This volume is a collection of selected papers from the 2002 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages on Linguistics (GURT). It contains 16 papers that are either loosely related to multimodal discourse analysis or address the relationship between discourse and technology, but not necessarily from the viewpoint of multimodal discourse analysis. The main strength of the volume is that it provides a rich variety of perspectives on discourse; the main weakness is that the perspectives do not seem to shed light on one single phenomenon or even a set of related phenomena, but, rather, the papers discuss various aspects of the multifaceted field of discourse studies.

The book starts out with an introductory chapter, “Multimodal Discourse Analysis as the Confluence of Discourse and Technology,” by the editors. By placing the volume in the context of GURT 2002, the chapter seeks to provide some background so that the reader can see how the papers relate to each other. In what follows, I will discuss those papers that in my view bring the most interesting insights. I will close the discussion with an overall assessment of the volume.

In his paper on “The Problem of Context in Computer-Mediated Communication,” Jones considers received notions of context that have been developed to describe written and face-to-face communication and argues that what makes communicating with new technologies different from face-to-face communication are the different ways in which these technologies allow participants to be present to one another and to be aware of other people's presence (p. 23). With examples from an English composition class, he shows that the students' ways of being present in computer-mediated communication are multifarious, and that it gives us a biased view of the communication if we extract one medium of communication out of the whole set of interactions in which the students are engaged.

Su offers an insightful sociolinguistic analysis of the Internet community in Taiwan. She analyzes a form of language play where Internet users modify Mandarin characters to produce what she calls mock Taiwanese-accented Mandarin (MTM) in order to create a humorous effect. She suggests that MTM is a practice of crossing (see Rampton, 1999), a way in which speakers use language or dialect to reproduce or challenged influential images of groups to which they do not themselves straightforwardly belong—in this case, the image of rural, unsophisticated speakers with a Taiwanese accent that is in opposition with the outgoing, urban image of Internet users.

Whalen and Whalen present an ongoing research program for what they call workscapes, which they define as “distinct configurations of people, their practices … the habitats or environments where this work gets done; and the tools, artifacts, and devices that populate these environments and are involved in the work's achievement” (p. 210). With an analysis of a misunderstanding in a copy shop between customer and the copy shop representative, they show that for an adequate analysis of the use of technologies in workplaces, we need to consider the technology as but one aspect of the workscape as a whole.

Erickson's article “Origins: A Brief Intellectual and Technological History of the Emergence of Multimodal Discourse Analysis” puts multimodal discourse analysis in a historical perspective. He considers both intellectual and technological developments and their impact on the field. The article is intellectually entertaining and provides insightful views, but, unfortunately, it reads very much like a conference paper rather than a fully developed research article.

Erickson's article reflects a problem for the volume as a whole: It is a collection of conference papers, some of which are very good (especially the ones mentioned previously), whereas others are too short and sketchy to convince the reader. The volume would have benefited greatly from more systematic and selective editing. However, it provides a rich picture of the field of discourse studies.