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

According to studies to date, the Covid19 pandemic has not yet led to a decline in confidence in the problem-solving competence of science in Germany. Nevertheless, there is much public discussion in Germany about the performance of scientific expertise in societal crises - the tone has intensified, society is perceived as polarised, and conflicts appear unsolvable. The facilitation of successful understanding of social problems for which scientific expertise is needed is therefore becoming increasingly important - and this is especially true across different interests, knowledge resources and socialisations. Be it in a fundamental sense with regard to social peace in our democracy, be it concretely with regard to the necessary joint efforts to solve current political challenges.Many scientists are therefore becoming increasingly involved in the public debate, for example through science blogs, which make it possible in a special way to exchange ideas with interested parties and to allow citizens with different levels of prior knowledge to participate in the discourse. Comments and responses to blogposts by scientists and science journalists, such as those available in abundance and thematic breadth on the portal SciLogs (since 2000, operated by Spektrum-Verlag), show that there are constant and by no means only factually conducted processes of negotiating expertise. Conflicts arise especially in the face of different expectations of professional roles and associated communicative practices, but also of understanding and insight on the part of lay participants. In this context, the initiating blog post seems to be partly responsible for the heatedness of debates and the success/failure of understanding, not only because of the content, but also because of the linguistic and multimedia way of dealing with the topic.This is where the corpus and discourse linguistic project comes in by setting goals on three levels: Goal 1 is the linguistic operationalisation of empathy in systematic connection with the concept of expectation and reciprocal expectation. 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. By operationalisation, we mean both the theory-guided, deductive formation of categories and their inductive differentiation as well as the direct methodological application, such as the systematic recording of indicators of empathic practices for qualitative text annotation and corpus linguistic detection. This goal is pursued in order to make the dynamics between blogposts, comments and responses systematically describable and to be able to linguistically typify communicative practices of expertise and empathy- and expectation-related understanding.Goal 2 comprises validation and generalisation: The viability of the categories and indicators developed on the basis of hypotheses and corpus (Goal 1) is to be examined and, with a view to the exemplary nature of expertise and communication practices, tested in an explorative and data-driven manner with regard to transferability to other communicative and thematic contexts. In this target area, therefore, a methodological continuation will be carried out, which at the same time should contribute to reconfiguration and further development at the level of theory building. In this way, both the blog-specificity of the practices of understanding and possible blind spots in the system of categories and indicators can be worked out.Aim 3 is a discourse-linguistic and thus a content-application-oriented one: the section of SciLogs texts that can be understood as part of the climate change discourse and which is estimated to account for about one sixth of the total corpus of 229,328 entries as a whole is to be subjected to a diachronic comparative analysis (2000-2019 vs. 2020-2023). The aim is to gain insights into the dynamics and change of practices of understanding under the transformational influence of social crises such as the Covid19 pandemic. The question to be asked here is to what extent discourses and discourse entanglements have an effect on themselves and whether and how attribution criteria and relevance perceptions of expertise change as a result.The focus is thus on the qualitative and quantitative reconstruction of communicative practices and linguistic patterns that are crucial for successful online science communication or that stand in the way of it because they contribute to or disrupt understanding in the course of negotiating, confirming and validating expertise. Methodologically, the concepts of empathy and expectation are central. Using the example of climate change discourse, we will also examine how such media-mediated communication practices are currently changing as a result of the pandemic and whether and how a possible dynamic in the quality of communication can be measured on a corpus linguistic basis.