Online leadership discourse in higher education: A digital multimodal discourse perspective

Abstract

As leadership discourses in higher education are increasingly being mediated online, texts previously reserved for staff are now being made available in the public domain. As such, these texts become accessible for study, critique and evaluation. Additionally, discourses previously confined to the written domain are now increasingly multimodal. Thus, an approach is required that is capable of relating detailed, complex multimodal discourse analyses to broader sociocultural perspectives to account for the complex meaning-making practices that operate in online leadership discourses. For this purpose, a digital multimodal discourse approach is proposed and illustrated via a smallscale case study of the online leadership discourse of an Australian university. The analysis of two short video texts demonstrates how a digital multimodal discourse perspective facilitates the identification of key multimodal systems used for meaning-making in online communication, how meaning arises through combinations of semiotic choices (not individual choices), and how the results of multimodal discourse analysis using digital technology can reveal larger sociocultural patterns -in this case, divergent leadership styles and approaches as reflected in online discourse, at a time of immense change within the higher education sector.

A Digital Mixed Methods Research Design: Integrating Multimodal Analysis With Data Mining and Information Visualization for Big Data Analytics

“…The analyses of the two multimodal texts displayed in Figure 3, which shows a screenshot of a university website 7 ( Figure 3a) and a university promotional video 8 (Figure 3b), have been undertaken using Multimodal Analysis Image and Multimodal Analysis Video software (Tan, Smith, & O'Halloran, 2015). In Figure 3a, the website has been manually annotated by creating overlays (in the form of rectangles, circles, polygons, lines, or pins) on the image and assigning choices from various system networks (i.e., which contain various options) to those overlays.…”

“…These data are directly related to the media (in terms of spatial coordinates for text and image files and time stamps for video files), permitting patterns and trends to be revealed. For example, analyses of the Curtin University website, as depicted in Figure 3a, reveal that brand communications for students have shifted over time from a narrow focus on certain domains of experiential meaning (e.g., courses, regulations) to domains that include lifestyle, the student experience, employment, and future prospects in an interactive environment (Tan et al, 2015).…”

Intersemiotic Translation as Resemiotisation: A Multimodal Perspective

“…state transition diagrams) have been used in order to capture semantic patterns in multimodal data which otherwise would not have been easily detected (e.g. O'Halloran, Marissa and Tan 2014; O'Halloran, Tan and Marissa 2015a;Tan, Smith & O'Halloran 2015). hese modelling and visualisation techniques have only been applied to a limited number of multimodal texts, however.…”

Toward a Theoretical Framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Criminal Courtroom Discourses

“…As is central to social semiotic theory, each instance of text involves three strands of meaning simultaneously: a. experiential and logical meaning, which interprets our experience of the world and the logical relations herein; b. interpersonal meaning, which focuses on negotiation of social relations and expression of attitudes; c. textual or compositional meaning, which pertains to coherence of messages and their relevance to the context. [12]…”