Iceberg Videos

Iceberg videos are a fascinating emerging genre as they branch off a meme format and appear (to me) to have primarily been concerned with conspiracy theories or adjacent content (lost media, ancient civilizations, etc.) but the video format actually lends itself quite well to more educational contexts, such as linguistics. Instead of a lecture going far in-depth into one topic, it jumps around between different relevant landmark ideas that, collectively, can give you an overall sense for the “landscape” of a field.

Educational curricula really likes constructing pathways and in-depth instruction that lasts years before arriving at teaching a target idea (say, calculus), whereas the iceberg flips that on its head and introduces the entire breadth of a field at once without going too deep into any one thing. This can be useful both to understand surface-level vocabulary/references and also as a way to give people more agency to choose which of those topics to actually delve into more depth and research into.