PSYLEX VI: Dr. Daniel Pascual explores credibility and engagement through pragmatic strategies
Our team member Dr. Daniel Pascual presented a poster at the 6th International PSYLEX conference. PSYLEX is a research group based at the University of Zaragoza that explores language from a cognitive perspective. They investigate how individuals process linguistic information in real-time, how bilingualism influences cognitive functions, and how language is represented and processed in the brain. They celebrated a conference at the University of Zaragoza on the 7th and 8th of November 2024 that was focused on language and emotion. The group invited 12 experts that presented their research and discussed the ways in which speakers process, recognise and explain their emotions through language. Aside from this, they also held a poster session in which different researchers could share their investigation around these topics.
On the 8th of November, Dr. Daniel Pascual presented a poster titled “‘Welcome to our research project’: Raising credibility and engagement online through pragmatic strategies”. In it, he presented the results of the analysis of pragmatic strategies of promotional and interactional nature in 30 research project websites from the EUROPRO Digital Corpus, and the 20 Twitter accounts associated with them. His results revealed that promotional strategies are commonly used by research groups to foster credibility, while interactional strategies usually reinforce engagement with audiences.
You can read Dr. Daniel Pascual’s abstract as follows:
‘Welcome to our research project’: Raising credibility and engagement online through pragmatic strategies
Professionals and academics are steadily involved in the development of research projects, pushed by the principles ruling Scholarship 2.0, which include globalization, interdisciplinarity, collaboration and Open Access policies (Pascual, Plo-Alastrué & Corona, 2023). Digitally-mediated communication in English offers them a revolutionary asset to disseminate scientific information about such projects and perform the roles of knowledge producers and science communicators. As such, their online identity as a research group responds to the “networked self” (Paparachissi, 2011), displayed across platforms and digital practices in complementary ways. This derives in a situation of “context collapse” (Marwick & Boyd, 2011), by which researchers’ personal, professional and social traits are interwoven in how the project is discursively displayed online. Further payoffs for researchers’ careers when communicating digitally comprise higher reputation and impact, which may derive from a solid “e-visibility” (Lorés-Sanz & Herrando-Rodrigo, 2020). This allows research groups to boost their presence online, show themselves as accountable of their work, and circulate new scientific knowledge and research results to ensure social outreach.
Departing from this context of digital scientific dissemination, this poster focuses on the EUROPRO Digital Corpus, which contains digital practices endorsed by international research groups who have been granted research projects within the European programme Horizon2020 (HorizonEurope at present) for innovation, research and transfer (Pascual et al., 2020). “Digital practices” refer to assemblages of actions exploiting digital technologies, which specific groups recognise as valid to embrace certain social goals, particular social identities and specific interpersonal relationships (Hafner et al., 2015). The most salient digital practices enacted in research project communication involve the use of websites and social media. These websites are structured in various sections (Homepages, About, Partners, and News & Events) that give an overview of the project rationale and aims, present the team of researchers and provide newsworthy accounts of research productivity. Social media underscore the communication of research projects to the wide public in bidirectional ways and support the content provided at length in websites.
30 research project websites and the 20 Twitter accounts associated are analysed to look into the deployment of pragmatic strategies of promotional and interactional nature. The strategies identified stem from a data-driven taxonomy (Pascual, 2023) designed by exploring 100 Horizon2020 research projects, which make up the EUROPRO Database. The study of the usage and frequency of these pragmatic strategies reveals how international research groups foster emotional engagement with their intended audiences through discourse. As related to promotional strategies, they seek to boost their credibility, construct a collective identity and attain self-branding. As related to interactional strategies, they reinforce the engagement of diversified audiences dialogically, attempt to bridge “knowledge asymmetries” (Engberg & Maier, 2015) and promote dialogue with the public about their projects. A comparison is established between web-hosted and social media practices, as well as among website sections to observe the deployment of research groups’ promotional and interactional intentions and their function in the context of research project communication online through English.