This volume integrates multimodal theoretical frameworks with those from graphic communication and information design and applies this critical synthesis to the examination of the changes and relationships that occur when multimodal documents are distributed across various means and channels of consumption. Drawing on examples from popular newspapers and store catalogs, the book’s specific focus is on documents as sets, here defined as the collective of all the assorted forms of a document published across multiple mediums and modes. This approach affords a multi-layered analysis of multimodal documents more broadly, in addition to engaging in questions about the very definition of a document and the terminology we use in relation to documents, including genres, mediums, and modes. As both a critical examination of the theoretical frameworks employed in literature on documents and a way forward for new approaches to analyzing multimodal texts, this volume is key reading for students and scholars in multimodality, graphic communication, design, media studies, and information science.

This volume sign posts several paths of multimodality research and theory-building today. The chapters represent a cross-section of current perspectives on multimodal discourse with a special focus on theoretical and methodological issues (mode hierarchies, modelling semiotic resources as multiple semiotic systems, multimodal corpus annotation). In addition, it discusses a wide range of applications for multimodal description in fields like mathematics, entertainment, education, museum design, medicine and translation.

In this volume, Soe Marlar Lwin proposes a contextualized multimodal framework that brings together storytelling practitioners’ and academic researchers’ conceptions of storytelling. It aims to highlight the ways in which various institutions in contemporary society have been using live storytelling performances as an effective communicative, educative and meaning-making tool. Drawing on theories of narrative from narratology as well as from related fields such as discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, communication and performance studies, the author proposes a contextualized multimodal framework to (a) uncover the potential narrativity of a live storytelling performance through an analysis of narrative elements constituting the story, (b) capture the process of developing actual narrativity through a multimodal analysis of performance features in the storytelling discourse, and (c) highlight the importance of context and dynamics between the storyteller and audience for an achievement of optimal narrativity in a particular storytelling event. The sample analysis shows how the framework not only describes the system governing institutionalized storytelling performances in general but also serves as a useful model to examine individual performance as a unique realization of the general system. The book also offers implications for possible applications of such contextualized multimodal frameworks more broadly across the disciplines.

Teaching and learning involve more than just language. The teachers' use of gestures, the classroom spaces they occupy and the movements they make, as well as the tools they use, work together with language as a multimodal ensemble of meanings. Embodied teaching is about applying the understandings from multimodal communication to the classroom. It is about helping teachers recognise that the moves they make and the tools they use in the classroom are part of their pedagogy and contribute to the design of the students’ learning experience. In response to the changing profile and needs of learners in this digital age, pedagogic shifts are required. A shift is the evolving role of teachers from authority of knowledge to designers of learning. This book discusses how, using examples drawn from case studies, teachers can use corporeal resources and (digital) tools to design learning experiences for their students. It advances the argument that the study of the teachers' use of language, gestures, positioning, and movement in the classroom, from a multimodal perspective, can be productive. This book is intended for educational researchers and teacher practitioners, as well as curriculum specialists and policy makers. The central proposition is that as teachers develop a semiotic awareness of how their use of various meaning-making resources express their unique pedagogy they can use these multimodal resources aptly and fluently to design meaningful learning experiences. This book also presents a case for further research in educational semiotics to understand the embodied ways of meaning-making in the pedagogic context.

This book develops a new framework for describing the structure of multimodal documents: how language, image, layout and other modes of communication work together to convey meaning. Building on recent research in multimodal analysis, functional linguistics and information design, the book examines the textual, visual, and spatial aspects of page-based multimodal documents and employs an analytical model to describe and interpret their structure using the concepts of semiotic modes, medium and genre. To demonstrate and test this approach, the study performs a systematic, longitudinal analysis of a corpus of multimodal documents within a single genre: an extensively annotated corpus of tourist brochures produced between 1967-2008. The book provides multimodal discourse analysts with methodological tools to draw empirically-based conclusions about multimodal documents, and will be a valuable resource for researchers planning to develop and study multimodal corpora.

The first systematic, corpus-based and theoretically rigorous approach to the description and analysis of multimodal documents. Drawing on academic research and the experience of designers and production teams, Bateman uses linguistically-based analysis to show how different modes of expression together make up a document with a recognisable genre.

A first in multimodal/multisemiotic discourse studies this collection of original articles by international scholars focuses primarily on texts from non-English speaking contexts. The illuminating insights enhance our understanding of how language and other semiotic resources construe specific cultural and social concerns.

Multimodal Approaches to Media Discourses brings together contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars on corpus-assisted analyses of multimodal data on austerity discourses in the United Kingdom, which extend and expand on the understanding of austerity but also of the methodologies used to analyse multimodal corpora. The volume demonstrates how the austerity measures introduced in response to global economic and financial crises in recent years can be viewed as being more complexly layered than they appear, not simply reduced to their connections to spending cuts and fiscal debt. The book employs an innovative methodological approach, in which established and emerging scholars from linguistics and computational and social sciences critically reflect on the exact same set of data – multimodal texts and articles from The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph from 2010 to 2016. This framework allows for the exploration of the role of the media in mediating the public’s assessment of austerity and the ideas, actors, emotions, geographies and broader material context which contribute to such perceptions. In so doing, the volume also offers unique insights into systematic analyses to multimodal data which may be applied to other topics and connected with other disciplines. Enhancing our awareness and assessment of austerity in public discourse and of the methodologies to study it, this book is key reading for students and researchers in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, multimodality, and those working at the intersection of these fields.

This innovative collection builds on current multimodal research to showcase image-centric practices in contemporary media, unpacking the increasing extent to which the visual plays a principal role in modern day communication. The volume begins by providing a concise overview of the history and development of multimodal research with respect to image-centricity, with successive chapters looking at how image-centricity emerges over time, unfolds in relation to language and other features in global design strategies. Bringing together contributions from both established and emerging researchers in multimodality and social semiotics, the book presents case studies on a variety of image-centric genres and domains, including magazines, advertising discourse, multimedia storytelling, and social media platforms. The aims of the book are, to interrogate the new multimodal genres, relations, forms of analysis, and methods of production that emerge from a greater reliance on visual components. Refining and broadening current understandings of image-centricity in today’s media sphere, this collection will be of particular interest to scholars and students in multimodality, social semiotics, applied linguistics, language and media, and discourse analysis.

This innovative work introduces the interdisciplinary field of research of kinesemiotics, offering a new adaptable model and means of analysis for understanding forms of movement-based communication, such as dance, that use a codified language shared by a community of users. It begins with a theoretical overview and review of existing literature on the main approaches to movement-based communication, specifically dance, which underpin kinesemiotics as an area of study. It reaffirms previous work which established dance as a form of embodied communication in that it encompasses a wide range of semiotic styles and forms shared by communities of "speakers." In collaboration with the English National Ballet, Maiorani employs the genre of ballet as a means through which to understand and analyse some of the key concepts of kinesemiotics, mainly that of space as a semiotic dimension and "motivated movement," or movement with meaning. Supported by automated movement recognition tools from the fields of bio-robotics engineering and computer science, Maiorani argues for ballet’s capacity, when movements are projected into meaningful space, to extend beyond sequences of physical movements to become a meaning making practice. Kinesemiotics advances interdisciplinary research in the fields of social semiotics, media and communication, multimodality, linguistics, and performance studies and will be of particular interest to students and scholars in these areas.