An Ethnographic Approach To The Emergence Or Reconfiguration Of Digital Knowledge Transfer Genres

Isabel Herrando-Rodrigo, Ramón Plo
2018 Zenodo  
Current quality standards in the academia are rising scholars' awareness on the importance of being known and present in their field of expertise and, consequently, the urge to increase the visibility of their research. Moreover, research institutions around the world praise those research projects that confirm their findings to be transferable and useful to society. Thus, scholars are finding new ways of codifying knowledge so as to reach a broader readership in order to show the validity,
more » ... sferability and visibility of their research. Needless to say the advent of new technologies and the Internet have opened a new avenue of possibilities, advantages and challenges for researchers to become more present worldwide. Among them, research project webs have become a shop window to those who surf the net in the search of further information. Since language cannot be 'context-less´ (Blommaert, 2006), we will take an ethnographic approach to the writing process of two different research group webs. The first case study will be from the Social Sciences and the other from hard science disciplines. We will collect ethnographic data, conducting interviews face-to-face, talk around the text and observations to explore the generic relations between the different genres embedded in research group webs in an attempt to find out whether knowledge is being (re)codified. Then, it would be essential to know whether these genres have emerged (Giltrow and Wilson, Crownton an Stein), evolved (Campagna et al. 2012; Herrando 2014) or even whether they might have been reconfigured (Herring, 2012) in research communication in English. So far, and together with Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), Miller (1994), Tardy (2003) or Herrando-Rodrigo (2015) our results suggest that writers gain knowledge of the genre network by having access to the practice community and colleagues' interaction
doi:10.5281/zenodo.1310950 fatcat:23ipdihk35fz7e26chopc7n53e