Between Expectation and Empathy: Expertise negotiation and practices of understanding in online scholarly communication

• Applicants: Dr. Michael Bender; Professorin Dr. Nina Janich
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517920702

Whether science can solve society's most urgent problems has been the subject of increasingly heated debate - especially since the Covid 19 pandemic. In the process, the tone has intensified, society is perceived as polarized, and conflicts seem unsolvable. It is therefore becoming increasingly important to facilitate successful communication about social problems for which scientific expertise is needed - especially across different interests, knowledge resources, and socialisations. Numerous scientists therefore contribute to the public debate, by communicating, e.g., via science blogs, which allow for an extraordinary way to exchange ideas broadly and publicly and make it possible to include citizens with different prior knowledge in the discourse. Comments on blogposts by scientists and science journalists, as they are available in abundance and thematic breadth on the portal "SciLogs - Diaries of Science" (Spektrum), show that processes of negotiation of expertise take place constantly, and by no means only factually. Conflicts arise here because of different expectations of professional, media and social roles and associated communicative practices, but also because there is a lack of mutual understanding of the different positions and perspectives in various role constellations, e.g., in the expert-layman spectrum. Empathy is thus a problem factor. The project goal project is the linguistic operationalization of empathy phenomena in systematic connection with the concept of expectation and reciprocal expectation of expectations. This is done in the course of a sociopragmatic in-depth analysis of practices of understanding that serve to negotiate expertise in the comment section of science blogs from SciLogs. They are to be made systematically describable through qualitative text annotation and the corpus linguistic detection of corresponding linguistic patterns. The robustness of the hypothesis- and corpus-driven categories and indicators will be tested for validity and transferability using data-driven algorithmic methods and various reference corpora. Finally, discourse-linguistic insights into the dynamics and change of understanding practices under the transformational influence of social crises such as the Covid 19 pandemic are to be gained using the example of the climate change discourse, which is disproportionately represented in the corpus. A special focus of this discourse and corpus linguistics project, which works with a mixed-methods approach, is on which practices are decisive for success or failure in understanding and which discursive moments in the commentary processes represent sensitive tipping points.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Partner Organisation: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF)
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Noah Bubenhofer