Her major contributions are based on the discourse of social media and ambient affiliation (how people bond online).
[2] From 2008 to 2012, Zappavigna was an Australian Research Council (ARC) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney.
[3] She worked on the ARC project Enacting Reconciliation: Negotiating meaning in Youth Justice Conferencing,[4] a research project that analysed Youth Justice Conferencing in Australia from the perspectives of functional linguistics and performance studies[5] with J.R. Martin and Paul Dwyer.
Zappavigna has published widely on the discourse of Twitter and has made major contributions to research on 'ambient affiliation' - how people bond online.
[10] Zappavigna's 2012 book, Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web,[11] expands upon the concept of "ambient affiliation" introduced in her 2011 journal article and, as a review by Rachelle Vessey states, "ultimately it presents new and innovative ways of approaching the discourse of Twitter, a type of data that had yet to be examined from a linguistic perspective".
[14] This book makes a major contribution to the study of hashtags as evaluative markers and expands upon Zappavigna's work on ambient affiliation.
In collaboration with Sumin Zhao[16] from the University of Edinburgh, she has developed a new social semiotic multimodal framework for interpreting the selfie.
[18] This framework has been applied to a diverse range of topics including selfies in mommyblogging,[19] digital scrapbooks,[20] decluttering vlogs on YouTube,[21] and cyclist Instagram posts.