Knowledge Dissemination on the Web

Digital tools have greatly influenced communication, cognition and human relations in general. In the fast-changing environment of the Web, the development of digital technologies has influenced the way knowledge is produced, distributed, and used. Starting from an overview of the nature of blogs, we focus here on the role they appear to play in specialized communication and on the theoretical and methodological issues involved in the design of corpora for the study of digital communication (in relation to print publications).Academic blogs can also become sites for knowledge construction. Academics engage in debate with other academics and the wider audience. Researchers engage in new collaborative practices, somehow blurring the distinction between science and public science, between internal communication and external communication. Research genres often take dialogic debates as their starting point and thus contextualize the internal argument within the debates that involve the expert community. The emphasis is on epistemic evaluation and values such as generality, simplicity and novelty. Knowledge dissemination genres, on the other hand, recontextualize expert argument in a wider participation framework. Blog posts present themselves as opening moves in polylogues, addressing the interests of different types of participants. Their dialogicity appears to be clearly based on forms of self-mention and reader’s engagement explicitly suggesting actual turn-taking and highlighting their persuasive and argumentative structure.