New publication about how research websites are spaces to promote research project values by Rosa Lorés
Our project about science communication on the web and the expanding role and significance of international research in the academic and professional spheres keeps moving forward! It is in this case a great pleasure to announce the publication of an article in the journal Discourse, Context & Media authored by our research colleague Rosa Lorés.
In her paper, entitled Science on the web: The exploration of European research websites of energy-related projects as digital genres for the promotion of values, she explains how exploring the research project websites of the international projects greatly helps to understand the values behind the project. Research groups stress them in the texts and webpages that interweave in the construction of the whole project website through the linguistic and discursive mechanisms employed. By analyzing a corpus of research project websites through some corpus-assisted tools, such as cluster analysis and concordances, Rosa Lorés proves how evaluative language is emphasized to endorse the promotion of research values and to disseminate them to the broad audience consuming these digital texts and genres.
Here below, you can read the full abstract of the paper:
Abstract
Digital discourse in scholarly and scientific communication has lately become a main object of study in discourse analysis, linguistics and associated fields. The increasing demands placed on scientists to disseminate and gain visibility for their research and on institutions to account for expenditure on research and innovation, in combination with a myriad of technical affordances, are enhancing the appearance of diverse digital practices, as a way to respond to an ever-changing and increasingly-demanding world. Within this context, the present study explores European Horizon 2020 websites dealing with research projects on energy as generic instances of current digital scientific practices. A special focus is placed on the use of evaluative language in their homepages and about pages in the understanding that evaluative language mirrors the values promoted in scientific research nowadays. In the webpages under analysis the main values promoted are the ones which are attached to two recurrent terms: project and energy. The study also shows the role that evaluative language plays in the construction of argument as discourse organiser. Moreover, the study reveals that, as textual instances, homepages and about pages do not differ much from offline genres, as they do not seem to fully exploit the technical affordances that the digital mode offers. However, they also seem to be subjected to a certain degree of recontextualization. In all, we might point at continuity rather than change in these generic instances.