Scientific text on the Internet: Communication-typological characteristics

Abstract

The key communication and typological characteristics of a scientific text on the Internet are considered as a special form of representation of scientific knowledge. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the use of a multimodal approach to the study of the specifics of academic texts in the Internet environment, which involves the study of a scientific text in a combination of linguo-stylistic, semiotic and discursive approaches. This approach makes it possible to study scientific Internet texts as certain communicative situations in terms of combining various forms and formats of transmitting and receiving information, taking into account the verbal and visual components, text architectonics, affordances, etc. As a result, the most important features of the academic Internet text, such as hypertextuality, interactivity, multimodality, openness and accessibility, are identified and characterized. The digital online environment has fundamentally changed scientific communication — it has made it cheaper, more accessible, more mobile, at the same time, it has also created new communication problems. One of them is the “extinction” of links in scientific publications: a significant number of hyperlinks either do not correspond to the original content or do not work completely. The number of “dead” links is linear, but constantly growing, which creates obvious threats to the development of modern scientific communication in the Internet environment. Based on the analysis of modern scientific texts, their typology was performed, based on the following parameters: the nature of the creation of texts (PDF versions of texts, web texts and mixed types of texts), the updating of the material in the publication (static and dynamic (“live”) scientific texts), semiotic organization of the text (verbal texts, verbal texts with a static or dynamic visual component), the ability to rate the material and comment on it (texts with excluded and enabled readers’ evaluation), conditions for the reader to access the publication (publications with free and paid full-text access), the prevailing way of perception of information by the consumer (linear, microergodic, non-mutable and mutable ergodic texts).