engleski

'Woke me up. Bed was shaking and my aquarium water was going wild. Shocking." Narrativity and Stancetaking in Online Earthquake Testimonials

This paper presents findings from a qualitative analysis of online earthquake testimonials posted on LastQuake, a mobile app designed by the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) that alerts populations about earthquakes in real- time and gathers testimonies from earthquake experiencers. The aim of the analysis is to illustrate notable aspects of narrativity and discursive strategies that users in Croatia employed when digitally sharing their experiences of earthquakes during the intensive seismic activity from March 2020 to March 2021. A corpus of over 31 thousand testimonials relating to 32 representative earthquakes from that period was analysed with an aim to describe the features of this peculiar online genre. The theoretical and methodological framework of the study was informed by the “small stories” paradigm (Georgakopoulou 2013, 2017a, 2017b), a prominent sociolinguistic approach to the analysis of narratives and identities that focuses on a range of discursive activities that are underrepresented or not recognized as stories in traditional narrative studies. This analysis shows that although the app was not designed as an interactive social networking platform, over time, posters have formed a digital community of practice, i.e. a “networked public” (boyd 2011), by ‘tweaking’ the affordances of the app and enacting new, unexpected practices of participation. The structural and thematic analysis of the testimonials illustrates that posters employ a wide range of networked practices of stancetaging (Giaxoglou and Johansson 2020), not only to report on felt earthquakes, but also to express frustration, fear, and support ; to argue, joke, troll, spread conspiracy theories, and call posters to stop commenting on minor seismic events. The rich genre proliferation of online earthquake testimonials shows how this type of digital storytelling can be informative about the socially complex impact of earthquakes and the use of various narrative strategies for the representation of earthquake-related anxiety, stress, and trauma.

narrative analysis ; small stories ; online earthquake testimonials

nije evidentirano