Understanding Communication Strategies and Viewer Engagements of Science Knowledge Videos on Bilibili

Title of the Paper

Understanding Communication Strategies and Viewer Engagement with Science Knowledge Videos on Bilibili

Bibliographic Information

• Research Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Science Communication
• Keywords: Science Communication, Online Video Platforms, Bilibili, Viewer Engagement, Communication Strategies, Video Comments

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Challenges

  • Science knowledge videos have significant potential for disseminating scientific knowledge and fostering public engagement, but few studies have systematically analyzed how video creators utilize communication strategies to fully stimulate viewer engagement.
  • The mechanisms by which communication strategies relate to viewers' behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement remain unclear.

• Research Importance

  • Science communication can enhance public scientific literacy and has significant implications for scientific research and societal development.
  • Videos, with their multimodal and dynamic content presentation, serve as an important medium for engaging the public in scientific dialogue. Studying science communication on platforms like Bilibili, which operates in a non-Western cultural context, offers new perspectives and enriches research in this field.

• Research Motivation and Related Work

  • Previous studies have predominantly focused on Western video platforms such as YouTube, with limited exploration of science communication practices on platforms like Bilibili.
  • Science communication theoretical models, such as the Deficit Model, Dialogue Model, and Public Engagement Model, emphasize the importance of two-way interaction, suggesting that this study should focus on how viewers participate in the dissemination of science knowledge videos through comments.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Methods

  1. Developed a taxonomy of video communication strategies based on data from 440,547 science knowledge videos collected between August 2021 and February 2022.
  2. Constructed a taxonomy for video comments to quantify viewers' behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement.
  3. Conducted negative binomial regression and linear regression analyses to study the correlation between communication strategies and three types of viewer engagement.

• Innovative Contributions

  • Proposed a comprehensive taxonomy specifically for communication strategies in science knowledge videos, covering visual, narrative, and communicator aspects.
  • Created a systematic comment taxonomy and extended it to large-scale datasets using the BERT language model.
  • Quantified the relationship between communication strategies and different types of viewer engagement through regression analysis.

• Implementation Steps and Key Techniques

  1. Data Collection and Science Topic Classification: Efficiently categorized video topics using video tags, extracting approximately 91.97% of video topics.
  2. Communication Strategy Taxonomy: Identified characteristics at the visual, narrative, and communicator levels through qualitative content analysis of 330 randomly sampled videos.
  3. Comment Classification and Analysis: Analyzed 286,313 first-level comments from sampled videos and classified them using the BERT model.
  4. Statistical Analysis: Built regression models to examine the correlation between communication strategies and viewer engagement metrics.

Research Findings

• Specific Results

  • Categorized 11 major science topics in Bilibili science knowledge videos, with medicine and health being the most common.
  • Identified several significant communication strategies, such as user community culture (ACGN themes), dramatic questions, and emotional arousal.
  • Classified comments into six categories, including discussion, storytelling, questioning, critique, etc., to reflect different types of viewer engagement.
  • Regression analysis revealed that narrative strategies significantly influence emotional and cognitive engagement, while community culture and professional communicators are strongly associated with behavioral engagement.

• Advantages and Comparisons

  • Compared to studies focusing solely on content popularity, this research further uncovers how communication strategies practically influence multidimensional viewer engagement.
  • Provides a new perspective in a non-Western context, highlighting the impact of cultural and community characteristics on science communication.

• Experimental and Evaluation Results

  1. Narrative Strategies (e.g., dramatic questions and storytelling) positively contribute to enhancing viewers' cognitive engagement.
  2. Visual Strategies (e.g., ACGN cultural elements and emotional arousal) play a significant role in behavioral and emotional engagement.
  3. When science communication content is more complex, the proportion of knowledge-related comments tends to be lower.

• Limitations and Future Directions

  • The study is limited to the Bilibili platform and may not be applicable to other video platforms.
  • Only first-level comments were analyzed, excluding replies or engagement behaviors from viewers without comments.
  • The sample size of videos is relatively small; future work could leverage large-scale automated techniques for broader quantitative video analysis.
  • Future research could further explore how cultural differences affect the effectiveness of science communication strategies.