Making Biosciences Visible for Popular Consumption: Approaching Image–Text Relations in Newscientist.com Through a Critical Multimodal Analysis

Abstract

Salience or visibility of science-related issues can be strategically projected by means of linguistic and visual resources. This article presents a methodology for examining the relations between the textual properties of popular science discourse and the visual features of accompanying images. The advantages of this approach are demonstrated through a multimodal analysis of a sample of biomedical articles from New Scientist, which reveals the frequency and distribution of selected properties of visual images, typical aspects of layout, attributed functions of the images, and their relation to the text. Humanization, domestication, and aesthetization are dominant discursive strategies of popularity-driven science journalism.