“And this is the view from outside my window”: On text and image interplay in university website blogs

Abstract

The paper focuses on the institutional website as a complex genre with a relatively discontinuous inner structure, which is, however, coherent and cohesive, and unified by a common communication goal(s). The website is viewed as a discourse colony consisting of independent but related components realized in an array of subgenres, some of which are typical of the academic/institutional environment while others come from different discourse domains and are employed as embedded genres. The paper focuses on the blog as an embedded genre, its forms and functions within university websites, and particularly on its potentially multimodal character, i.e. the interplay of the verbal content of the blog and the non-verbal elements, esp. photographs, which co-create the producer's message to the addressee. Drawing upon the recently developed field of multimodal discourse analysis within Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly Martinec and Salway's model, the paper explores the level to which the modes are integrated and the ways they contribute to meaningmaking in the genre.

Towards a Multimodal Hermeneutic Model: The case of Uber-Blog-mediated advertising discourse order of ‘Saudization’

“…Crucially, the literature relevant to purely institutional blogging with promotional interest seems to be scarcer than that associated with personal, academic, and scientific blogs. One representative study of the former type of research is offered by Tomášková (2017), with a focus on the sub-genre of university-website blogs. The study has methodologically followed multimodal discourse analysis to demonstrate how institutional blogging amounts to being an embedded sub-genre whose interplay of text-image forms/functions is internalized in university websites.…”

Ideational Meaning and Morality in the Internet Memes of 9gag about the Interaction between Teacher and Students

“…This analysis explains the relation between verbal and visual modes to obtain the logical and relevant meaning of both modes. According to Tomášková (2017), the relations of text-images often grow into a solid and complex network that connects one or two streams of text, namely mainstream texts and sequences of texts that comment on images, and series of images, and develop complex texts into visual narratives. The results of the inter-semiotic relations analysis yielded two findings.…”

Literature and Culture

“…The reshaping of institutional discourse and the change in its rhetoric -accompanied by a steady decline in the use of the verbal mode as well as the new emerging literacies enhanced by the World Wide Web -have inspired extensive research into multimodal features (both visual and verbal) and their role in meaning-making (Kress 2010;Kress & van Leeuwen 2006) as well as analytical methods for the description of multimodal elements (Bateman 2008, extended by Hiippala 2013Thibault & Baldry 2006) and their interplay in both promotional and institutional discourse (Francesconi 2014;Tomášková 2015Tomášková , 2017. The research aim of the present article is therefore to expand the multimodal analysis into the novel genre of theatre websites and to explore the opportunities and constraints of applying models which were originally created for static printed documents.…”