An anthropology of reading science texts in online media

Abstract

Reading multimodal (popularized) scientific texts predominantly is studied in terms of technical decoding skills said to be required. In this chapter I suggest that there are other interesting approaches to the study of reading multimodal (popularized) scientific texts grounded in anthropological concerns and the notion of reading as social praxis. These concerns include questions of what people read, how much they read, and the purposes and effects of reading. Here, I focus on reading practices and the kind of semiotic (meaning-making) resources (popularized) scientific texts in online media make available for the practices of reading, including the way in which membership categories are used to link different aspects of a text. An anthropology of reading (online science) ought to be of interest to (science) educators and educational psychologists, because, as part of development, members of society encounter reading first in their transactions with others, as a social phenomenon, before reading becomes an individual phenomenon. Important aspects of reading multimodal (popularized) scientific texts therefore can be found by studying sociocultural and cultural-historical practices and resources. Because “mind” is found in society, the development of higher-order psychological processes including reading can be studied using methods more typically found in disciplines concerned with culture. In this chapter, I take inspirations from anthropological and ethnomethodological approaches to reading generally that are consistent with a culturalhistorical approach and develop them for my study of the reading of online (popularized) scientific texts. My database includes all science texts that BBC published online between February 16 and March 31, 2007. I develop a framework for reading these texts from a cultural-historical practice perspective and provide exemplary analyses of reading such multimodal texts from an anthropological and ethnomethodological perspective.