Multimodal discourse on online newspaper home pages: A social-semiotic perspective

In a short space of time, online newspapers have emerged to play an important role in the institutional construction of ‘news’ and the mass mediation of information. The home pages of online newspapers feature short verbal texts, and communicate using language, image, layout, colour, and other semiotic resources: they communicate multimodally. This thesis examines the multimodal discourse of three English-language online newspapers: the Bangkok Post (Thailand), the English-language edition (translated from Chinese) of the People’s Daily (China), and the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). Between February, 2002 and April, 2006, three data collections were made (February-April, 2002; September-November, 2005; January-April, 2006) using a five-day ‘constructed week’ method. The main corpus was 15 home pages from each newspaper (five per collection per newspaper), but the total corpus (including other pages from each newspaper) was 603 web pages. Two senior editors (one each from the Bangkok Post and the Sydney Morning Herald) were interviewed. The multimodal discourse of the home pages was analysed using tools from Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA), and a ‘visual grammar’ of home pages building on the work of Kress & van Leeuwen (1996) was developed. In addition, a rank scale for online newspapers was proposed, and limitations of applying the tool of rank scale to this corpus were identified. An emerging genre - the headline-plus-lead-plus-hyperlink newsbite - was identified, and the design of newsbites on the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald and the evolution of their design over time was analysed. The use of images on the home pages in the corpus was analysed, and the increasing use of thumbnail images in the Sydney Morning Herald - particularly close-up thumbnails of faces - was investigated in further depth. The visual design of online newspaper home pages and the news texts appearing on them are an evolution of print news genres and their design practices. Newsbites and headline-only newsbits are verbally short, so the authors of newspaper home pages are forced to rely increasingly on visual communication in order to position stories and readers, and to communicate the values of the news institution on the home page as mediated by the screen. Thumbnail images are evolving as a new form of punctuation on some home pages, and this may be a short-lived, or an emerging historical trend in the development of punctuation, at least in online environments. Overall, online newspaper home pages are tending towards shorter texts, which communicate in novel ways. These short texts cannot communicate the values and ideology of news institutions in the way that extended verbal texts have done for centuries, yet this function of news texts remains important to the construction and maintenance of a readership, and therefore crucial to the home page of a newspaper. As a result, news institutions express values visually in their design of newspaper home pages. As readers become familiar with the meanings of online news design, they become adept at reading and understanding short stories within these multimodally-construed frames of reference. Ideology is increasingly fragmented on shorter timescales, but expressed over longer timescales in a hypermedia environment that affords and extends many of the pre-existing multimodal features of print newspaper discourse

Multimodal discourse on online newspaper home pages: A social-semiotic perspective

In a short space of time, online newspapers have emerged to play an important role in the institutional construction of ‘news’ and the mass mediation of information. The home pages of online newspapers feature short verbal texts, and communicate using language, image, layout, colour, and other semiotic resources: they communicate multimodally. This thesis examines the multimodal discourse of three English-language online newspapers: the Bangkok Post (Thailand), the English-language edition (translated from Chinese) of the People’s Daily (China), and the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). Between February, 2002 and April, 2006, three data collections were made (February-April, 2002; September-November, 2005; January-April, 2006) using a five-day ‘constructed week’ method. The main corpus was 15 home pages from each newspaper (five per collection per newspaper), but the total corpus (including other pages from each newspaper) was 603 web pages. Two senior editors (one each from the Bangkok Post and the Sydney Morning Herald) were interviewed. The multimodal discourse of the home pages was analysed using tools from Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA), and a ‘visual grammar’ of home pages building on the work of Kress & van Leeuwen (1996) was developed. In addition, a rank scale for online newspapers was proposed, and limitations of applying the tool of rank scale to this corpus were identified. An emerging genre - the headline-plus-lead-plus-hyperlink newsbite - was identified, and the design of newsbites on the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald and the evolution of their design over time was analysed. The use of images on the home pages in the corpus was analysed, and the increasing use of thumbnail images in the Sydney Morning Herald - particularly close-up thumbnails of faces - was investigated in further depth. The visual design of online newspaper home pages and the news texts appearing on them are an evolution of print news genres and their design practices. Newsbites and headline-only newsbits are verbally short, so the authors of newspaper home pages are forced to rely increasingly on visual communication in order to position stories and readers, and to communicate the values of the news institution on the home page as mediated by the screen. Thumbnail images are evolving as a new form of punctuation on some home pages, and this may be a short-lived, or an emerging historical trend in the development of punctuation, at least in online environments. Overall, online newspaper home pages are tending towards shorter texts, which communicate in novel ways. These short texts cannot communicate the values and ideology of news institutions in the way that extended verbal texts have done for centuries, yet this function of news texts remains important to the construction and maintenance of a readership, and therefore crucial to the home page of a newspaper. As a result, news institutions express values visually in their design of newspaper home pages. As readers become familiar with the meanings of online news design, they become adept at reading and understanding short stories within these multimodally-construed frames of reference. Ideology is increasingly fragmented on shorter timescales, but expressed over longer timescales in a hypermedia environment that affords and extends many of the pre-existing multimodal features of print newspaper discourse

