University research blogs: constructing identity through language and images

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing upon Erving Goffman’s concept of identity and its contemporary applications in the analyses of blogs, this study explores the practices bloggers use to construct their identities in research blogs accessible through university websites. The study focuses both on verbal as well as non-verbal strategies and their combinations, i.e. the interplay of words and images in the posts. The analysis of the interaction of texts and images builds on Martinec and Salway’s model of text-image relations. The corpus analysed consists of 80 posts from 16 different blogs affiliated with British and North American universities. The bloggers construct their online persona through multiple identity features dominated by their commitment to research and communicating their findings to wide audiences, employing the verbal and non-verbal tools in a close cooperation to send a coherent message.