Scientific knowledge dissemination in the multilingual and digital era: A multimodality-enhanced genre analysis of Chinese epidemiologists’ COVID-19 posts on Sina Weibo

The emerging digital genres distributed via social media platforms have been increasingly prominent in disseminating scientific knowledge to the public audience. During COVID-19, Sina Weibo, the biggest Chinese microblogging website, has become the primary media where epidemiologists communicate knowledge of public health to the generalist audiences. Through the lens of genre theory, this exploratory qualitative study examines a corpus of 72 Weibo posts in Chinese language written by three reputable medical scholars. Six major moves with multiple steps were identified. Moreover, we found that both multimodal resources and rhetorical strategies have been employed to realize the identified moves for various functions. This study represents one of the first attempts to investigate emerging digital genres for public scientific knowledge dissemination in a non-English language. It also seeks to establish the interrelations between the identified moves and the multimodal resources along with rhetorical strategies used by bloggers. As such, it contributes to our understanding of evolving genred activities in the increasingly multilingual and multimodal ecology of public genres for scientific knowledge dissemination. Keywords: digital genres, public science, genre analysis, Chinese social media, COVID-19