ABSTRACT
In today’s “internet galaxy”, multimodal resources have increasingly shaped new communicative environments where scholars are required both to explore new ways of disseminating expert scientific knowledge to peers and “translate” this knowledge into more comprehensible language at didactic and popular levels. A significant example is the partnership between Research Gate, among the most popular academic social networks, and the Breakthrough Prize, the world’s largest monetary science prize which honors top scientists, even very young ones. Laureates attend a televised award ceremony designed to celebrate and promote their achievements and inspire the next generation. These ceremonies are analyzed within an MDA framework based on social semiotics. More specifically, the investigation includes “resemiotization” and “composites of connotations”, where the former is used to discuss the continuous shifting from different contexts, and the latter is interpreted as a way to understand the spectacularization of science featured in BP. The investigation intends to demonstrate that, in BP events, many different strategies and techniques combine and result in the “marketisation” or “promotionalization” of scientific discourse and to show how science can be “popularized” in a new, attractive way through the potential of visual and aural media.
