Making Science Easier to Access: Investigating Academic Social Networks as "Composites of Connotations"

In today’s ‘Internet galaxy’ (Castells 2001), multimodal resources have increasingly shaped new communicative environments where scholars are required both to explore new ways of disseminating expert scientific knowledge to peers, and “translate” (Gotti 2013) this knowledge into more comprehensible language at the didactic and popular levels. A significant example is the partnership between Research Gate, among the most popular academic social networks, and the Breakthrough Prize, the world’s largest monetary science prize which honours top scientists, even very young ones. Laureates attend a televised award ceremony, designed to celebrate, and promote their achievements and inspire the next generation. These ceremonies are analysed within an MDA framework based on social semiotics (Iedema 2011). More specifically, my investigation includes ‘resemiotization’ Iedema 2003; O’Halloran, Tan and Wignell 2016) and ‘composites of connotations’ (Leeuwen 2009), where the former is used to discuss the continuous shifting from different contexts, and the latter is interpreted as a way to understand the spectacularisation of science featured in BP. My investigation intends to demonstrate that in BP events many different strategies and techniques combine and result in the ‘marketisation’ (Fairclough 1994) or ‘promotionalisation’ (Bhatia 2002) of scientific discourse and to show how science can be ‘popularized’ (Hyland 2010) in a new, attractive way through the potential of visual and aural media.