This is the project blog for the research project entitled Knowledge Construction and Writing Online: Exploring Digital Academic Discourse and Practices in Hong Kong, funded by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Direct Grant for Research.

Project Summary

Digital media such as blogs, Twitter, and ResearchGate have provided academics with new opportunities to enhance their visibility and publicize their research globally, thus giving rise to new texts and sub-genres which have been referred to as “digital academic discourse”. The emergence of digital academic practices also calls for reconceptualizations of academic writing and knowledge production. The primary aim of this project is to explore the digital writing practices by Hong Kong scholars, and how these practices are potentially shaped by the current context of Hong Kong higher education and institutional policies. Focusing on academics at CUHK from a range of disciplines, this project adopts a mixed methods research design involving online survey, technobiographic interviews, and digital discourse analysis, so as to address the following research questions:

1. What are the discourse features of digital writing produced by scholars in Hong Kong? 

2. How does digital academic discourse impact the production and consumption of knowledge? 

3. In what ways is digital academic discourse shaped by institutional and government policies?

4. For HK Chinese scholars who use English as an additional language, do they draw on multilingual resources in their digital academic discourse? If so, in what ways and to what extent?

The interdisciplinary nature of this project will inform university and government policies related to the assessment of research from a wider range of academic sub-genres. The open access nature of digital academic discourse will also serve as a bridge between academia and the wider public.