Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 180, July 2021, Pages 187-202
Journal of Pragmatics

Popular digital knowledge dissemination platforms: Evaluating the pragmatic professional credibility from Wikipedia to Academia.edu and ResearchGate

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.04.027Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Discusses whether the three platforms serve the needs of (linguistic) researchers.

  • Describes their language interaction in internal posts and email messages.

  • Evaluates routine agents' language in their digital interaction with researchers.

  • Provides a quantitative lexical and functional comparison of email messages.

Abstract

This contribution discusses pragmatic linguistic aspects that indicate professional credibility in three popular digital knowledge dissemination platforms. Credibility here does not refer to the correspondence of platform content to ‘reality’, but to the pragmatic metalanguage interaction of researchers and platforms. Whereas Wikipedia is only a platform for distributing (multi-modal) information, Academia.edu and ResearchGate include a messaging system. Given their millions of users, all three systems include automated replies by (programmed) agents (bots), which can be classified as share, profit, and vanity agents – and only the first is usually perceived as a credible communication partner by a (linguistic) researcher. An analysis of pragmatic metalanguage (incl. interactive pronouns and reader address) makes this clear. Whereas Wikipedia only addresses its readers collectively in Wikipedia community style, Academia.edu and ResearchGate address their users individually; thus the first mentioned uses few personal pronouns, the latter many of them. For Academia.edu and ResearchGate, the internal platform structures and agents' email messages can be compared. A pragmatic corpus-linguistic evaluation of their (automated) language shows partly contrasting functions: some linguistic cues (e.g. modal auxiliaries) enhance the “sharing” community, others profit and vanity. For successful academic interaction, persuasive polite cooperation language contributes to the impression of credibility and professionalism.

Introduction

A rapid exchange of information is crucial in academic circles today. Digital communication, access to other researchers' work as well as the possibility to disseminate one's own, is particularly important for young scholars in their early careers and for international scholars who have restricted access to research published in high-ranking research journals and book series, not only because of weak internet connections but also because of commercial paywalls. The (seemingly) freely available new internet tools of knowledge dissemination are therefore a welcome opportunity for professional digital natives. By this I mean professional researchers who have to rely on general up-to-date educational platforms (outside of their institutional libraries) for their academic interests. These interests may range from general professional information (like the accepted short definitions of academic terms and related introductory reading from Wikipedia) to advanced specialized research (like a recent article by a researcher in academia.edu or ResearchGate). Of course, such digital platforms should provide open access whenever needed without unwanted personal restrictions or data mining – although the borderline between welcome suggestion and unwanted spam may be rather personal.

However, as social media have a bad reputation, the question of credibility arises and this is closely related to professional interpersonal use of language. In a provocative colophon on “How social media endangers knowledge” for the computer magazine “Wired”, Derakhshan (2017) was worried about how to “save Wikipedia and its promise of a free and open collection of all human knowledge” (Derakhshan, 2017: n.p.). Guy (2012) pointed out that “research on the effectiveness of social media in teaching and learning is limited to the use of discussions, chats, blogs, and wikis; therefore, the need exists for further exploration in determining how other social media platforms can be used for academic practice” – and this is still true today, especially from a researcher's perspective. Thelwall and Kousha (2014) queried the extent to which ResearchGate is useful in “disseminating, communicating and [even!] measuring scholarship”, when it can also be perceived as a threat by both young and experienced researchers, especially in the humanities, who are so far less accustomed to “academic metrics”. The “possibilities and perils of academic social networking sites” (Williams and Woodacre, 2016) are topical in many disciplines.

In this multidisciplinary discourse, two questions can be asked from a linguistic perspective:

  • a)

    To what extent do the three platforms Wikipedia, Academia.edu and ResearchGate really serve professional needs of (linguistic) researchers?

  • b)

    Can we use functional pragmatic corpus-linguistic analyses to demonstrate this?

The linguistic concepts to explore the pragmatic interaction between platforms and users in this article are based on Halliday's functional grammar (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014), especially on the textual and interpersonal metafunctions, cohesive1 and interactive devices, such as intra- and extratextual references through pronouns, modals and imperatives. Like Thompson (2014: 46), I separate “the experiential meanings (the ‘content’) from the interpersonal ones (the ‘interaction’)”. Only linguistic concepts that focus on the metalinguistic functions are discussed in this contribution in order to show that pragmatic analyses and functional evaluation (Martin and White, 2005) can reveal important aspects of successful professional interaction in knowledge dissemination.

Section snippets

“Digital knowledge dissemination platforms” and related terms

The complex term “digital knowledge dissemination platforms” does not seem to exist – at least in Google searches, we receive no results, although it is useful, combining the topical concepts of digital knowledge dissemination (DKD) and popular platform, both (very) frequently found in internet searches. Interestingly, the adjective digital collocates with all three of the following nouns: knowledge is usually stored in digital form on a digital platform and disseminated by digital means, i.e.

Description of platforms and qualitative aspects of their language in reader interaction

Over the years, the three DKD platforms discussed in this contribution have developed a complex web presence, which will be presented only briefly here in terms of their description in Wikipedia, in on-line discussion forums and social media in contrast to the self-presentation on their webpages. Since most of the evaluation depends on personal and community-specific preferences and personal expectations, the perspective here is explicitly one of a critical senior linguist - although

Quantitative aspects of personal platform messages

For a comparison of platform messages, I used a small corpus of all emails (778 texts with 8162 words) that were sent to my address in the year 2019, during which I was a passive recipient and did not interact with the platforms in any uploading activity. As Wikipedia does not interact with individual users via email, only Academia.edu and ResearchGate could be included in this quantitative interaction analysis. The two subcorpora consisted of 575 vs. 203 texts and 6440 vs. 1722 words from

Summary

Our qualitative and quantitative analyses of the three popular digital knowledge dissemination platforms Wikipedia, Academia.edu and ResearchGate shows: Wikipedia as a popular knowledge dissemination platform only uses internal messages to maintain limited interaction in order to ensure the quality of texts, usually templates by volunteers and only partly by automated agents or bots. Academia.edu and ResearchGate do not only generate different types of internal messages, but they include a busy

Conflict of interest

None declared.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the organizers of the inspiring CLAVIER Conference in Modena in 2015, two anonymous reviewers for interesting comments that allowed me to clarify and expand my linguistic ideas in this fascinating multidisciplinary field, and to Jessica Dheskali, Hildegard Schäffler, Sven Albrecht and Marina Ivanova for valuable comments when I was finalizing this paper. The concept of credibility was developed in the context of our “Hybrid Society” Project ID 416228727 – SFB 1410 funded by the

Josef Schmied has been full Professor of English Language & Linguistics at Chemnitz University of Technology since 1993. His main research interests are in Language & Culture (sociolinguistics, English in Africa and SE Asia), Language & Computers (corpus-linguistics, Internet English), and Language & Cognition (e-learning, Academic Writing).

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  • Josef Schmied has been full Professor of English Language & Linguistics at Chemnitz University of Technology since 1993. His main research interests are in Language & Culture (sociolinguistics, English in Africa and SE Asia), Language & Computers (corpus-linguistics, Internet English), and Language & Cognition (e-learning, Academic Writing).

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