International research groups are expected to ensure global dissemination and visibility of their knowledge production, for which Twitter is effectively employed to reach diversified audiences. This paper analyses the dialogic dimension of tweets published in accounts of Horizon2020 research projects, where group’s productivity and work are promoted, and multiple readers addressed. Our study focuses on the use, in these Twitter accounts, of interactional pragmatic strategies, their verbal realisation through engagement markers, as well as on medium affordances and non-verbal markers. A sample of 1.454 tweets from 10 accounts of the EUROPROtweets corpus were coded and analysed through NVivo. The data-driven pragmatic analysis triggered the identification of 8 interactional strategies. We then quantitatively analysed the use of engagement makers and qualitatively studied the characteristic non-verbal markers with a dialogic function within each of these. Our findings will help understand the complexities of current digital academic professional practices, especially as regards the dynamics of dialogic interaction in social media.

The EUROPRO digital corpus was designed by the InterGedi research group, based at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). The main focus of InterGedi is the analysis of the textual resources used by international research groups as part of their dissemination and visibility strategies. The corpus comprises a collection of 30 international research project websites funded by the European Horizon2020 Programme (EUROPROwebs corpus). By looking into their websites, 20 projects were observed to maintain a Twitter account and the tweets from these accounts were the basis for the compilation of the EUROPROtweets corpus. This paper delves into the criteria used for the selection of the research project websites and the methodological steps taken to classify, label and tag the verbal component in these websites and tweets. The paper discusses the challenges in the compilation of the corpus because of the dynamic, hypermodal, and hypermedial nature of the digital texts it contains. The paper closes by underlining the potential uses and applications of EUROPRO in order to gain insights into the digital discursive and professional practices used by international research groups to foster their visibility online.