Over the past decades, the myth of the digital natives being 'naturally' fluent in the use of ICT has been repeatedly rehearsed, revised, and eventually challenged (Prensky 2001a, 2009; Thomas 2011), but probably not yet comprehensively explored on the basis of empirical evidence. Especially in a teaching context, such competence has been more assumed than tested, and the gap between imagined and real skills runs the risk of leaving a grey area where neither the potential is fully exploited nor the limitations are fully addressed. With this in mind, the present article reports on the results of a teaching experience carried out with university students – namely, a corpus linguistics/stylistics exploration of Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice in digital format. While the pervasiveness of digital technology in everyday life has been seen as having a significant impact on the interaction with text from a very young age, it seems in fact that new digitally enhanced reading skills still need to be self-consciously developed in learners. The use of corpus linguistics resources and tools in the literature class can therefore be seen as a useful contribution to the development of such skills and a way to raise awareness of shifts occurring in digital reading compared to print-based reading. In particular, by experimenting with vertical (Tognini Bonelli 2001) and distant (Moretti 2013) reading, and by engaging with quantitative and qualitative analysis of language data, students can both attain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare's innovative use of language and develop useful digital reading skills that can be profitably exploited in different contexts.

With web users increasingly taking on the role of producers/consumers (prosumers) of information, thanks to the technological affordances of social media, the representation of historical events may be subject to a number of centrifugal forces which allow virtually any and every user to have their say. Thus, while the academia, the traditional media, and other institutions have apparently lost part of their privileged positions as information content providers and source of monologic accounts, the patterns of negotiation and conflict inherent in any representation of events is foregrounded and made visible through the new media. It is against this background that the present article explores the impact of Web 2.0 technologies on the representation of particularly controversial events through platforms devoted to the sharing of User Generated Content like Wikipedia. More specifically, the article provides a detailed critical analysis of the Wikipedia entry for “Bloody Sunday”, through a reading of all subsequent revisions by individual users. The methodology consists in applying Critical Discourse Analysis to the revised versions which make up the so-called “history” of this specific entry. For each editorial change,the resulting version is discussed in terms of transitivity (processes, participants, circumstances) as well as intertextuality and interdiscursivity. Particular attention is devoted also to edits that lay bare strategies of (de)legitimation of in-groups and out-groups. The preliminary results of the investigation seem to suggest that the textual and discoursal negotiation taking place in the history of this specific Wikipedia entryreflects –but also reconstructs, reshapes and to some extent re-enacts –the real-life conflict, and provides a case in point to reconsider the role played by new technology in making conflicting perspectives in the representation of reality visible and accessible worldwide.