Recontextualizing specialized knowledge outside Academia: multiple routes to science communication

At present, science and technology-related issues have become integral to the fabric of our contemporary society. However, despite their pivotal role in shaping people’s everyday lives, non-experts still encounter a multitude of challenges in acquainting themselves with these topics, mainly because of the overabundance of science-related information and the language barriers posed by the domain-specific discourses. As a result, in the attempt to accurately educate the general public, as well as to prompt meaningful communication between them and the world of Academia, scientists, scholars and institutions alike are now compelled to “redraft and remodel” (Zou & Hyland 2019) the way in which scientific concepts are presented, and to “recontextualise” (Calsamiglia 2003, Gotti 2013) the specialised information into new contexts or formats. In this light, this research sets out to investigate how domain-specific knowledge in the fields of biology, chemistry and Earth sciences is transmitted across three different media, e.g., blogs, YouTube channels and comic books. Grounded in the perspectives of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, this study endeavours to investigate the rhetorical dispositio of the contents and their elocutio, namely the specific linguistic and discursive strategies employed for information tailoring purposes. Under scrutiny is a 504,762-word corpus, purposely-built for this research, assembled from authentic blog, video and comic book data (e.g. CrashCourse Biology, SciTechDaily, The Cartoon Guides to the Environment). The insights and reflections derived from the two parallel investigations into the ‘moves’ and ‘steps’ that constitute the discourse, and into the items that lexicalise the docere and delectare rhetorical goals shed light, above all, on the potentialities these media have on the dissemination of specialized information. Furthermore, these results not only provide information on the linguistic, discursive and rhetorical means employed to accommodate science in blogs, videos and comic books, but highlight also a number of similarities and differences that can be observed between these three media.