Multimodal genre analysis of video abstracts: Exploring rhetorical structure, hybridization, and innovation

Abstract

Video Abstracts (VAs) are designed to summarize research and enhance research visibility. Despite some efforts to understand their generic structure and rhetorical strategies, the evolving multimodal nature of VAs—particularly in relation to authors' communicative intentions—remains underexplored. This lack of research raises critical questions about the communicative functions of VAs and their stability as a new genre. Inspired by literature on transcription of video genres and multimodal discourse analysis, this exploratory study analyzes the rhetorical structure and modal affordances of three VA formats–Graphical VAs, Whiteboard VAs, and Talking-researcher VAs–—using insights gathered from interviews with their creators. The results identify both traditional and novel features of VAs’ rhetorical structure, aligning VAs with research and non-research genres. Additionally, each VA format uses modes creatively to communicate research to a hybrid audience of scientists and nonscientists, enabling researchers to establish new communicative intentions but resulting in instability of the genre. We discuss implications for understanding their multimodal, meaning-making affordances as essential for fostering genre innovation.