Literacy studies approaches have tended to adopt a position which enables ethnographic explorations of a wide range of 'literacies'. An important issue arising is the new challenge required for researchers to capture, manage, and analyse data that highlight the unique character of practices around texts in digital environments. Such inquiries, we argue, require multiple elements of data to be captured and analysed as part of effective literacy ethnographies. These include such things as the unfolding of digital texts, the activities around them, and features of the surrounding social and material environment. This paper addresses these methodological issues drawing from three educationally focused studies, and reporting their experiences and insights within uniquely different contexts. We deal with the issue of adopting new digital methods for literacy research through the notion of a 'deep dive' to explore educational tasks in classrooms. Through a discussion of how we approached the capture and analysis of our data, we present methods to better understand digital literacies in education. We then outline challenges posed by our methods, how they can be used more broadly for researching interaction in digital environments, and how they augment transdisciplinary debates and trends in research methods.

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AbstractWith digital texts being employed in classrooms, the construction and content of communication need to be examined to understand implications for classroom pedagogies and the development of new communicative practices. The study employs a multimodal interaction analysis (MIA) framework (

Language editing was introduced into the A&A editorial process in 2001. Here, we report on how this is done in practice and on the criteria that are applied. Key words. Editorials, noticesA&A introduced language editing as a service to its authors in 2001. Since that time, the scope and coverage of articles has increased steadily with the goal of making all the articles published in the Journal as clear and concise as possible. The Journal now employs three full-time language editors, all professionals with university degrees and with extensive training or experience in editing, language teaching, writing, science, and publishing. This Editorial discusses how and why articles are selected for language correction, the behind-the-scenes process in the editorial office, and why certain phrases and terms are corrected and others not. We hope that this explanation will help clarify both the purpose and the process of language editing and also describe how the authors can help make the submission of articles smoother and more rapid. Why edit articles?The Journal introduced language editing to improve the overall clarity of its published articles and to make certain a good level of English is maintained. It is one part of the recent developments at the Journal, and indeed language is edited in most professional publications. A&A is not just a forum for publishing scientific articles, but is also the reflection of a growing community of astronomers and astrophysicists from over 60 countries. While English is the chosen medium of communication, it is often not the first language of most of the Journal authors, who might feel hampered by the need to publish in a language that is not their own. With this in mind, the language editors placed some guidelines for authors to use on the A&A web site in 2006 and have been sending authors to the site since then for explanations of specific points as they came up.All too often, unclear language is interpreted as a sign of unclear thinking, so the job of the language editors is to allow the science to appear as it is intended. The language should be correct, unambiguous, and formal, and it should also carry the content, such that the article reads smoothly and clearly. The process of review by a trained, but non-specialist reader allows areas of text to be detected that are not very clear or that may be confusing to some readers.It is not the role or the intention of the language editors to evaluate or adjust the scientific content, since that has been done in the refereeing process. Rather, the text is read to assess its grammar, syntax, and clarity. They intervene first to remove grammatical errors, second to resolve any ambiguities of expression, and third to smooth out or simplify the style, leading to a style for the journal that is clear, concise, and easy for scientists to read. To this end, we feel that the language should be transparent, meaning it should go unnoticed, thereby allowing the reader to pay full attention to the scientific content.

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