Communicating science on Twitter conference presentations

Technological advances and social media are currently transforming how scientific knowledge is produced, shared, and disseminated. Within the preferred digital platforms employed by scientists, Twitter has become a powerful tool to disseminate, network, and engage with both specialised and non-specialised publics. Moreover, because of COVID-19 lockdowns, instructional and informative Twitter threads have become more popular, and academic institutions have contributed to this trend by adapting spoken genres such as 3 Minute Thesis presentations and academic conferences into the Twitter thread format. From a small-scale corpus of 55 Twitter presentations, I report on the main results identified with the support of computerassisted software. Findings focus on the rhetorical structure of Twitter presentations, the communicative strategies employed by scientists to re-contextualize and remediate scientific knowledge, and the innovation provided by Web 2.0 affordances. The pedagogical implications of this study align with current policies of open science for social impact and wider dissemination of science beyond expert publics