“There’s power in stories”: A Multimodal Corpus-Based and Functional Analysis of Fandom Blogs

Blogs have been classified according to their discussion of external events (i.e. filters, Blood 2002) and to the impact and influence bloggers may have as citizen journalists (Lasica 2002, Gillmor 2003), public intellectuals (Park 2003) and opinion leaders (Delwiche 2004). Other studies focus on the sociodemographics of bloggers’ and individuals’ motivations for using a specific medium (Papacharissi 2004, Herring et al. 2005a, 2005b, Kaye 2005, Nowson and Oberlander 2006, Li 2007, Sanderson 2008). Blogs have been also variously defined, but what most definitions have in common is that they include posts published in inverted chronological order and that they need technical affordances to be aggregated. Research literature has amply discussed social and verbal aspects in blogging and also multimodal properties to some extent, but no systematic attempt has been made so far to take into full account the many resources that come into play in blogs. This paper sets out to fill this gap, also trying to capture the textual and semiotic transition from macro-blogging to micro- blogging in English, here defined as blogEng (Sindoni 2013), that is holding sway in the contemporary mediascape.