Ibérica

Digital genres and Open Science practices

2023-12-17T19:50:33+01:00

Open Science: What’s not to like?

2023-12-17T19:50:33+01:00

“... is an open access, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal”: How open-access journals describe themselves in their “Aims and Scope” statements

2023-12-17T19:50:34+01:00

Open access journals (OAJs) have been celebrated for freeing research from paywalls and increasing the visibility of research results beyond disciplinary, academic, or financial boundaries. They have been recognized as an important part of the Open Science (OS) ecology. However, they are still viewed by some with skepticism. Given these conflicting perceptions, it would be important for LSP researchers and practitioners to understand OAJs better as they may need to work with students who are or will be part of the OS movement. Examining how open access journals describe themselves in their “Aims and Scope” (A&S) statement is a worthwhile step in this direction. I analyzed the A&S statements of 104 OAJs and 104 subscription-based journals. I conducted thematic analysis aided by NVivo. Although both groups of journals include some broad themes in their A&S statements, there are some observable differences in the way they describe their scope and promote themselves. Using the concept of the prestige economy, I offer two theoretical insights: the OAJs journals may be selfconsciously and purposefully responding to the expectations of the prestige economy. Meanwhile, they may be redefining what is relevant in such an economy.

‘Great work folks!’: establishing interpersonal communication in transparent peer reviews of research articles

2023-12-17T19:50:31+01:00

In this paper, we examine how referees establish interpersonal relationships by mitigating criticism and expressing compliments as a realization of politeness strategies through the analysis of a specific corpus of transparent peer review reports (TPRs) with 220 reports totaling approximately 200,000 words. For the analysis, employing a framework drawn primarily on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness strategies and following a detailed review of the literature, we coded all occurrences of politeness strategies using UAM Corpus Tool 3.3x (O’Donnell, 2021). Conducting intercoder/intracoder reliability tests, we identified and interpreted a variety of politeness strategies at the sentence and discourse levels, which were used for mitigating criticism and expressing compliments. Our results suggest that reviewers resorted to a variety of politeness strategies, predominantly negative politeness strategies, to mitigate their criticism directed at the authors of manuscripts. This is significant especially in the light of earlier studies where reviewer reports appeared to include some blunt/hurtful comments due partly to the anonymity of the reviewing process. Rather than focusing on just communicating criticism or a required change, reviewers were found to have cared about politeness and seemed to achieve interpersonal communication goals in TPRs by means of favoring an egalitarian approach rather than an authoritative one, supporting Gosden’s (2003) argument on the interpersonal aspect of reviewing discourse. This research contributes to our understanding of how criticism in TPRs can be conveyed without imposing, leading to encouraging, constructive and polite reports in English as part of science communication, especially when the review reports are publicly available.

Visual recontextualisation of meaning in science research articles and News and Views articles

2023-12-17T19:50:31+01:00

News and Views articles appear in Nature-branded journals, summarising and critiquing newly published studies. Written by experts outside the research team, they inform the wider scientific community of novel research, promoting a broader readership as well as cross-fertilisation between fields. Most studies of genres that recontextualise science research articles for a broader audience focus on textual meaning. This article prioritises visual meaning, comparing News and Views articles and research articles. Corpora of research articles and News and Views articles were analysed using social semiotic analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021); interviews with expert authors of the articles also inform the investigation. Drawing on Daston and Galison (2007), a three-way categorisation was made of conceptual, technologically-produced and mathematical images. Findings reveal that visual meaning is central in both genres. In research articles detailed and exact meaning is conveyed using graphs and technologically-produced images (e.g., microscope images). News and Views articles use accessible, conceptual images such as schematic diagrams. Research article writers reported planning the article around the images, which function to validate author claims; as readers, experts reported examining images before reading the article. In News and Views articles, the image provides a conceptual overview of the text, matching the genre’s purpose in facilitating understanding of a complex study.

Verbal and visual resources in graphical abstracts: Analyzing patterns of knowledge presentation in digital genres

2023-12-17T19:50:28+01:00

Nowadays, open science communication is facilitated with the affordance of multimodal semiotic resources. Against this backdrop, graphical abstracts have emerged as a digitally mediated genre and have become an important means of knowledge communication in academic settings. While its interactive visual designs have been discussed in the literature, the rhetorical patterns of verbal and visual resources used in this genre warrant more empirical investigation. Therefore, based on a corpus of 90 graphical abstracts from journals in biology, chemistry and engineering, this study explores the organizational use of verbal and visual resources to mediate knowledge presentation. Five moves were identified in the textual components of the graphical abstract: reference to visuals, research background, report of results, interpretation of results, and implications or applications of the research. Furthermore, we examined what and how contents are visualized in the graphical abstracts. We found that the most visually displayed contents are the results and the overview of research, and that the duplication of pictures in the full article is a dominant source of the graphical abstracts. Additionally, the most commonly used layout patterns in the graphical abstracts are narratives or ‘evolutions’.

