Tatiana Alenkina, PhD in Philology, associate professor, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), Russia

Title: Digitality in the Open Science age: Practices and genres

Despite the fact that there has been a long dispute whether scientific communication can be considered a revolution or an evolution, we can claim that digitality has brought about radical change of practices and genres. In the modern context, the members of international discourse community are regularly addressing the digital genres born in the Internet age as a part of New Media resources (science news reports, TED talk presentations, science blogs), as well as a traditional print-based genre of a research article and its subgenres. Few works have synthesized the practice of interaction of these genres where “the new genres meet the old genres” (Luzon & Perez-Llantada, 2019). However, the Open Science digitality context has not received considerable treatment in the genre scholarship, and little attention has been given to such features of scientific genres as multimodality, interdiscursivity, participatory culture in the Open Science context. Thus, the relevance of the research is in the reconceptualization of the Open Science practices and classifying the genres of science communication born in the Internet age. The method is the qualitative studies of discourse analysis. The theoretical background is the social semiotic theory and the social genre theory developed by the scholars of the New Rhetoric School. Applying the pragmatic approach to genre analysis, the following groups of genres were 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 levels of discourse, discourse mode, and language and style: the written discourse is combined with the oral, the scientific discourse with the journalism and the PR, and the scientific style with the conversational one. Second, multimodality competes with the writing-based space, thus getting the potential of a meaning-making tool. Thus, the concept “science” has been reconsidered: science has become not only the property of the professional community but actively engages with other fields and audiences in the process of science popularization. In the end, we claim that digitality is more than a medium and genres are not only recontextualized. Genres are getting to be more complex and multi-layered while the process of meaning making has gone inevitably through the change of the rhetorical situation.