Digital Genres in Academic Knowledge Production and Communication

Perspectives and Practices

María José Luzón, Carmen Pérez-Llantada

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781788924733
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book presents an overview of the wide variety of digital genres used by researchers to produce and communicate knowledge, perform new identities and evaluate research outputs. It explores the role of digital genres in the repertoires of genres used by local communities of researchers to communicate both locally and globally, both with experts and the interested public, and sheds light on the purposes for which researchers engage in digital communication and on the semiotic resources they deploy to achieve these purposes. The authors discuss the affordances of digital genres but also the challenges that they pose to researchers who engage in digital communication. The book explores what researchers can do with these genres, what meanings they can make, who they interact with, what identities they can construct and what new relations they establish, and, finally, what language(s) they deploy in carrying out all these practices.

1 Introduction: Why Focus on Digital Genres?

1.1 Introduction

The unique technological affordances of new media and the impact of open science are revolutionizing the way researchers worldwide produce, represent, reuse and share knowledge. Although the status of the research article as the primary genre in academic knowledge¹ production and communication remains uncontested, the affordances of the internet (e.g. hyperlinking, multimodality and interactivity) provide researchers with a rich repertoire of digital genres to share, at different moments in time, a variety of data types and results with diverse audiences, widen their participation in the scholarly arena and interact with the lay public.

In a context of considerable socioeconomic, cultural and technological change, researchers need to meet new and more complex demands. In addition to publishing high quality research, scholars in many contexts are required or urged to promote their research output and achieve visibility and international impact, in order to meet institutional standards, and achieve personal recognition and public funding. We are often encouraged to participate in national and international networks and to collaborate with other researchers and research groups. Funding agencies also often demand more transparent and ‘open science’, that is, science that involves open sharing and dissemination of scholarly research to expert and diversified audiences. Thus, researchers are encouraged to establish a dialogue with the general public, engage citizens in research processes and disseminate knowledge to non-specialist readerships. We may also need to show that research methods are reliable and the data shareable, and to interact with peers and non-specialist audiences in different media. Digital genres for knowledge communication have emerged and evolved as scholars respond to these demands and adapt to the changing research and academic context. This book seeks to give a comprehensive view of how scholars employ digital genres to disseminate academic knowledge to diverse audiences in response to these social and economic demands. The book discusses how digital genres are changing the landscape of academic communication and brings to the fore important changes in scholars’ communication practices; it thus illuminates the genre knowledges that scholars may need in order to achieve social and individual goals in this changing context as well as the challenges that they may face.

Genres, defined as semiotic tools for accomplishing actions or goals (Devitt, 2004; Miller, 1984; Miller et al., 2018), have become crucial to our understanding of knowledge communication and dissemination. Looking at genre-mediated actions enables us to appreciate how the rapid technological advances of the internet shape and constrain the ways in which academic knowledge is produced and exchanged. In this book, we use the term ‘digital genre’ to refer to internet-mediated genres, that is, genres which harness the affordances of the internet to varying degrees. It includes what we might think of as more static genres, or genres which do not allow readers to add or contribute content (e.g. academic homepages), as well as more dynamic, participatory, collaborative or interactive genres (e.g. online laboratory notebooks or enhanced publications).

Three concepts are central to an understanding of how digital genres facilitate and/or constrain researchers’ communication practices today: medium, mode and language choice. Medium refers to the material substance through which the message is communicated. In the case of digital genres, this term signals any medium that encodes data and information which is stored and transmitted over the internet or computer networks. The specific technical features and capabilities of digital media enable actions often not possible using traditional media, for example, to reach both expert peers and broader publics simultaneously or to share research data and results free of charge, and before formal publication, with other researchers. For scholars, these capabilities not only expand the possibilities for communication and collaboration with their disciplinary community and for public outreach but they also impose some constraints and pose challenges, as we discuss throughout this book.

Particular media make specific modes available. A mode is a ‘socially organized set of semiotic resources for making meaning’, for example, writing, sound as speech, music, still and moving images (Jewitt et al., 2016: 157). What is particularly relevant for the discussion of digital genres in this book is the fact that the different modes made available in digital genres have different potentialities and limitations for making meaning, that is, they have different ‘mode affordances’ (Kress, 2010). For instance, the affordances of moving images include the passage of time and movement (Kress, 2010). Both the medium and the semiotic resources that can be deployed in a genre shape the potentials and constraints of such genre for meaning making. As an example, the modes afforded in the video methods article (VMA) (e.g. moving image, spoken narration) (see Hafner, 2018) make it possible to demonstrate complex methods and laboratory techniques. Digital genres are inherently multimodal (Herring, 2019; Jones & Hafner, 2012), with written verbal text being only one of the possible semiotic resources through which meaning is made.