TOWARD A VISUAL PAIDEIA: VISUAL RHETORIC IN UNDERGRADUATE WRITING PROGRAMS

New media and digital texts of the twenty-first century are generally characterized as rich and dynamic combinations of verbal, visual, and aural elements. Instruction in visual rhetoric in the writing classroom, however, has tended to focus on analysis with far less emphasis on teaching students how to produce multimodal texts. Drawing upon classical rhetorical theory, I propose the development of a visual paideia grounded in the educational goals of the Greco-Roman paideia to incorporate richly balanced instruction in both analysis and production of visual-dominant texts. I approach the development of a visual paideia via examining the current state of visual theory and practice in academic instructional culture. I survey extant theories of visual texts to argue that theories of graphic design, semiotics, and visual culture provide the rich framework needed to inform a visual paideia. I then conduct a writing program and textbook survey to tease out pedagogical practices. Finally, I propose the development of a collection of visual topoi or commonplaces that can be used as a powerful tool of invention in the creation of visual-dominant texts as I demonstrate through several examples of student work

Living Knowledge

Diversity, especially manifested in language and knowledge, is a function of local goals, needs, competences, beliefs, culture, opinions and personal experience. The Living Knowledge project considers diversity as an asset rather than a problem. With the project, foundational ideas emerged from the synergic contribution of different disciplines, methodologies (with which many partners were previously unfamiliar) and technologies flowed in concrete diversity-aware applications such as the Future Predictor and the Media Content Analyser providing users with better structured information while coping with Web scale complexities. The key notions of diversity, fact, opinion and bias have been defined in relation to three methodologies: Media Content Analysis (MCA) which operates from a social sciences perspective; Multimodal Genre Analysis (MGA) which operates from a semiotic perspective and Facet Analysis (FA) which operates from a knowledge representation and organization perspective. A conceptual architecture that pulls all of them together has become the core of the tools for automatic extraction and the way they interact. In particular, the conceptual architecture has been implemented with the Media Content Analyser application. The scientific and technological results obtained are described in the following

ITALY: WEB TOURISM PROMOTION

Tourism, an important industry with a significant social and cultural dimensions, provides interesting stimuli for the study of communication, particularly in the search for adequate tools for persuading potential clients. Since the internet is an essential tool for self-promotion nowadays, specialists examine how tourist destinations are presented in different types of digital texts such as official tourism websites, which combine the informative function of guidebooks with the promotional function of brochures and leaflets. The purpose of this study is to analyse the rhetorical strategies used on the official homepages of nine Italian regions to catch the eye of potential clients and create an identity for a particular region as a tourist destination. Il turismo, industria importante che ha una significativa dimensione sociale e culturale, costituisce un’area che fornisce stimoli interessanti per lo studio della comunicazione, in particolare nella ricerca di strumenti adeguati a persuadere potenziali clienti. Dal momento che oggi Internet è uno strumento essenziale per l’auto-promozione, molti specialisti si sono dedicati allo studio di come le destinazioni turistiche sono presentate in diversi tipi di testi digitali quali, ad esempio, i siti turistici ufficiali, che combinano la funzione informativa delle guide con quella promozionale di opuscoli e volantini. Scopo di questo studio è analizzare le strategie retoriche utilizzate nelle homepage ufficiali di nove regioni italiane per catturare l’attenzione dei potenziali clienti e per caratterizzare la regione come destinazione turistica

