Abstract : This chapter looks into an online genre resulting from recent scholarly and scientific digital practices: popular science online videos. These are short videos of approximately 10 minutes in which a varied and validated scientific content is disseminated to the general public. We adopt a multimodal discourse analysis approach and use specialised annotation software for the analysis of recontextualisation strategies (Valeiras-Jurado et al., Ibérica: Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos, 35, 93–118, 2018; Luzón, Ibérica. Journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes, 37, 167–192, 2019; Rowley-Jolivet & Carter-Thomas, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 48, 1–14, 2020) and modes used to enact them in the four examples selected: (1) Why Megalodon (Definitely) Went Extinct, (2) Why the Muon g-2 Results Are so Exciting!, (3) The Physics Girl: What Is the Magic Russian Diamond? and (4) Why Are We the Only Humans Left?—YouTube. Our findings suggest that the composition and semiotic affordances of the multimodal ensembles employed play a decisive role in a successful recontextualisation of scientific content.
