Science, Entertainment and Television Documentary

The construction of awe in science communication

“…Because scientific products and practices are sometimes “vast” in size (physically and conceptually), and sometimes violate people’s expectations, they are argued to instantiate the kinds of core appraisals that constitute a prototypical awe episode (Valdesolo et al, 2017). Science communication researchers have identified appeals to awe-like emotions in various media, including science photography (Kessler, 2012), science television (Campbell, 2016; Helsing, 2016), popular science literature (Gross, 2018; Sideris, 2017), science journalism (Fahnestock, 1986; Perrault, 2013), and children’s science literature (Bell, 2008). These scholars have described representations connoting awe in vastly large objects such as the Apollo program (Nye, 1994), images of galaxies (Kessler, 2012), and the Large Hadron Collider (Gross, 2018).…”

“…Gottlieb et al, 2018; Helsing, 2016; McPhetres, 2019; Valdesolo et al, 2017) or implicit (e.g. Campbell, 2016; Sideris, 2017), has also underpinned descriptions of awe and wonder that relate to the communication of science.…”

Configuring Epistemic Authority: The Significance of Film Style in Documentaries about Science

“…As a result, Cox commands the places in which he is pictured – looking out across the landscape, standing on top of a mountain or astride a ridge, his face imposed on the scenery beyond through big close ups. As Vincent Campbell has suggested, through such shots the Wonders series frequently draws on the “magisterial gaze” of the Romantic sublime (Campbell 2016, 74–5). In Destiny , the most extreme examples use low angle shots to look up at Cox as the sun forms a halo around his head – imagery that, together with the film's invocation to “wonder,” is consistent with Chris Rojek's thesis that religiosity pervades the performance of modern celebrity (Rojek 2012).…”

“…As will be discussed below, in recent years television practice has reconfigured aspects of the expository mode in order to accommodate a greater emphasis on entertainment culture, in science as well as other areas of factual programming (Campbell 2016). Even a public service broadcaster such as the BBC, which has an explicit remit to educate, must produce entertaining programmes if it is to engage sufficient numbers of viewers.…”

Book review: Roberta Piazza, Louann Haarman and Anne Carbon (eds), Values and Choices in Television Discourse: A View from Both Sides of the Screen

“…The book is multidisciplinary and multifaceted at more than one level: (a) it focuses on verbal, sonic, textual and visual aspects of television; (b) it covers perspectives of both practitioners/professionals and academics; and (c) it touches on various aspects of television programmes, as endpoints, in their process of development, and also on their impact on commissioners’ demands. Finally, despite the current ‘propensity for a shift […] in how factual producers have increasingly devoted resources and scheduled space to pseudoscience and outright fiction’ (Campbell, 2016: 2), and despite the fact that television may inevitably be viewed as the ‘sound box’ of ideologies, this book convincingly demonstrates that trustworthiness, factual verifiability, ethics and truth values are still matters of great concern in the televised world.…”