EXPLORING RHETORICAL STRATEGIES OF STANCE AND ENGAGEMENT IN TWITTER CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

Abstract

This study examines the emerging digital genre of the Twitter conference, which remediates the traditional academic conference. Twitter conference presentations (TCPs) are composed of six-tweet threads where academics share their ongoing research projects. In the context of Open Science, this paper aims to analyse how academics craft these presentations to reach diverse audiences and increase the visibility and impact of scientific knowledge. The study analyses a corpus of 55 TCPs (330 tweets) to identify textual and multimodal markers of digital academic discourse that can function as stance and engagement markers. The findings show that engagement markers were more frequent than stance markers, particularly in terms of appeals to shared knowledge and attention-getting resources. Appeals to shared knowledge are conveyed through specialised terminology, abbreviations, references, and hashtags, while attention-getting resources consist mostly of symbols, images, emojis, and mentions. The results highlight the importance of effectively orchestrating modes and capitalising on Twitter affordances to balance academic discourse conventions with the informal register. This approach can aid in disseminating scientific knowledge on this platform to a wider audience, thus contributing to the democratisation of science.