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

Abstract

In today’s neoliberal economy, digital platforms have led to a proliferation in science popularization where scientists package their messages for the wider public. Our study explores how science ideas are disseminated in one of the most widespread digitally mediated genres of science popularisation, the TED talks. We adopt a multimodal discourse analysis approach to explore how the presenter orchestrates her speech, visuals on slides, and hand gestures to achieve the communicative purposes of the TED talk. From the analysis, it is observed that the presenter uses many specific linguistic choices to clarify the ideas and build the speaker’s authority. These language choices are supported by visual choices and gestures. We unpack the presenter’s multimodal semiotic choices and examine how they work together to communicate scientific ideas to the layman and engage with the audience. Our study reveals a deeper understanding on the power of language, visuals, and gestures as communicative tools in presentations, and sheds light on how the three modes are orchestrated to present scientific ideas in an accessible and engaging manner as part of science popularization.

Humour in TED Talks: A Multimodal Account

“…Typical traits include the use of humour as an endemic characteristic (Scotto di Carlo, 2013), an informal register that encourages participation and proximity (Scotto di Carlo, 2014), reduced technicality and the presence of personal anecdotes (Mattiello, 2017), the use of markers of engagement, together with epistemic verbs for the expression of stance (Caliendo & Compagnone, 2014;Compagnone, 2014). From a multimodal perspective, research has shown that different semiotic resources (including gestures and visuals as slides with images and videos, see Harrison, 2021;Jiang & Lim, 2022;Wu & Qu, 2020;Xia, 2023) can be significantly co-deployed with words in this genre of popularisation, thus contributing to multimodal ensembles (Kress, 2010), i.e., combinations of meaningmaking resources or modes, of different degrees of complexity and with a varied distribution across distinct knowledge domains (Masi, 2019(Masi, , 2020a.…”