Science Dissemination in Instagram reels: A multimodal overview

Abstract

In recent years, social media have become an essential part of everyday life in educational contexts, especially considering the gradual expansion of academic dissemination in social networks (Cooper, 2014). Consequently, concepts such as content recontextualization and engagement have become essential to attract and maintain an audience for the dissemination of science in social media (Bernad-Mechó & Valeiras-Jurado, 2023; Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Khan, 2017). A multimodal perspective for the analysis of social media’s polymathic nature seems to be necessary, as the combination of semiotic modes such as speakers’ gestures or the process of postproduction contribute to communicating information and engaging the audience (Welbourne & Grant, 2016). Science dissemination videos have, in fact, been widely analyzed from a multimodal point of view (Bernad-Mechó & Valeiras-Jurado, 2023). Nevertheless, few studies have investigated science dissemination Instagram reels from a multimodal perspective. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is twofold: first, to examine the modal density of science dissemination Instagram reels attending to their embodied and filmic modal ensembles (Valeiras-Jurado & Bernad-Mechó, 2022); and second, to discern the most salient engagement strategies used in this potential digital genre. To achieve this objective, seven videos retrieved from popular Instagram scientific content creators have been selected and studied using the software GRAPE-MARS (Ruiz-Madrid et al., 2023). The findings of this research illustrate that science dissemination short videos on Instagram share a set of modes, such as the use of deictic gestures and subtitles, that aid the audience to comprehend specialized content. In addition, the results also revealed that reels’ modal density contributes to creating engagement strategies to attract the audience’s attention and emphasize key elements.