AESLA 2022: Pilar Mur-Dueñas explores how researchers use explanatory strategies to diseminate knowledge through project websites

Pilar Mur-Dueñas attended the 39^th AESLA (Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada) conference during the days 27th-29th April in the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Canary Islands), where she presented a paper titled “Recontextualising research results: An analysis of explanatory strategies in project research websites”. In this paper, Mur-Dueñas explores how explanatory or illustrative strategies are used in H2020 research project websites in order to communicate specialised knowledge, analysing these websites from verbal and non-verbal perspectives through the NVivo software.

The full abstract of Pilar Mur-Dueñas’ talk can be consulted as follows:

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Recontextualising research results: An analysis of explanatory strategies in project research websites

The digital medium is bringing with it an increasing complexity in scholars’ discursive and professional practices. Academics are expected to produce and publish specialised knowledge following the conventions of the disciplines they belong to, and also to disseminate it globally online for diversified audiences, ranging from experts in other fields to the general public. In the case of international, funded research projects such dissemination is required by granting agencies. Research projects financed under the H2020 programme are asked to transfer their research results widely through a website. These research project websites contribute to making the project visible and gaining reputation and credibility, to being held accountable for the research undertaken and the funding received, and to making research available and accessible to varied audiences, in line with the promotion of open science and public engagement. If research results are to be made accessible to non-expert audiences, a process of recontextualisation is called for, adjusting expert knowledge to a new social context prompted by the digital medium. Previous research (e.g. Luzón, 2013; Gotti, 2014; Bondi et al, 2015; Carter-Thomas & Rowley-Jolivet, 2021) has pointed out different strategies used in the necessary recontextualisation of scientific knowledge to both ease the understanding of complex ideas and to engage audiences. It is my intention in this paper to analyse the extent of use of explanatory or illustrative strategies to bring specialised knowledge closer to citizens in a corpus of H2020 research project websites, part of the EUROPROWebs corpus (Pascual et al. 2020) compiled by InterGEDI research group (http://intergedi.unizar.es/methodology/). Each of the websites will be analysed in search of verbal and non-verbal explanatory or illustrative strategies (e.g. semantic approximations, elaborations, personalisations, exemplifications, explicitations, and analogies). The corpus will be coded using NVivo Pro and results compared within and across websites to explore the extent to which such strategies are used, and which ones tend to be most commonly resorted to in this genre for dissemination purposes. The study can help us gain insights into the complex cognitive and discursive processes researchers and mediators of knowledge need to undertake to effectively communicate their research results to different audiences.

Keywords: recontextualisation, dissemination of science, specialised knowledge, knowledge dissemination, open science, research websites