Abstract
The affordances of Web 2.0 technologies are bringing about significant changes to the research context, leading to the emergence of new digital genres for knowledge production and communication. While the abundance of semiotic resources available online opens up new possibilities for discourse practices, it remains to be fully unpacked the way different ‘mode affordances’ (Kress, 2010) are employed in the achievement of communicative purposes in digital genres. Therefore, the edited volume under review presents a timely, comprehensive and in-depth discussion about the extent to which the internet resources and multimodal elements are intermingled in the achievement of communicative purposes in internet-mediated genres.
This book uses genre analysis from the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) (Swales, 2004) and RGS (Rhetorical Genre Studies) traditions (Miller, 1984) to explore why genres emerge, what users do with them and why they are composed the way they are (p. 27). The questions guide the research perspective and inquiry in the remaining chapters, and as a result the 11 chapters it includes are divided into three sections. The first section (Chapters 1–3) provides a comprehensive introduction to the emergence of digital genres from the perspectives of genre evolution and contextual changes. The second section (Chapters 4–10) examines how researchers analyse the strategies employed in various digital genres to achieve rhetorical purposes. Chapter 11 is the concluding chapter, offering a summary of the key findings and presenting future directions for research in this field.
In Chapter 1 (‘Introduction: Why focus on digital genres?’), Luzón and Pérez-Llantada point out the research questions and provide an overview of the book’s organisation. The book seeks to present a holistic view of digital genres, including the reasons that they emerge, the purposes they serve, the rhetorical strategies they use and the linguistic and multimodal resources they bring into play.
In Chapter 2 (‘Genre as a framework for the analysis of digital communication’), digital genres are defined as ‘typified responses to recurrent situations the researchers encountered’ (p. 12), referring to the ESP and the rhetorical traditions of genre studies (see Hyon, 1996). The section discusses the interconnections between traditional and digital genres through four concepts: genre sets, genre systems, genre repertoires and genre ecologies. The authors draw an important distinction between form and function and between medium and genre when defining digital genres. This chapter also presents an analytical framework of exploring how communicative purposes are achieved by the various modes available online, which steers the analysis of digital genres in the following chapters.
Chapter 3 (‘Knowledge communication in the digital era’) explores the factors that influence knowledge production, communication and dissemination and thus facilitates our understanding of the emergence of new genres. The factors are shown to include the pressure researchers face in the market-driven environment of scientific dissemination, the emergence of open science and digital media. It is also pointed out that the language choices may vary by specific purposes and audiences in the online environment.
Chapter 4 (‘Performing multiple identities and enhancing academic visibility’) examines the online identity construction with the affordance of digital resources, and discusses the academic identity shaped by both textual and digital practices. After having reviewed the literature on the identity construction and the language choices by multilingual scholars in online genres to perform different identities, this chapter closes with a case study in which multiple academic identities are built through texts, visuals, hyperlinks and both English and local languages in the research group blogs of L2 Spanish academics.
Chapter 5 (‘Sharing research in progress with peers: online laboratory notebooks’) and Chapter 6 (‘Interacting in academic social networking sites’) are concerned with digital platforms where scholars share their research and interact with peers for networking and collaboration. Chapter 5 focuses on open laboratory notebook (OLN), an online genre which enhances the accessibility of research information by publicising the material that is not provided in scientific articles. An empirical analysis of this new genre shows the rhetorical moves, linguistic features and intertextual links writers employ to share the whole research process and promote a wide communication. Turning to social networking sites (e.g. ResearchGate, Academia.edu), Chapter 6 explores the discourse functions and rhetorical exigences of Q&A discussions and provides insights into how the online platforms help researchers from different lingual and disciplinary backgrounds to share connections and interests.
Chapter 7 (‘Disseminating knowledge to diversified audiences’) examines the strategies used on blogs and Twitter by researchers on how to communicate with readers inside or beyond the disciplinary community. Based on 600 tweets from six Spanish research groups across three disciplines, the study shows that the communicative purposes Tweets function to achieve include community building and networking, self-promotion and the public dissemination of research output and appealing to social actions. It is also found that the multilingual practice depends on the intended readers they engage.
Chapter 8 (‘Engaging the public in research’) discusses the projects of citizen science and crowdfunding proposals which foster the participation of the lay public in scientific research. The chapter examines the platforms which facilitate the public involvement in scientific research, and shows the multiple language choices and multimodal resources together with the technological affordances provided by the platforms are all important in crafting an inclusive engagement with the public.
Chapter 9 (‘“Showing” research through audio-visual genres’) focuses on (audio)visual genres, including (audio)visual abstracts, video methods articles and online videos, which function as tools to disseminate knowledge online and assist the public understanding and reproduction of experiments. The analysis of online videos shows that rhetorical organisation of material information and the orchestration of visual and verbal semiotic resources are often used to engage the public while increasing the intelligibility of specialist scientific knowledge.
Chapter 10 (‘Assessing research and participating in research discussions online’) discusses the advantages and disadvantages of open peer review on online platforms. The open peer review emerged with the affordances of the internet, accelerating knowledge distribution and evaluation and improving the quality of the publication, but this new genre may arouse worries about the issue of equity and anonymous evaluation. However, as recognised in the chapter, social media play an important role in post-publication evaluation. This is manifested in the case study of the way researchers take a positioning towards controversial scientific issues through the comments of blog posts.
By concluding the findings in the previous chapters, Chapter 11 (‘Final considerations and future directions’) further suggests that digital genres equip scholars in today’s academic context with online resources to achieve various communicative needs. While this may pose challenges to researchers, especially those using English as a second language, the rhetorical purposes in the digital genres are accomplished not solely by language, but also by various other semiotic resources. This raises pedagogical suggestions that formal instruction should illustrate the technological possibilities offered by digital genres while presenting the rhetorical constraints and semiotic affordances of each genre.
On the whole, this volume offers a unique presentation of the digital genres that researchers use to construct online identity and promote academic work in the digital space, so keeps the readers in ESP up to date with the new context of digital genres. Furthermore, this book contributes to future research on academic digital genres by drawing attention to the new emerging but under-explored digital genres. Practitioners in EAP will also find the theoretical introduction of digital genres useful in addition to the methodological approaches in the empirical studies on digital genres. However, the volume did not encompass other digital genres utilised for knowledge dissemination in academia, such as podcasts and webinars.
Despite the above small quibble, it can be said that this book offers an important implication to studies of genre evolution and innovation through the analysis of a variety of digital genres. It is a valuable reference to researchers who are committed to genre analysis and readers who explore new ways to communicate knowledge with more diversified readers.