Genre networks for public engagement with science: An analysis of knowledge transformation processes in an online crowdfunding proposal

In the current online landscape, scientists can draw on a myriad of digital genres to disseminate research, get international visibility, and encourage public participation in scientific issues. These digital genres, as Pérez-Llantada and Luzón (2023) argue, need to be conceptualised in conjunction with other genres with which they form complex genre networks or, in Bazerman’s (1994) words, “genre systems”. A genre network representative of public engagement with science is the crowdfunding proposal (Mehlenbacher, 2019), used by scientists to prompt online donations for financing their research projects. On the platform Experiment.com, this network results at a glance from the embedding of several modular texts and multimodal elements (i.e., images and video) within a preestablished layout, plus their connection with other genres or related texts on the Web through hyperlinking (Myers, 2010). In view of these remarks, the present paper aims to examine the processes of remediation, embedding, hybridisation, and resemiotisation that give rise to this genre network, for which little research has been documented. To do this, we selected a research project on experimental Biology from Experiment.com as a case study. First, we analysed and critically assessed the rationale for the rhetorical organisation of both textual and multimodal genres in the network. Second, we observed how those genres support each other to recontextualise and adapt contents to Internet audiences. To fulfil both aims, we relied on seminal rhetorical and EAP genre studies (Miller, 2015; Swales, 2004) to specifically examine the rhetorical strategies scientists use to get funding. The results show that the network presents generic hybridity (Herring, 2013), since it adopts rhetorical conventions of traditional genres such as grant proposals and advertisements. Moreover, the video constitutes the most attention-grabbing genre of the network and uses a more accessible language than the text does to recontextualise specialised scientific discourse to all types of audiences.