1 BAAL-CUP seminar report “Historicising the Digital: language practices in new and old media” Mel Evans and Caroline Tagg Historicising the Digital (University of Leicester, 27th-28 th June 2016) focused on promoting transhistorical perspectives between media scholars, historical linguists and researchers of language and new media. Around 30 participants attended the two-day seminar from the aforementioned disciplines, and ranged from MA and PhD students to senior academics. The opening plenary by Ana Deumert set the scene by exploring the extent to which digital practices are really “new”, drawing attention to the importance of context in order to ascertain who they are new for. This latter question requires a perspective that encompasses both time and space. The digital sphere has emerged differently across different parts of the world: there are multiple ‘digital modernities’, each the product of distinct historical trajectories shaped by levels of access, opportunity and power. Mclear on the Eastern Cape, 2012: phone-charging and airtime purchase services have sprung up in places where mobile phones are commonly owned but where people tend not to have contracts and only limited access to electricity (Deumert) Deumert’s plenary and the subsequent papers also foregrounded the layering of histories relevant to any analysis and understanding of digital practices. A present-day practice must be understood not only in relation to pre-digital practices (such as those surrounding Edwardian postcards, as discussed by Julia Gillen) but also to more recent technological developments within the same “mode”. Martine van Driel, for example, showed how users orient to online news articles in ways that differ from how they respond to live newsfeeds. WhatsApp practices, to take another example, must be understood in relation to earlier SMS practices (in the case of British users, discussed by Caroline Tagg) or to Mxit and BBM (in South Africa, as shown by Deumert). Tagg, for example, discussed how WhatsApp is seen as