The influence of discipline, medium and target audience in multimodal recontextualization practices: The case of popular science online videos

Abstract

This study contributes to our knowledge about the rapidly evolving repertoire of genres that support Open Science communication practices online. The focus lies on popular science online videos (i.e., 10-minute videos that disseminate scientific content), which have been previously described as scifotainment or edutainment genres. Like other genres that disseminate science to lay audiences, they partake from a need to recontextualise information. To this aim they resort to a number of strategies that tailor the information to the assumed knowledge of the audience, build credibility and engage the audience (Pérez-Llantada, 2021). Given the multimodal nature of these videos, the recontextualisation processes involved in them imply the orchestration of complex multimodal ensembles. Our aim is to gain more insight into these ensembles and how they enact multimodal recontextualisation strategies (Luzón, 2019; Rowley-Jolivet & Carter-Thomas, 2019; Ruiz-Madrid & Valeiras-Jurado, 2023). In particular, we want to identify similarities and differences in the way multimodal recontextualisation is carried out in videos from different disciplines. With this, we want to contribute to a more accurate description of this emerging genre. To this aim, we adopt a Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach and use specialised annotation software for the comparative analysis of four selected examples. The analysis reveals both similarities and differences regarding the strategies used and their modal realisations. Our findings suggest that while most similarities are triggered by the online medium, the differences can be mainly attributed to the target audience, and to a lesser extent to the scientific discipline.