ABSTRACT
From the first choices scientists make about their research, they are rhetorically positioning their work. In this and the next several chapters, I extend investigations of how scientists position new research to consider how Swendsen, Bouzida, and Kumar deliberately planned and carried out various strategies to influence and persuade their constituents, both those within their own community of physics and those in biology and chemistry.1 I focus in this chapter on how the physicists selected and defined their research problem, and on how their audiences’ differing conceptions of this problem influenced both the physicists’ definition and their subsequent research. I also show how the physicists disseminated their preliminary findings at a physics conference to position and gain support for their work prior to publishing it. (I save discussion of how the physicists prepared and positioned the main DOMC paper for later chapters.) My findings in this chapter show how Swendsen, Bouzida, and Kumar, rather than relying on a single rhetorical event to persuade their audiences (e.g., publication), deliberately engaged in ongoing rhetorical activity from the initial stages of their work.
