Medical video abstracts and their subgenres: a phase-based approach to the detection of generic structure patterns

ABSTRACT

In recent years, digital platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and ResearchGate have broadened the range of genres used in specialised knowledge dissemination. This paper focuses on the Video Abstract (VA), a four-to-five-minute presentation of what lies behind the production of a specific research article (RA). This emergent genre transcends the confines of the RA allowing researchers to reinterpret their research making use of multiple information flows thanks to the meaning-making affordances created by the videotrack, the soundtrack and, above all, their simultaneous interplay. The extent to which researchers make full use of these affordances is examined in relation to the generic structure of a small specialised video corpus of medical VAs published in ten international journals. The study shows that the VA tends to replicate the generic structure typical of the RA but does so by using different subgenres which address a wider audience than that of the RA.

KEYWORDS:

• Video abstracts
• knowledge dissemination
• specialised video corpus
• generic structure potential
• phasal analysis

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Any shortcomings still present remain my own responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_s_first_images_reveal_campfires_on_the_Sun. Accessed: 9 September 2020.

2. https://www.youtube.com/c/TheBMJ. Accessed: 16 November 2020.

3. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiC5xPiBbjJU6KeduIFbfJH_Kdad9HPTr. Accessed: 16 November 2020.

4. Drawing on Steen’s (1999) distinction between genre and subgenre, in this article, the term subgenre is used to indicate “conceptual subordinates” (Steen 1999, 112) of a given genre which differ from each other on a small range of attributes (e.g. medium and form).

5. In videojournalism, a slice-of-life story documents some aspects of a person’s ordinary life (Kobré 2012).

6. http://links.lww.com/ANC/A13. Accessed: 31 August 2020.

7. The caret sign indicates a fixed sequence of items.

8. The videos quoted can be viewed in YouTube using the code given.

9. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/nuts-my-anti-death/281722/. Accessed: 14 September 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesca Coccetta

Francesca Coccetta is a tenured Assistant Professor in English Language at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. Her research publications relate to video corpus construction and annotation, English language teaching and computer-assisted language learning, and multimodal discourse analysis of domain-specific discourses and include: “Enriching Language Learning through a Multimedia Corpus” (2007), “Access to Discourse in English through Text Analysis” (2016), “Multimodal Concordancing in DDL” (in press), and “Medical Video Abstracts: A Web Genre for Research Accessibility and Visibility” (2020).