research blog; student blog; identity construction; genre analysis

Drawing upon Erving Goffman’s concept of identity (1956) and its contemporary applications in the analyses of blogs (María-José Luzón 2018), this paper explores the practices bloggers use to construct their identities in university website blogs. 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 (2005). The corpus analysed consists of 120 posts from 19 different blogs accessible through the websites of British and North American universities. The corpus represents two sub-types of blogs, namely student blogs written by bachelor and master students, and research blogs authored by academics or doctoral students. The study aims to compare the repertoire of practices characterizing the student and the research blogs respectively.