The Joy of Stats and Dancing Statistics: The Popularization and Dissemination of Statistical Science in Multimodal and Multimedia Genres

Many people have no familiarity with the language of statistics, with the result that frequently they are unable to comprehend correctly the meaning of the figures measuring economic, political and social phenomena. Since government decisions and actions are increasingly based on statistics, understanding statistical concepts more easily can be a way to diminish information asymmetries and contribute to the growth of a democratic knowledge society (Barbieri and Giacché 2006). Today more and more national and international bodies and statistical offices have been producing multimodal and multimedia materials to provide citizens with the appropriate tools to read, understand and analyse statistics. The videos “The Joy of Stats”, broadcast by BBC Four, and “Dancing Statistics”, provided by the British Psychological Society, were investigated from a multimodal discourse analysis perspective (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, 2001) in order to identify the linguistic and visual discursive strategies used to familiarize viewers with different statistical issues and popularize statistics. In addition, by focusing on the intertextual and interdiscursive elements which come out of the linguistic and semiotic investigation, this study explored how statistical concepts are recontextualized through the interaction and combination of different modes. Consequently, the analysis verified whether the transfer from specialized language to popularizing texts involves any contamination in discursive practices, thus leading to the birth of new text-types