Typography and disciplinary identity in academic writing

This paper examines the potential significance of typographic variation in the front pages of a corpus of Humanities and Social Sciences doctoral theses. Some account is taken of the linguistic content of these pages, but the primary focus is on typographic resources such as font choice, salience, and layout. It is found that there is a strong association between the nature of the typographic choices and the disciplinary orientation. Specifically, the more marked semiotic resources are likely to be associated with theses which are oriented towards the “New Humanities”, that is, adopting a more subjective approach to research.