Multimodal stance and engagement in digital video methods articles

2023-12-17T19:50:31+01:00

The proliferation of digital media technologies has led to fundamental changes in the way that we communicate, changes that have also been felt in the realm of scholarly communication. One underresearched scholarly digital genre is the “video methods article” (VMA) in experimental science, which is published by the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), and whose purpose is to share advances in scientific methods with members of the scientific community. The genre draws on the medium of digital video in order to communicate new methods through multiple modes (e.g., spoken, written and visual), making it possible for scientists not only to read about but also to see new scientific methods as they are demonstrated on screen. In addition, the genre opens up possibilities for interpersonal engagement with the audience (such as the ability to speak directly to the camera) that are not present in traditional methods articles. This article draws on a corpus of 11 VMAs (1 per year from 2006 to 2016) in order to provide a multimodal analysis of key sections. It aims to show how stance and engagement are realized in VMAs through a complex multimodal interplay constructed by multiple individuals. Semiotic resources identified include elements of the researcher’s video recorded performance such as speech, gesture, facial expression, gaze, dress, and body; elements of the setting, such as chosen location, represented human and non-human participants and represented action; use of scientific visuals and animations; filmic elements such as camera angle, movement, and distance.

“Spread is like wildfire”: Attracting and retaining attention in COVID19 science tweetorials

2023-12-17T19:50:32+01:00

Digital spaces offer scientists new ways to share scientific knowledge with a broad public audience, in some cases leading to the emergence of new genres. This paper examines one new genre intended to inform a non-expert audience about scientific content: the informational tweet thread, or tweetorial. More specifically, the paper explores the rhetorical structure of 50 tweetorials on COVID19 content, focusing on how writers use rhetorical moves to share scientific information and to attract and retain readers’ attention in the content-saturated space of social media. The analysis identifies eight rhetorical moves that regularly appear in these COVID19 tweetorial introduction and body posts. The moves emphasize urgency through their focus on immediate exigencies and their repetition and recirculation throughout a thread. The study’s findings contribute to a growing body of research on public science genres and how they support the goals of Open Science.

“Can I write this is ableist AF in a peer review?”: A corpus-driven analysis of Twitter engagement strategies across disciplinary groups

2023-12-17T19:50:30+01:00

At a time when scholars are increasingly expected to participate in public knowledge dissemination, social media platforms like Twitter hold great promise for engaging both experts and non-experts. However, it remains unclear in what ways academic tweets are shaped by disciplinary concerns and how this might, in turn, impact audience engagement. Our paper reports an early-stage corpus-driven analysis of 4,000 English tweets from 40 scholars’ Twitter accounts across four disciplinary groups: Arts and Humanities (AH), Social Sciences (SS), Life Sciences (LS), and Physical Sciences (PS). Engagement rates (Tardy, 2023), multimodal elements, tweet types, and interaction markers were quantitatively calculated using corpus and computational methods and qualitatively analysed through close reading. Our findings revealed some disciplinary variation in the corpus: specifically, LS used more multimodal elements than SS on Twitter; SS used fewer interactional markers than LS and PS on Twitter. We further found that LS also has the highest number of threads and the longest threads, often to unfold their multimodal information. Despite being the least multimodal and interactive disciplinary group, SS has the highest engagement rate. Our analysis suggests that explicit evaluation and critique plays an important role in eliciting responses on Twitter, particularly with regard to current social or political issues —a finding that resonates with previous research on science communication and popularization (Orpin, 2019). The findings can be applied in science communication training to raise disciplinary awareness in shaping one’s social media presence.

The influence of discipline, medium and target audience in multimodal recontextualization practices: The case of popular science online videos

2023-12-17T19:50:30+01:00

This study contributes to our knowledge about the rapidly evolving repertoire of genres that support Open Science communication practices online. The focus lies on popular science online videos (i.e., 10-minute videos that disseminate scientific content), which have been previously described as scifotainment or edutainment genres. Like other genres that disseminate science to lay audiences, they partake from a need to recontextualise information. To this aim they resort to a number of strategies that tailor the information to the assumed knowledge of the audience, build credibility and engage the audience (Pérez-Llantada, 2021). Given the multimodal nature of these videos, the recontextualisation processes involved in them imply the orchestration of complex multimodal ensembles. Our aim is to gain more insight into these ensembles and how they enact multimodal recontextualisation strategies (Luzón, 2019; Rowley-Jolivet & Carter-Thomas, 2019; Ruiz-Madrid & Valeiras-Jurado, 2023). In particular, we want to identify similarities and differences in the way multimodal recontextualisation is carried out in videos from different disciplines. With this, we want to contribute to a more accurate description of this emerging genre. To this aim, we adopt a Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach and use specialised annotation software for the comparative analysis of four selected examples. The analysis reveals both similarities and differences regarding the strategies used and their modal realisations. Our findings suggest that while most similarities are triggered by the online medium, the differences can be mainly attributed to the target audience, and to a lesser extent to the scientific discipline.

