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Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

Recontextualizing knowledge in academic video publications

A discourse analysis of multimodal science dissemination

ORCID logo | University of Zaragoza
Online videos have gained popularity as a means for academics to communicate complex scientific ideas both to specialist and non-specialist audiences (Erviti & Stengler 2016; León & Bourk 2018; Luzón & Pérez-Llantada 2019). Nonetheless, concerns are raised about the potential journalistic or oversimplified nature of such science communication efforts. Consequently, this paper aims to shed light on how researchers can enhance transparency without reducing the significance of the content. The study is accomplished through an analysis of a corpus consisting of 10 videos compiled from the ‘chemistry’ section of the Latest Thinking (lt​.org) website. This study adopts a discourse analysis approach, focusing on the discursive strategies employed in these videos to recontextualize knowledge for a wide audience. The preliminary findings reveal three types of recontextualization strategies performed through the orchestration of various semiotic modes: simplification strategies, strategies to construct an authorial persona and bonding strategies.
Keywords: academic online video publications, science dissemination, discourse analysis, multimodal recontextualization strategies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Video publications corpus
    • 3.2Analytical approach
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Simplification strategies
    • 4.2Strategies to construct an authorial persona
    • 4.3Bonding strategies
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Author queries
  • References
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