Disseminating research results in The Conversation: An analysis of comprehensibility strategies

Abstract

Recognizing the key role of knowledge dissemination in socio-economic progress, The Conversation is a news website intended to promote the public understanding of science. When using this platform to disseminate their own findings, scholars need to recontextualize their published research to make it suitable for a wide audience. However, despite the potential of this website for improving science literacy, there is little research on the strategies used to render scientific knowledge comprehensible for the general audience. This article studies the recontextualization strategies that researchers utilize to facilitate understanding when reporting their own research in The Conversation. For this purpose, we analyze a dataset consisting of 50 Environment articles. Adopting a multimodal perspective, we propose an analytical framework that can account for the various semiotic resources employed to aid comprehensibility. We analyze the frequency, function and formal features of the following elements that facilitate understanding: (i) verbal in-text elaboration (exemplification, reformulation, definition, analogy and explicitation); (ii) visuals; and (iii) hyperlinks to supplementary information. The results show that the technological features of The Conversation (e.g., hyperlinking, multimodal embedding) shape how researchers adapt and reframe their discourse, enabling a distinctive form of knowledge dissemination. Through this analysis, we aim to shed light on the multimodal recontextualization strategies that facilitate effective knowledge dissemination in science news websites.