Multimodal practices of research groups in Twitter: An analysis of stance and engagement

Abstract

Twitter is being increasingly used in academia as a tool for self-promotion, information sharing, networking and public outreach. To achieve these purposes scholars combine a variety of semiotic resources afforded by this social networking site. The aim of this study is to analyse the use of multimodal semiotic resources to express stance and engagement in the Twitter accounts of research groups. The data for the study consist of 300 tweets taken from the Twitter accounts of four research groups in two different disciplines (Chemistry and Medicine). The analysis reveals a high number and variety of stance and engagement resources (the most prominent being attention-getting resources, self-mentions, and attitude markers), which help research groups to promote their research, make themselves saliently visible, establish interpersonal rapport with diverse audiences, and persuade these audiences to perform actions. In these tweets, stance and engagement are expressed by resources found in other academic genres (see Hyland, 2005b), but also by other resources afforded by the digital medium (e.g. static images, moving images, emoji, @mentions, hashtags). The study shows that these semiotic resources are orchestrated strategically to achieve the promotional, social networking and persuasive purposes of tweets composed by research groups.