Navigating the web looking for good information is a tiresome task. Here you can find some sites I have personally found useful or interesting. That is no guarantee of fitness for any particular purpose, so read the comments to see what any specific site may have to offer. If you are looking for academic material, that’s just around the corner, at the publications page.

Journals

Critical Discourse Analysis

If you are interested in discourse analysis, there is little doubt that you will already be familiar with the main print journals in the field. If you aren’t (familiar, that is; if you aren’t interested, I wonder what brought you to this site), you would do well to read Kimberly K. Emmons concise and accurate survey of journals carrying CDA. I limit my discussion here to online or otherwise unconventional media.

• Studies in Language and Capitalism is an online journal devoted to, well, the study of the language of contemporary capitalism, although its focus has been so far much wider than a strict reading of the notion would seem to entail; there is interesting writing on CDA methods, postcolonialism, gender and racism besides work specifically addressing capitalism/liberalism/globalisation
• Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines is also an interesting read. It claims to seek to establish links with related disciplines, such as media studies or philosophy. I guess I am not so certain that this isn’t what CDA has been all about since the label took over from Fowler and Kress’ critical linguistics, but whatever may be the case, the journal’s content is solid and engaging
• Discurso & Sociedad is one of the few Spanish-language journals carrying CDA nowadays. My involvement with the project is evident, so I will refrain from further comments here

Critical Management Studies

Critical Management Studies are that oddest of beasts: a theoretical approach focusing on the critique of established social practices and institutional arrangements, and the challenge to systems of domination, coming from that most late capitalist of disciplines, management. It is singular, anomalous, and very much a fringe phenomenon still, but it exists and is growing. It seems that not all is lost for Business majors yet.

• The Electronic Journal of Radical Organisation Theory is sort of a print organ for the work presented at the biennial CMS conferences. Publication is irregular (there was a two-year hiatus before the latest number came to light), but material is consistently good. And interdisciplinarity is really the name of the game here
• ephemera is, in contrast, much more strictly limited to its claimed field of theory & politics in organization. It manages to cram quite a lot of material in its four yearly issues
• M@n@gement seems to have slowed down a bit lately, but it has consistently published interesting material with a qualitative and critical bent in several languages. It is far less radical than the preceding ones, so perhaps readers exclusively interested in ideological matters may find it less useful

Metaphor

• Metaphorik is exclusively devoted to conceptual matters of metaphor and metonymy. Good German is a must, specially if one’s interested in the earlier issues. Blessed be the editors for their good taste in providing HTML versions of the published articles besides the customary PDF

Personal sites

Research articles tend to give an overly finished and polished image of research. Sometimes what one needs isn’t an elegant summary of findings, but rather some offbeat guidance, an instructive reflection or a good glimpse of how things stand in a particular field. Good homepages (which are sadly scarce) sometimes offer this. I have found the following of particular note:

• Jay L. Lemke’s page at the University of Michigan site is a treasure trove of interesting materials. It may not be the be-all, end-all of design, and some sections are awfully outdated, but Jay’s guide for doctoral students and young researchers is invaluable, and his reflections on the status and trends in semiotic research are excellent
• Teun A. van Dijk’s homepage contains a wealth of resources about CDA. It is very much about Teun and his interests, but it deserves careful examination

Institutional and project sites

Everybody and their grandmother have a website nowadays (even the author of this lines!), and most of them are nothing but sheer promotion (if you need to know the fancy term for this, it is marketisation of discourse). Occasionally someone has the bright idea to actually add some content. I like the signal-to-noise ration in the following.

• The Language in the Workplace Project is Janet Holmes’ project to research communication at work, the most thorough one I know from a linguistic perspective and a hugely interesting one to discourse analysts and organisational researchers alike

Interdisciplinarity

• Ever wondered why is it that people calling themselves discourse analysts and semioticians research the same topics, have the same interests, focus on the same phenomena but nevertheless do not read each other?^* If you do, that makes it two of us. And if you want to help reverse the trend, you can find heaps of interesting material at the Proceedings of the 2004 Congress of the International Semiotics Association. Mostly in French, so monolinguals beware

* Pretty much the same goes for other labels, “applied linguistics” being the most prominent. I have long wanted to do some scientometrics on label/topic relations and mutual citation between fields, but I need to find a stray scientometrist and funding for the project before seriously considering the matter

LaTeX

The worst thing about writing is not writer’s block, journal guidelines, deadlines or endless proofreading. It’s word processors.

I know that editing and correcting were much more complex and time-consuming in the days of typewriters or pen-and-paper, but there was one good thing to be said for the system: when writing, you concentrated on writing, not on making your work look pretty. It was assumed that the fancy decisions about layout and design would be better attended to by a professional typesetter, leaving authors to do what they’re actually supposed to: produce quality writing.

Word processors and their DIY approach have had two main consequences: first, much increased work for writers, who now have to spend time choosing typefaces, font size and weight, adjusting alignement and generally worrying about the
unprofessional look of their documents, rather than focusing on writing clear and accurate sounding prose; second, much worse design, since most of us are not seasoned designers with a good eye for things such as margin-to-print ratios or
adequate title blackness, let alone sophisticated kerning. Documents written in word processors are almost invariably idiosyncratic, inconsistent and poorly laid-out.

Those of us who want to focus on writing and leave layout to professionals do not need to hire a graphic designer. We can use LaTeX, a powerful typesetting system based on the idea that one should focus on document content, letting the program work out the specifics of presentation. LaTeX documents are written in plain text, with just the necessary markup to indicate their semantic structure. Once the document is ready, the typesetting program produces high-quality and publication-ready output.

Here you have a few useful documents and resources about LaTeX:

• The not-so-short introduction to LaTeX, possibly the best work to get acquainted with the system;
• The rather solid Wikibook on LaTeX, less systematic and well-written but also informative;
• A very useful page about using LaTeX in Linguistics, including a number of resources for satisfying the complex writing needs of a research linguist;
• Not strictly LaTeX-related, but on the same vein, linguists willing to actually make use of what computers have to offer should check Kenneth W. Church’s Unix™ for Poets tutorial. It is a wonderful lesson about why is it sensible to avoid binary formats.