Open AccessRhetorical temporality in online scientific communication
Author(s) -
Olga Menagarishvili,
Bret Zawilski
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
ibérica/ibérica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.347
H-Index - 20
eISSN - 2340-2784
pISSN - 1139-7241
DOI - 10.17398/2340-2784.41.39
Subject(s) - temporality , rhetorical question , rhetoric , situated , categorization , sociology , epistemology , linguistics , computer science , philosophy , artificial intelligence
Professional organizations use websites as spaces for the creation of communities. Academies of Sciences are examples of professional organizations, and their websites represent scientific discourse used in these scientific communities. However, little to no attention has been paid to the ways in which websites of Academies of Sciences present these scientific organizations in general and use rhetorical temporality for that purpose in particular. In this article, we attempt to explore how rhetorical temporality functions across two Academies of Sciences’ websites associated with different nations: the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. We situated our research within the frames of epideictic rhetoric, the role of consensus in the rhetoric of science, and rhetorical temporality. We developed a coding scheme that we applied to our data to categorize the individual pages on each site according to how they were temporally situated.
Our analysis revealed several differences in the ways that the temporal categories we developed were used within each site. The coding scheme we created shows potential for future application to websites belonging to other professional organizations