Volume 6, Issue 1 -

This article provides a preliminary answer to exactly why video-conferencing is evaluated as better than traditional telephony for long-distance familial interaction by allocating analytical attention to the showing of objects during interaction. While it is acknowledged that ‘showing’ constitutes an interactive move less contingent on linguistic maturation, more importantly, the showing of objects, artefacts or entities during video-conferencing interactions exemplifies an agentive and volitional production of identity elements on behalf of young children. Thus, while some have pointed to shortcomings of conversation-like activities mediated by video-conferencing in favour for more activity-driven tasks, I make a case for drawing upon pre-existing components of the material surround as a means to more comprehensively and longitudinally engage younger children in video-conferencing interaction.

The visual narratives of comics involve complex multimodal interactions between written language and the visual language of images, where one or the other may guide the meaning and/or narrative structure. We investigated this interaction in a corpus analysis across eight decades of American superhero comics (1940–2010s). No change across publication date was found for multimodal interactions that weighted meaning towards text or across both text and images, where narrative structures were present across images. However, we found an increase over time of narrative sequences with meaning weighted to the visuals, and an increase of sequences without text at all. These changes coincided with an overall reduction in the number of words per panel, a shift towards panel framing with single characters and close-ups rather than whole scenes, and an increase in shifts between temporal states between panels. These findings suggest that storytelling has shifted towards investing more information in the images, along with an increasing complexity and maturity of the visual narrative structures. This has shifted American comics from being textual stories with illustrations to being visual narratives that use text.

This paper is part of a larger scale project where I explore the structure of academic lecture. The focus of the study here presented is to investigate the structure and organization of a university lecture through the introduction of new topics. One of the tools traditionally referred to as an organizer of discourse is metadiscourse (Crismore et al. 1993. Metadiscourse in persuasive writing: A study of texts written by American and Finnish university students. Written Communication, 10:39–71; Vande Kopple. 1985. Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition and Communication, 36(1):82–93). Although metadiscourse has been studied from a wide range of perspectives (Hyland. 2005. Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. London, England: Continuum), these analyses have most of the time been conducted from a purely linguistic point of view and neither the speaker as a social actor nor metadiscourse as part of a multimodal interaction are taken into account. That being so, the aim of this study is to explore the role played by introducing topic metadiscourse (Ädel. 2010. Just to give you kind of a map of where we are going: a taxonomy of metadiscourse in spoken and written academic English. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 9(2):69–97) from a multimodal perspective as it is being used within a lecture. In order to obtain a holistic account on how topics are introduced and the role of metadiscourse within the set of actions performed by the speaker in interaction, I make use of the tools provided by Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis (Norris. 2004. Analyzing multimodal interaction. A methodological framework. New York: Routledge; 2011. Indentity in (Inter)Action. Introducing multimodal interaction analysis. Göttingen: De Gruyter Mouton). The main analysis is carried out on two excerpts where new topics are being introduced which come from a lecture on African-American History belonging to Yale University’s opencourseware. Through the production of verbal and multimodal transcripts, this paper demonstrates how the lecturer structures the class before he verbally utters metadiscursive expressions and the minor significance that these instances play in the lecturer’s broad organization of the lecture, as metadiscourse is predominantly performed as a background task.

The goal of this paper is to present a multimodal framework for analysing a particular dimension of space in moving images, namely, narrativised space . In particular, this paper unravels how the framework offers effective methods for addressing empirical questions which have been extensively debated in recent decades in the studies of moving images such as transmediality and narrative complexity. To achieve this end, I first provide a specific definition of the dimension of narrativised space and move on to discuss what essential properties of narrativised space might support viewers’ meaning interpretation paths. This leads to a more fine-grained categorisation of features which function so as to lead the viewers’ navigational routes within and across different narrative levels and event spaces. Through applying the framework to analysing Brian De Palma’s war film Redacted (2007) and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2003), this paper will show the analytical strength of the proposed methods and the potential of the framework for addressing corpus-based empirical questions with regard to puzzle films and transmedial comparison.