Using questions in non-interactive presentations: Multimodal analysis of an audience-engaging strategy

2023-12-17T19:50:29+01:00

Open science, an approach based on making research available and understandable to everyone, is currently attracting considerable attention. Online genres are a well-accepted means of democratizing science and spreading scientific research to reach the widest audience (Luzón & Pérez-Llantada, 2019). This paper explores one of these genres devoted to laypeople: FameLab presentations. These are online 3-minute talks on scientific and/or technological subjects which are part of an international competition. One aim of these talks is to engage the audience, and this strategy can be developed by both different language resources (Hyland & Zou, 2021), and multimodal ones (Fortanet-Gómez & Ruiz-Madrid, 2016; Luzón, 2019).

Our study focuses on analyzing how questions are used as an engagement device to attract the audience’s attention, and how they are complemented by multimodal features. Our dataset includes 20 FameLab presentations from the 2020 (10) and 2021 (10) editions, when they became live-stream, pre-recorded events because of the COVID-19 pandemic, unlike the traditional dynamics, when they were delivered as in-person live events. Following prior research (e.g., Thompson, 1998), we identified the questions appearing in our dataset, and found similar results to previous findings in comparable genres. We then conducted a multimodal analysis to determine common features among speakers. The results show the need to consider certain non-verbal features which accompany questions, supporting and emphasizing their engagement function. Our research may help understand how multimodal discursive practices are used to explain science, and how they can be transferred to the classroom of Languages for Specific Purposes.

Disseminating legal information on online law forums in English and Italian

2023-12-17T19:50:29+01:00

The advent of the Internet has had a significant impact on the transfer of specialised knowledge from experts to non-experts. Over the years, the way in which digital tools such as blogs, forums and websites have been conveying information has had a strong impact on people’s understanding of specialised knowledge: popularisation thus functions as a tool for the “empowerment” of the lay people (Bondi et al., 2019, p. 2). The focus of the present paper is on legal knowledge communication from expert to non-expert online from a cross-cultural perspective. The aim is to investigate the linguistic-discursive strategies deployed by English and Italian law professionals providing legal advice to lay people on online law forums. The contribution of online law forums to legal knowledge dissemination has received scholarly attention in English. Relevant research across languages is still lacking. This paper attempts to help fill this gap, by illustrating and comparing the ways legal information is given on the UK LegalExpert and Italian La Legge per Tutti forums. Adopting a discourse analytical approach, the analysis shows that both British and Italian legal experts give advice using a variety of strategies, ranging from impersonal explanatory to interpersonal and communicative practices. The paper attempts to provide further insights into effective computer-mediated legal discourse for legal professionals and language scholars alike.

A lexical bundle analysis of art-related crowdfunding projects

2023-12-17T19:50:29+01:00

In the context of Open Science, crowdfunding projects are gaining increasing attention. They are becoming an alternative way of funding research and an opportunity for researchers across the disciplines to share and disseminate their work widely while engaging their potential backers. The aim of this paper is to analyze crowdfunding projects online by examining language-in-use at the level of phraseology, understanding the latter from a lexical bundle approach. Using corpus analytical approaches, the study findings show that there is a recurrence of lexical bundles conveying deontic meanings used to persuade the potential backers that the project and the research methods proposed for carrying it out are reliable and therefore trustable. Lexical bundles expressing gratitude and politeness are also recurrent, not unexpected considering that crowdfunding proposals aim to prompt the audience’s participation through donation. The findings further reveal how distinct discourse style and language features especially frequent in the conversational register realise the main communicative purpose of the genre, namely, to build credibility and trust in research with a view to persuasively enticing the backers’ audiences to donate money.

Digital Genres in Academic Knowledge Production and Communication, by María José Luzón and Carmen Pérez-Llantada

2023-12-17T19:50:28+01:00

Discourses, Modes, Media and Meaning in an Era of Pandemic, by Sabine Tan and Marissa K. L. E (Eds.)

2023-12-17T19:50:29+01:00

Popularizing Science in the Digital Era: A Multimodal Genre Perspective on TED Talk Videos, by Sichen Xia

2023-12-17T19:50:28+01:00