Finally, the language(s) that researchers choose when producing digital genres also offer(s) particular potentialities, which we consider as ‘language affordances’. The digital medium enables researchers to engage in complex multilingual practices often not adopted in conventional academic communication (Androutsopoulos, 2015) and draw upon two or more languages that are part of their linguistic repertoire (i.e. English and/or the languages spoken in their local communities and/or languages for cross-border communication) in order to reach and connect with various audiences (i.e. international or local audiences).

1.2 Why this Book?

Although in the last few years there has been an increasing interest in the genres used by researchers to communicate knowledge online, existing studies have focused mainly on how particular genres are changing (in form and substance) because of the increasing use of digital platforms and multimedia elements, and on the purposes for which some digital genres are used by specific discourse communities (see e.g. Luzón, 2017; Rowley-Jolivet & Carter-Thomas, 2019; Wickman, 2016). However, in order to understand contemporary knowledge production and dissemination, we need a more comprehensive picture of the diversity of digital genres on which researchers draw to communicate within and beyond the boundaries of traditional discourse communities. It is important to understand the rhetorical actions performed by these genres, the multiple semiotic modes that researchers can combine when composing these genres, and the languages in which researchers based in non-Anglophone institutions produce these genres. This book thus aims to provide a holistic view of the wide variety of digital genres used by researchers, in an attempt to shed light on broader changes in academic communication in the 21st century (i.e. new purposes, new audiences and new academic knowledge production and dissemination practices). Our account should be of interest in itself but it is also of pedagogical value, since it helps researchers become aware of academic digital practices and of the skills they may need in order to produce and communicate knowledge in the digital era.

Specifically, we seek to answer four key questions in this book:

1. What are the digital genres being produced by academic researchers and why have these genres emerged?
2. What are the purposes of the digital genres used in current knowledge communication practices and what are their affordances and constraints?
3. Who are the audiences of these digital genres and what rhetorical strategies are deployed to reach such audiences?
4. What language(s) and semiotic resources are used in digital genres today and what is the rationale behind researchers’ language choice?

The question of language is of particular interest for us, since we ourselves are multilingual scholars who do research in a European national context where English is not an official language of communication but is often an explicit and implicit requirement for our research practice. The choice of language for communicating knowledge is an important decision for scholars carrying out research in non-Anglophone research institutions around the world. We may use English in online communication as a lingua franca for reaching international and linguistically diverse audiences (Luzón, 2018b). English supports collaboration among researchers from diverse linguacultural backgrounds and enables them to share their results with the international expert community. On the other hand, as we will illustrate in this book, researchers may use their local/national languages or engage in multilingual practices for a number of reasons, including performing multiple identities or reaching diversified audiences. The languages used to communicate knowledge online have received little attention, with limited research on how multilingual scholars draw upon the linguistic codes that are available to us when communicating in online contexts or on the interaction between languages and digital genres. In this book, we hope to contribute insights into the languages used for communicating knowledge. We argue that in the digital media era, while the choice of a particular language or languages depends on the contextual specificity of genres and on the target audience the scholars aim to reach, multilingualism widens the possibilities for accessing, sharing and disseminating knowledge to diverse audiences. One goal of this book is to contribute to raising awareness of the importance of multilingualism in scholarly communication online, specifically in providing access to knowledge to diversified audiences.

The issue of audiences is therefore also particularly important when considering digital genres. In this book, we engage with the concept of ‘context collapse’ (boyd, 2002) and show that, although this concept has been critiqued (Szabla & Blommaert, 2020), it remains useful as a way of capturing how, due to the open nature of many of these genres, multiple audiences are often collapsed into a single context. The hybrid and flexible nature of many digital genres makes them powerful tools not only to communicate with peers but also for dissemination to the lay public, which enables a much broader participation in the scholarly process. This book will contribute to mapping the audiences with whom researchers communicate and collaborate in the 21st century and to showing how researchers adapt their discourse to reach and meet the needs of these audiences.

