaning or message is conveyed through the illustrations.

Young Adults novel (shortened as YA novel) is a literature subcategory within the Young Adult fiction genre. The concept of the young adult (YA) refers to adolescence and youth, though it is very context-dependent. According to the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) YA books are those aimed at people from 12 to 18 years old (teenagers). In most of the cases, the protagonists of the novels fall within those age ranges, and the story is told through teenage eyes.

The concept of the ‘young adult’, also synonymous with adolescence and youth, is one which is heavily context-dependent. Over time, the perception of the concept has shifted from merely a developmental outlook to one which is also bound by a socio-cultural understanding. Broadly, it is believed to be a stage between childhood and adulthood, and is influenced by several social, economical and cultural factors.