Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis: A Multimodal Toolkit and Coursebook(Equinox Textbooks and Surveys in Linguistics)

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.

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Jay Lemke Preface Chapter 1: Introduction: multimodal texts and genres Chapter 2: The printed page Chapter 3: The web page Chapter 4. Film texts and genres Appendix 1 Appendix 2 References

About the Author :
Anthony Baldry is Associate Professor in English Linguistics, Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, University of Pavia. He recently edited a book of essays: Multimodality and Multimediality in the Distance Learning Age (2000). Paul J. Thibault is Associate Professor in English linguistics in the University of Venice. He is the author of a number of books including Language and Interaction: Discussing John J. Gumperz, edited with Susan Eerdmans and Carlo Prevignano (Benjamins, 2003).

Review :
It is difficult to bring out the full semiotic potential of multimodal texts in the linear structure of a book, but Baldry and Thibault's book succeeds magnificently. ...The potential audience for this book and course is wide, spanning advanced undergraduates, lecturers and researchers in linguistics, media studies and related field, and media professionals: each group wil come away with new insights.' Baal News, Autumn 2007 'Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis is an indispensable resource for the analysis and interpretation of multimodal texts as they unfold through time; the book develops a rich array of practical, theoretically principled and computationally enabled tools for deconstructing the interaction of verbiage, image and sound across registers including work on cartoons, web pages, textbooks and film. This is the single most important contribution to multimodal discourse analysis since O’Toole’s The Language of Displayed Art and Kress & van Leeuwen's Reading Images created the field. James R. Martin, Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney 'After reading Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis you will never look at texts monomodally, i.e. simply as texts, any longer. This book offers an excellent and comprehensive view and understanding of the ways our communication has changed in the age of Internet and other media and offers an extensive toolbox for analysing these integrated meanings in printed pages, web pages and films. The book encourages students and researchers as regards interdisciplinarity which is of vital importance when attempting to understand the complex communicative procedures used in today’s technological world. ' Eija Ventola, Professor of English Philology, University of Helsinki 'Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis is a book that many of us have been looking for: a readable "how to" manual for analyzing images, websites, video and film, cartoons, magazine layouts, advertisements, textbooks, television programs, and computer games. Paul Thibault and Anthony Baldry strike just the right balance between rich examples and accessible explanations of the concepts that lie behind their practical methods. This book is, however, far more than a "how to" manual: it is a comprehensive introduction to the field of multimedia analysis.' from the Foreword by Professor Jay Lemke, University of Michigan