What are multimodal texts? How can we transcribe and analyse them? How can multimedia and internet help us in multimodal discourse analysis? What postproduction and authoring skills are needed to analyse a multimodal text or to develop a corpus of multimodal texts? How does integrating multimedia meaning-making resources into hypertext multiply our meaning-making potential? How does the study of language relate to multimodality and multimedia, in particular in the e-learning age? How, and to what extent, will multimodal discourse analysis re-shape linguistics?
In its attempt to provide answers to the questions raised above, and many others, this book proposes concrete solutions to the problems of multimodal text analysis and transcription of printed texts, websites and film. As such, it constitutes a much needed course in multimodal text transcription and analysis. It also suggests ways in which multimodal discourse analysis can help both educators and students understand how meaning is made in the e-learning environments that now play such an important role in our lives. As befits a coursebook, the individual chapters of the book are carefully organised in such a way as to provide a step-by-step progression in theoretical and descriptive complexity.