By: Leandra Thiele and Hande Akin
Explanation videos are increasingly common on media websites such as YouTube and are used by school students, university students as well as members of the general public. They cover all areas of knowledges and try to provide appropriate explanations about a huge variety of subjects. BUT: do they work? How can we measure this or give guidelines for making them better? How can we evaluate empirically the effectiveness of teaching videos that are constructed in different ways? As Bateman and Schmidt-Borcherding (2018) have formulated, one of the first challenges is achieving a strong framework that takes theories from multimodal discourse as well as the aspect of empirical investigation into consideration. Our aim here is to have a framework that can be applied to a wide range of explanation videos. In our project we deal with these multimodal-communicative, empirical questions and have developed (preliminary) systematic categories for annotations and (ultimately) analyses for said videos. Since these multimodal artefacts offer a diverse range of overlapping layers of semiotic modes (e.g. vastly changing graphics and diagrams), this undertaking (i.e. the transcription of materials for analysing sufficiently) posed a challenge in its own right. Moreover, in addition to the questions of what makes the mediation of different knowledges effective and what does not, further questions that this project will try to answer are how people actually understand certain contents and whether differences in the effectiveness of mediating knowledges can be seen for varying academic disciplines (natural sciences vs. the
humanities), taking e.g. sociological concepts from Karl Maton’s Legitimation Code Theory (2012) – ‘semantic gravity’ and ‘semantic density’ – into consideration. The proposed presentation will show this work-in-progress’ current state: the development of meaningful categories and their application for the analysis (using ELAN annotation-schemes) of a number of selected videos. Moreover, to answer questions in terms of how multimodal discourse comprehension is achieved in our data, preliminary visualisations of cohesive chains demonstrating the overlapping discourse units will be included as well. The videos we compare deal with a linguistic concept on the one hand (the processes of articulation) and biological concepts (xylem and phloem) on the other hand. Furthermore, for other comparison purposes, they also differ in style.
References:
Bateman, John A. and Florian Schmidt-Borcherding (2018), “The Communicative
Effectiveness of Education Videos: Towards an Empirically-Motivated Multimodal
Account”, Multimodal Technologies and Interact. 2018, 2(3), 59.
Maton, Karl (2012), “Making semantic waves: A key to cumulative knowledge-building”,
Linguistics and Education, 24 (2013), 8–22.
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