Academics Online: Code Glosses across Research Genres and Public Communication

This study focuses on the notion of knowledge dissemination and on the role of blogs in knowledge dissemination today. The issue is explored through a case study of two well-known economists, by comparing their blog posts and their scholarly production of journal articles. A comparison of the general lexis of the two corpora highlighted the presence in journal articles of word forms referring to elements and relations typical of economic reasoning and mathematical demonstration, together with words referring to the structure of the extended text, with limited use of evaluative language, pointing to generality and current relevance. Blog posts, on the other hand, appeared characterized by first person and other forms of self-reference, intertextuality and a marked presence of evaluative words, intensifiers and hedges. It was also important to note that language choice contributes to creating a personal voice and the representation of dialogue with readers. The comparative analysis of code glosses in posts and journal articles by the two authors did not highlight any intense use of code glosses in posts. From a quantitative point of view, code glosses were almost as frequent as in research articles. The expectation that they might be more frequent, as in instructional genres, did not prove correct in these A-blogs. There were peculiarities in the personal tone, in the constant reader engagement and in the frequent involvement of evaluative elements, both attitudinal and epistemic. But the most likely inference from the observation of code glosses in “academic celebrity blogs” is that these are not used to instruct the readers, but rather to engage them in the development of the debate. The prominence of the writer is counterbalanced by a collaborative development of discourse, where the reader is presented as a partner in an open and ongoing dialogue. Overall, then, posts of this kind turn out to be not only sites for disseminating knowledge (and opinions), but above all for managing the blogger’s image (and reputation) in public dialogue with the virtual community