Changing scholarly practices: The case of the Twitter conference “Linguistweets”. Villares, R.
Abstract
During and after the COVID-19 crisis, changes in online academic socialization and research exchanges have skyrocketed to engage in new forms of science communication. In this presentation, I focus on academic conferences, and how this genre has shifted and benefited from the affordances of microblogging platforms like Twitter (Mehlenbacher, 2019). To illustrate this issue, the Linguistweets conference (2020, https://www.linguistweets.org/en/) is presented as a case study to analyse how Twitter can be used not only for networking or promotional purposes during conference sessions, but also as the hosting platform of the conference itself. Preliminary findings reveal key issues for digital genres analysis such as remediation process due to the Internet affordances; how this conference facilitates the dissemination of scientific results to specialist and non-specialist audiences (Gimenez et al., 2020); or how academics have adapted their ways of communicating science according to the platform affordances of text limitation, hypertextuality, multimodality, interactivity, and multilingual resources (Heyd, 2015). Implications for teaching and learning of academic communication along with digital literacy will also be discussed.