Engaging the online audience in the digital era: A multimodal analysis of engagement strategies in TED talk videos

Abstract

Scientific popularization genres have attracted the attention of researchers in esp. Authors of such genres have been found to employ a variety of strategies to engage the readers. However, most studies of engagement in scientific popularization tend to focus on written genres. For this reason, they have mostly examined only the linguistic mode and rarely gone beyond this to take multimodal resources into consideration. the present study investigates how multimodal semiotic resources are combined in digital media to engage the online audience in an influential online scientific popularization genre, that is, TED talks. drawing on a corpus of 28 highly viewed TED talks from the area of biology, this study provides an in-depth analysis of multimodal engagement strategies in one of those talks. the analysis shows that the engagement of online viewers in a digitally mediated scientific popularization genre like TED talks tends to be achieved by the combination of multiple semiotic resources afforded by digital technologies, such as speech, gestures, gaze, visuals, distance of shot, perspective of shot and angle of shot. the study also reveals five strategic multimodal configurations employed to achieve viewer engagement, with the focus variously on engagement through visual aids, a long shot, gaze, questions and reference to personal emotions.

‘We Poles are pill poppers’: Proximity in Polish medical popularisation videos on YouTube

“…A significant amount of research has concerned strategies of recontextualisation of science in videos available on YouTube. Focusing on such types of videos and genres as TED Talks, vlogs, PBS Space Time videos, the studies have investigated how different modes of communication are applied in the process of knowledge framing and engagement as well as persuasion and identity creation (compagnone, 2014;Scotto di carlo, 2014Scotto di carlo, , 2018Luzón, 2019;riboni, 2020;xia & Hafner, 2021).…”

“…The presence of viewers is acknowledged by means of address terms, questions, directives, appeals to shared knowledge, personal experiences, references to popular lore, humour, as well as visuals, i.e. the strategies identified in previous research on popularisation discourse in various media (Hyland, 2008;Luzón, 2013Luzón, , 2015Luzón, , 2019xia & Hafner, 2021).…”

Popularizing science – Analyzing the presenter’s multimodal orchestration in a TED Talk

“…We posit that the presenter's use of a range of semiotic modes, such as gestures and slides, can work with the speech to communicate scientific ideas in accessible and engaging ways as well (Mattiello, 2019). thus far, there have been few studies on the use of multimodal modes in ted talks (Harrison, 2021;Masi, 2016Masi, , 2020Wu & Qu, 2020;xia & Hafner, 2021). Masi has investigated the presenters' use of hand gestures and found that metaphoric gestures are often used to reinforce the meanings of abstract notions, while deictic gestures are used to enhance audience involvement.…”

Engaging the public in science crowdfunding

“…Luzón (2019) studied the multimodal strategies used in 14 science online videos to recontextualise scientific knowledge for a broad internet audience, and she noticed a variety of semiotic resources apart from language (e.g., static and moving images), through which scientists engage the audience. Similarly, Xia & Hafner (2021) observed the expression of engagement in a small-scale corpus of 28 TED Talks videos and showed how the creators of those videos exploit the semiotic affordances of digital technologies to get the viewers involved. These are just some examples of recent studies that extend the linguistic perspective of engagement to other modes of communication, such as image and non-verbal sound, and thus incorporate multimodality concepts to the analysis.…”

“…To illustrate these devices a bit further, Table 1 summarises them and provides some examples of possible materialisations into lexico-grammatical resources. For a long time, the notion of engagement has been the object of research in the study of academic and professional writing (Hyland, 2001(Hyland, , 2002(Hyland, , 2004(Hyland, , 2005Hardwood, 2005;Lafuente-Millán, 2014;Jing & Ma, 2018;McLaren-Hanken, 2019), and more recently, it has been adopted for the study of persuasion in digital audiovisual genres, such as elevator pitches (Díez-Prados, 2019), science online videos (Luzón, 2019), and TED Talk videos (Xia & Hafner, 2021). Díez-Prados (2019) examined the verbal and non-verbal engagement strategies of 4 business entrepreneurial pitches and found that non-verbal strategies were more abundant and persuasive than verbal ones.…”