AAUWriting texts for the Internet
Sanat Seidekhanov is currently spending three months at the university’s Department of Slavonic Studies as a visiting researcher. Originally from Kazakhstan, the linguist is particularly interested in texts that appear on the Internet. Ursula Doleschal, head of the department, will provide methodological support.
Sanat Seidekhanov is a doctoral student at the “Al-Farabi Kazakh National University” in Almaty, the former capital of the ninth largest country in the world (in terms of the surface area). He will spend the summer semester in Klagenfurt at the Department of Slavonic Studies, and is hoping to make significant progress with the work on his thesis, as he tells us. Seidekhanov’s research interests focus on copywriting and re-writing. These two terms refer to both, texts for advertisements and articles for various kinds of websites. Seidekhanov is particularly interested in the so-called multimedia longread formats, or reports, which are published online, illuminating a topic in depth from many perspectives and offering various multimedia formats in addition to the text. Typically, these can include audio files, or embedded YouTube videos. According to Sanat Seidekhanov, this format offers a multitude of possibilities for marketing purposes, but also serves the traditional mass media well. Seidekhanov, who works at the Department of Linguistics and European Languages at his home university, studies the linguistic characteristics of this format in great detail.
The linguist believes that the opportunities provided by the World Wide Web are responsible for new narrative styles and linguistic formats, which he would like to explore more thoroughly. “The interplay of various instruments – image, text, video, sound – has had a significant impact on how messages are transported.” Here, at the Department of Slavonic Studies, Ursula Doleschal will contribute her linguistic expertise in order to support Sanat Seidekhanov in his work on his thesis.
Before his scientific activity, Seidekhanov was a first editor-in-chief of Men’sHealth magazine in Kazakhstan and worked as a copywriter in network advertising agencies for a long time. Today he is still working as a freelance copywriter. Seidekhanov is a full-time student and enjoys working in the academic sphere: “I find the creation and distribution of knowledge very satisfying.” He hopes to remain involved with academic teaching in the future.
