In the context of rapid theoretical development in multimodal discourse analysis, and of its growing interdisciplinary influence, it is crucial that those working in the field give due consideration to methodological rigour. The corpus-based approach described here offers a means of addressing some key methodological issues. Firstly, this approach provides a check on over- and under-interpretation and also reveals a more nuanced picture of data about specific genres than might be derived from even the closest observation of individual instances. Thus it helps avoid pitfalls associated with relying on hand-picked examples. Secondly, the semi-automated implementation of a multilayered annotation scheme, which separates the representation of layout from rhetorical structure, supports the empirical investigation of a variety of research questions, while minimizing the influence of the analyst on the data by delaying interpretation insofar as possible until it becomes unavoidable. This article illustrates the corpus-based approach through a contrastive case study of one very visual genre, product packaging, with data taken from two locales, Taiwan and the UK. In so doing, issues of the selection of texts for inclusion and corpus design are addressed and the principles and practicalities involved in data preparation are discussed. Consideration is also given to the types of question which such an approach enables us to explore. In addition, since the data analyzed here are drawn from different languages and cultures, the present study sheds light on some issues of interest from the perspective of localization. Finally, some benefits of the approach are suggested, among which not least is that a stronger basis for the critique of designs in turn supports identification of opportunities for their improvement. This is not possible when the analysis is itself circular.
This paper presents a multimodal corpus of comparable pack messages and the concordancer that has been built to query it. The design of the corpus and its annotation is introduced. This is followed by a description of the concordancer's interface, implementation and concordance display. Finally, some ideas for future work are outlined.
Pattern libraries, originating in architecture, are a common way to share design solutions in interaction design and software engineering. Our aim in this paper is to consider patterns as a way of describing commonly-occurring document design solutions to particular problems, from two points of view. First, we are interested in their use as exemplars for designers to follow, and second, we suggest them as a means of understanding linguistic and graphical data for their organization into corpora that will facilitate descriptive work. We discuss the use of patterns across a range of disciplines before suggesting the need to place patterns in the context of genres, with each potentially belonging to a “home genre” in which it originates and to which it makes an implicit intertextual reference intended to produce a particular reader response in the form of a reading strategy or interpretative stance. We consider some conceptual and technical issues involved in the descriptive study of patterns in naturally-occurring documents, including the challenges involved in building a document corpus
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