ADDA2 2019: Daniel Pascual analyses the use of Twitter as a networking mechanism for international research groups

Daniel Pascual participated in the 2nd ADDA (Approaches to Digital Discourse Analysis) international conference organised at the University of Turku, Finland (23-25 May 2019). This forum provided wonderful insights into digital discourses in new genres, media and platforms, including social media. Daniel presented a preliminary study of the interrelationship between Twitter and research project websites, focusing on the strategic use of hyperlinks and the pragmatic strategies accompanying them to promote research groups’ activity, progress and success concerning their projects.

You can read the abstract of the communication here below.

Twitter in H2020 websites: A pragmatic study of scientific research groups networking

Scientific research groups tend to disseminate their results by using a variety of different digital genres and media, and usually employing English to reach a wider audience. Social media seem to play a significant role in such dissemination and in the impact these results have in society. In this context, Twitter has been found to be particularly prominent for the scientific discourse community, as scientists’ tweets normally highlight their everyday research practices and conundrums (Kuteeva, 2016). This pragmatic study aims to analyse the use H2020 European scientific research groups make of Twitter as a social network, to create their e-visibility and develop their digital identities and relationships (Veletsianos, 2016). To do so, 30 H2020 projects have been selected. Their websites have first been explored, to focus on the range of social networks available in each project –where Twitter stands out, as well as on how these social media are displayed, and subsequently publicised, within the framework of the project websites that host them. Then, a number of corpus-driven pragmatic strategies have been identified and explored in the project Twitter accounts in the belief that these strategies reinforce the creation of social groupings and their social identity (Merchant, 2006). Thus, they are also thought to reflect the bidirectional relation between websites and Twitter, considering hyperlinking as a resource that fosters intertextuality and a “navigating mode” for the audience. Preliminary results show that the most prominent pragmatic strategies in the digital context under analysis comprise self-praise, announcing events and presenting output. Prototypical lexico-grammatical and discursive realizations have also been accounted for. This pragmatic analysis will lead to better understand how international scientific research groups participate in, and exploit, global digital communication, and how this may affect their e-visibility.