First Advisor

Steven Thorne

Term of Graduation

Fall 2024

Date of Publication

12-4-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

Department

Applied Linguistics

Language

English

Subjects

multimodality, recontextualization, science communication, social semiotic multimodality, video essay, YouTube

Physical Description

1 online resource (xii, 136 pages)

Abstract

Recontextualization - the intricate process of transferring meaning material from one social semiotic context to another - is the primary avenue through which science and social science are communicated to general audiences. The prevailing popularity of social media platforms such as YouTube has encouraged a digital turn in recontextualization research and practice, with considerable emphasis given to navigating web 2.0's unique participation structure. However, compared to professional organizations, which contribute the largest amount of recontextualized scientific or social scientific content to social media platforms, independent user-generated creators consistently produce more successful content. Of interest to this project is the YouTube video essay: an increasingly mainstream yet understudied content format that unapologetically embeds digital pop culture with the dissemination of scholarly research and ideas. Despite the format's increasing popularity, little existing research includes careful description of the semiotic features that constitute the format.

This thesis contributes to research on recontextualization and science communication by advancing theoretical approaches to digital multimodal composition and highlighting the affordances of long-form online video for public scholarship. Drawing on principles from social semiotic multimodality, this thesis qualitatively analyzes 7 hours and 44 minutes of YouTube video essay data to address the lack of empirical research on the format and describe its affordances in the digital recontextualization of scholarly materials. To capture the YouTube video essay's semiotic repertoire, focus is given to recurring linguistic and multimodal features across the dataset, operationalized as the format's available designs.

In addition to employing designs endemic to digital spaces, the analyzed YouTube video essays tended to directly disseminate scholarly materials by means of quotation and liberal use of terminology, a practice that counters common ideas about best practices for recontextualization. This hybrid semiotic approach allows for nuanced, rhetorically rich, and entertaining material that retains academic rigor while enhancing its accessibility to audiences, in effect scaffolding audiences to a greater understanding and familiarity with academic discourse. These results suggest an urgent need to revisit and revise the infotainment paradigm common to science and social science communication.

Rights

© 2024 Michelle Lynn Arendt

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42980

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Linguistics Commons

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