IS AN IMAGE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS? NET REPRESENTATIONS OF THE BOOK INDUSTRY

[EN] This study focuses on the book industry homepage, a digital genre which has emerged as a result of the many multimedia and technical capabilities of the online system. Traditionally, publishing firms have made use of catalogues, leaflets and brochures for information and self-promotion. With the advent of the Internet, however, these traditional methods have been gradually transferred to the digital context, which propitiates the evolution of existing genres and the emergence of new ones, the so-called cybergenres. By means of the homepage, publishing companies represent themselves and project their image on the new computer environment using a wide range of devices, such as icons, animated and non-animated images, and links, which make up the visual rhetoric of the genre. Nonetheless, the verbal element still plays a crucial role in the realisation of the promotional purpose of the genre, especially in the company's profile section.http://doi.org/10.4995/rlyla.2006.681Gea Valor, ML. (2006). IS AN IMAGE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS? NET REPRESENTATIONS OF THE BOOK INDUSTRY. Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas. 1. doi:10.4995/rlyla.2006.681.SWORD1Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman.Bhatia, V. K. (2004). Worlds of Written Discourse. A Genre-Based View. London & New York: Continuum.Breure, L. (2001). "Development of the genre concept." Document in: http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/leen/GenreDev/GenreDevelopment.htm [access date: 23.10.2005]Crowston, K. and M. Williams (1997). "Reproduced and emergent genres of communication on the World-Wide Web," in R. H. Sprague (ed.) Proceedings of the 30th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences(HICSS '97). Maui, Hawaii, VI,30-39. Document in: http://crowston.syr.edu/papers/genres-journal.html [access date: 23.10.2005] https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.1997.665482Dillon, A. and B. Gushrowski (2000). "Genres and the Web: Is the personal home page the first unique digital genre?" Journal of the American Society of Information Science51.2: 202-205. Document in: http://memex.lib.indiana.edu/adillon/genre.html. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(2000)51:23.0.CO;2-RFernández Sánchez, C. (2002). "E-bank web sites: an evolving cybergenre," in S. Posteguillo, E. Ortells, J. R. Palmer, A. Bolaños and A. Alcina (eds.) Internet in Linguistics, Translation and Literary Studies. Castelló: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I: 291-302.Fortanet, I., J. C. Palmer and S. Posteguillo (1999). "The emergence of a new genre: advertising on the Internet (netvertising)." Hermes, Journal of Linguistics23, 93-113.Gea Valor, M. L. (2005). "Advertising books: a linguistic analysis of blurbs." Ibérica, 10, 41-62.Posteguillo, S. (2003). Netlinguistics: Language, Discourse and Ideology in Internet. Castelló: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I.Posteguillo, S. and N. Edo (2005). "The ceramic industrial community through its representation in traditional and digital genres." Proceedings of the 4th AELFE International Conference, 83-94.Regier, W. (1998). "Scholarly press websites." The Journal of Electronic Publishing4: 1.Document in: http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/regier.html [access date: 17.10.2005] https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0004.108Ruiz, N. (2003). "The university homepage: definition and evolution from a generic perspective," in I. Fortanet, J. C. Palmer and S. Posteguillo (eds.) Linguistic Studies in Academic and Professional English. Castelló: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I, 275-298.Shepherd, M. and C. Watters (1998). "The evolution of cybergenres," in R. H. Sprague (ed.) Proceedings of the 31st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS '98). Los Alamitos, CA, IEEE-Computer Society, 97-109. https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.1998.651688Shepherd, M. and C. Watters (1999). "The functionality attribute of cybergenres," in R. H.Sprague (ed.) Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS '99). Los Alamitos, CA, IEEE-Computer Society. https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.1999.772650Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis. English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Document in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki [access date: 9.11.2005]

Croatian tourism web site as text type

The aim of this paper is to present the web site as a new form of the tourist supply. The web sites, as a new text form, show special features when compared with those of conventional, non-electronic texts. The paper examines diverse aspects of web sites created by the tourism industry, as well as of their layout and linguistic features. The language of tourism is also analyzed on the corpus of the Croatian tourism web site, i.e. on the website of the Zagreb Tourist Board. The results of this analysis will show the tendencies in the creation of the Croatian tourism web sites

Learning design approaches for personalised and non-personalised e-learling systems

Recognizing the powerful role that technology plays in the lives of people, researchers are increasingly focusing on the most effective uses of technology to support learning and teaching. Technology enhanced learning (TEL) has the potential to support and transform students’ learning and allows them to choose when, where and how to learn. This paper describes two different approaches for the design of personalised and non-personalised online learning environments, which have been developed to investigate whether personalised e-learning is more efficient than non-personalised e-learning, and discuss some of the student’s experiences and assessment test results based on experiments conducted so far