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.

Keywords

• digital genres
• multimodality
• scientific popularization
• engagement