REPRESENTING SCIENCE: A MULTIMODAL STUDY OF SCIENCE POPULARIZATION ON INSTITUTIONAL AND MASS MEDIA WEBSITES

Abstract

This thesis investigates the representational practices of online science news from institutional and mass media websites, including university websites, the university consortium website of Futurity, and MSNBC. The online science news is analyzed within the frameworks of genre theories and Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis. The study focuses on the usage of hyperlinks, the generic structures of verbal stories, and the functions of images in science news from the three types of website. Moreover, the evolution of the Futurity website is examined; and the genre of `hypermodal nucleus¿ is uncovered, which, as a type of `scifotainment¿, integrates journalistic flair with academic rigor in an effort to marketize research and universities. The thesis argues that institutional news reports of scientific research have moved beyond the popularization of science into the realm of the marketization of research and universities to build positive public attitudes towards the science enterprise.