De 'youtubers' a 'cultubers'. Un fenómeno de divulgación académica, cultural y científica en YouTube

Abstract

The term youtuber label has sometimes been associated with pejorative considerations when it has been reduced only to define YouTube creators linked to the video game and entertainment sector. Parallel to the quantitative success of this type of youtubers, communicators from practically all academic, cultural and scientific fields have emerged on YouTube in recent years. Cultube is a digital community conceived within the Spanish-speaking digital reality that brings together this kind of creators and promotes this increasing model of science communication on the most popular video social media. Based on a grounded theory methodological orientation, this article presents the results of a semiotic-discursive analysis applied to interviews and ethnographic data collected from the three editions of Cultube held to date: 2018, 2019 and 2021. This case study helps to understand the global and growing phenomenon of cultural and science communicators on YouTube, their role in the global democratization of learning and their potential for the future.

Comunicación para la salud a través de TikTok. Estudio de influencers de temática farmacéutica y conexión con su audiencia

“…Looking specifically at scientific communication, we find studies focused exclusively on influencers or promotors of science on certain platforms. Examples are the work on scientific dissemination on YouTube (Buitrago, Martín-García & Beltrán-Flandoli, 2022;Pattier, 2021;Welbourne & Grant, 2016;Zaragoza Tomás & Roca Marín, 2020); on Twitch (Buitrago & Torres Ortiz, 2022b); or on Instagram (Álvarez-Herrero & Hernández-Ortega, 2021;Sidorenko, Cabezuelo & Herranz, 2021). However, with the exception of this study, there have been no studies specifically examining the work of science influencers on TikTok.…”

<em>Influencers</em> de ciencia en YouTube. Divulgación científica en el contexto español de la plataforma hegemónica de vídeo <em>online</em>

“…A partir de 2015, han ido emergiendo perfiles dedicados a la divulgación académica, cultural y científica (Erviti y Stengler, 2016;León y Bourk, 2018;Welbourne y Grant, 2016); enriqueciendo y diversificando un panorama temático que en las primeras etapas de la plataforma apenas se distanciaba de los videojuegos, los videoblogs y la moda (García Villarán, 2018;Scolari y Fraticelli, 2019;Zaragoza Tomás y Roca Marín, 2020). Este florecer de la divulgación en YouTube ha sido de utilidad incluso para buena parte del profesorado, quienes aseguran recurrir a los vídeos de estos youtubers de ciencia como material lectivo en sus clases de prácticamente todos los niveles educativos (Buitrago, Martín García y Beltrán-Flandoli, 2022).…”

Content Analysis From a Gender Perspective of Comments Received by Spanish Science YouTubers

“…Both non-scientific media and mass media have become excellent vehicles for this type of knowledge. In this sense, Buitrago et al (2022) point to the social enrichment that a collaboration between YouTube outreach and the education sector could generate. This study focuses on the popularisation of science on YouTube and, specifically, the gender perspective that can be glimpsed from the comments posted by followers.…”