Video Abstracts in EMP: A Corpus-Based Approach to the Analysis of Rhetorical Structure in Multimodal Medical Genres

Developments in digital technologies have broadened the range of media forms of knowledge dissemination: blogs/forums, tweets, TED Talks, and video abstracts are examples of how researchers transcend the confines of research articles and reach an audience extending well beyond the members of their own research community. Yet this comes at a price for both researchers and ESP analysts: the former need to acquire specific competences to produce texts that make full use of full range of semiotic resources available in such media, while the latter need to develop methods for analyzing them for both research and teaching purposes. The present paper investigates a corpus-based approach to the Video Abstract, "a video presentation corresponding to a specific science research article, which typically communicates the background of a study, methods used, study results and potential implications through the use of images, audio, video clips, and text" (Spicer, 2014, p. 3). Drawing on established models for the analysis of the ESP genre (Swales, 2004) and multimodal discourse analysis (Baldry & Thibault, 2006; Kress & van Leeuwen [1996] 2006) the study builds on the author's previous work on video abstracts (Coccetta, 2020) using corpus-based methods to characterize the resource selection process – what choices authors actually make from the overall inventory of semiotic resources when deciding how best to communicate their research.