Writing digital genres: A cross-disciplinary study of women scientists’ socioliterate activity. Carmen Pérez-Llantada
Abstract
Digital technologies have dramatically changed the way scientists circulate, communicate and disseminate their research findings within and beyond their disciplinary communities. While digitally mediated writing practices have been investigated by genre research and workplace writing research, limited attention has been paid to socioliterate activity and digital writing among women scientists. Using data from a survey of women scientists representing different disciplines and statistical analysis, this paper applies genre theory (Bazerman, 1994, 2004) and activity theory (Russell, 1997; Spinuzzi, 2003) to map the repertoire of digital genres these scientists engage with, and the genre systems (Bazerman, 1994) and genres in networked digital media (Finnemann, 2016) that routinely enact the typified rhetorical actions of their workplace contexts. The paper also discusses the genres that support collaboration in scientific publications across disciplines, and in some disciplines, the collaborative genres supported by digital media that scientists use for data sharing, reuse and research replication purposes. It is concluded that the variable ‘discipline’ partly determines the degree to which these scientists engage with technologies and digital forms of communication that are in line with Open Science (Bartling & Friesike, 2014) and socially responsible research (Loroño-Leturiondo & Davies, 2018). Ways of providing language and communication training to support women scientists in writing in their disciplines and for a wider public are discussed.