Rewriting and re-contextualizing biology for the general public: from blogs to YouTube educational videos

This article presents a corpus-assisted analysis of n-grams characterizing the discourse of popular science in two web-based media: blogs and YouTube channels specializing in the fields of human and cell biology. The study is aimed at identifying and comparing the most frequent n-grams in both corpora in order to gain valuable insights into the discursive and rhetorical strategies, and their related linguistic devices, employed to transmit the specialized contents. The findings not only reveal information on the means used to accommodate science in blogs and videos, but also highlight a number of cross-media similarities and differences which can further our understanding of the study of web-based popular science discourse.