The analysis of digital genres for knowledge communication requires an awareness that genre emergence and change are not driven by technology alone, but are mediated by social, cultural, linguistic and material dimensions. As pointed out previously, these digital genres have emerged as responses to the changing research context and needs that scholars face. In addition, although they facilitate sharing, greater access and circulation, and more transparency and visibility, these genres also bring with them new challenges and raise broader questions related to their role in global academia (e.g. socioeconomic interests, issues of power, visibility and access). We aim to both describe the ways in which digital genres are being used and also critically assess the inherent limitations of these genres, the constraints imposed by digital media and by broader socioeconomic factors, and the challenges that they pose to researchers.

1.3 Why Digital Genres?

As applied linguists interested in the study and pedagogy of academic communication, we advocate for genre analysis as an appropriate and valuable theoretical and analytical framework for understanding knowledge communication in the digital context. We draw on both traditions of genre analysis from English for Specific Purposes (Bhatia, 2002, 2004; Swales, 1990) and Rhetorical Genre Studies (Devitt, 2004; Miller, 1984, 2015a), since both traditions are based on a functional view of genres that helps us to explain why digital genres emerge and what researchers do with them. Thus, following pioneering work on genres in these traditions, we conceptualize ‘genres’ as tools for responding to particular rhetorical exigences and achieving particular communicative purposes (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010; Miller, 1984; Swales, 1990). Like Heyd (2016: 88), we argue that genre analysis is a suitable ‘toolbox for doing linguistic and discourse analysis with digital material’ because it provides a useful way not only to reveal the communicative purposes and effects of emerging forms of online communication and describe their discursive features, but also to explain why these forms emerge and evolve. As Bhatia (2002: 6) explains, genre analysis helps us ‘to understand how members of specific discourse communities construct, interpret and use [these] genres to achieve their community goals and why they write them the way they do’. Since digital genres are fundamentally multimodal (Herring, 2019), the analysis of these genres involves studying how various multisemiotic resources are employed to achieve the purposes of the genre. A more detailed discussion of genre and the framework for digital genre analysis applied in this book is presented in Chapter 2.

The chapters in this book explore digital genres, focusing on what scholars do with them (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 What do researchers do with digital genres?

Digital genres are used by scholars to perform, among other things, the following actions: to build their scholarly reputation and negotiate their academic identities; to share research in progress and practices with peers; to interact with scholars across the world and form new relations with other researchers; to disseminate research to diversified audiences in informal contexts; to engage the public in funding or conducting research; to create meaning in new ways by combining various modes; and to assess the quality of research and provide feedback in new ways.

Chapters 4–10 discuss the use of digital genres to accomplish these actions. Each of these chapters first presents a critical synthesis of current research on different practices of knowledge production and dissemination in the digital era, followed by what we refer to as a ‘research case study’.² Each case study involves investigating a small number of related exemplars of a specific digital genre within the shared context in which they are used. The primary data sources for these studies are therefore small-scale specialized corpora of digital genres. The genres that the studies focus on comprise research group blogs, open lab notebooks (OLNs), tweets by research groups, crowdfunding project proposals, posts on academic social networking sites (ASNSs), online science videos and science blogs. Given our interest in multilingualism, in some of the chapters we analyze genre exemplars produced exclusively by multilingual scholars (affiliated with Spanish universities), which include languages other than English (mainly Spanish, but also Catalan). The case studies illustrate what researchers do with these genres, what meanings they make, who they interact with, how they engage with their audiences interpersonally, what identities they construct and, finally, what language(s) they deploy in carrying out all these practices. Given our overarching genre framework, which involves viewing genres as complex and multilayered phenomena (Bhatia, 2002), analysis of each case involves paying attention to specific...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Why Focus on Digital Genres?
• 2 Genre as a Framework for the Analysis of Digital Communication
• 3 Knowledge Communication in the Digital Era
• 4 Performing Multiple Identities and Enhancing Academic Visibility
• 5 Sharing Research in Progress with Peers: Online Laboratory Notebooks
• 6 Interacting in Academic Social Networking Sites
• 7 Disseminating Knowledge to Diversified Audiences
• 8 Engaging the Public in Research
• 9 ‘Showing’ Research through Audiovisual Genres
• 10 Assessing Research and Participating in Research Discussions Online
• 11 Final Considerations and Future Directions
• References
• Index