Digitality in the Open Science age: practices and genres

Abstract

No matter where we are in the revolution versus evolution debate, digitality has undoubtedly brought about radical changes of practices and genres. Today digital genres born in the Internet age as New Media resources (science news reports or science blogs) compete with a traditional print-based genre of a research article. Although few works have synthesized the interaction of these “old” and “newly-born” genres, the Open Science digitality context has not received considerable treatment in genre scholarship, and little attention has been given to such features of scientific genres as multimodality, interdiscursivity, participatory culture. Thus, the relevance is in the reconceptualization of the Open Science practices and classifying the Internet-born genres of science communication. The qualitative method of discourse analysis is used in the lens of the social semiotic and the social genre theory proposed by the New Rhetoric School. As a result, four groups are suggested: research genres, promotional genres, trans-scientific genres, presentational genres. As a result of the analysis, we have come to the following conclusions. First, hybridization penetrates all the discourse and language levels: written discourse is combined with oral discourse, scientific style – with spoken style, scientific discourse – with journalism. Second, multimodality competes with the writing-based space, thus getting the potential of a meaning-making tool. As a result, the concept “science” has been reconsidered; science has become not only the professional community property but an active area of engagement with other fields and audiences in the process of science popularization. Digitality serves more than a medium and genres are not only recontextualized but gained more complexity.