Expert knowledge dissemination online: Discursive choices, roles enacted and authorial voice constructed

A wide range of digital practices are currently employed to disseminate specialised knowledge beyond expert communities. Expert knowledge needs to be recontextualised so that it becomes accessible, understood an acceptable to diversified audiences with varying levels of expertise. How knowledge brokers construct and project their authorial voice plays a key role in this endeavour. This paper proposes a framework for analysing the construction of authorial voice in digital practices that recontextualise expert knowledge, based on the discursive choices made by knowledge brokers and the discursive roles enacted through them. The framework is applied to a corpus of 40 digital dissemination texts: 20 author-generated texts published in The Conversation and 20 writer-mediated research digests in two disciplines: Economy and Natural Sciences. Overall results show that Stance-taking and Comprehensibility roles are more prominent than Credibility and especially Engagement roles. Differences are observed in the Credibility roles enacted by knowledge producers versus mediators, and in Stance-taking across disciplines. The results offer insights into how expert knowledge is disseminated in trustworthy digital sources and can inform more critical consumption and production of such practices.