Mediation and Multimodal Meaning Making in Digital Environments Routledge Studies in Multimodality Series

This collection explores the mediation of a wide range of processes, texts, and practices in contemporary digital environments through the lens of a multimodal theory of communication.

Bringing together contributions from renowned scholars in the field, the book builds on the notion that any form of digital communication inherently presents a rich combination of different semiotic modes and resources as a jumping-off point from which to critically reflect on digital mediation from three different perspectives. The first section looks at social and semiotic practices and the implications of their mediation on artistic production, cultural heritage, and commerce. The second part of the volume focuses on dynamics of awareness, cognition, and identity formation in participants to digitally-mediated communicative processes. The book?s final section considers the impact of mediation on shaping new and different types of textualities and genres in digital spaces.

The book will be of particular interest to scholars, researchers and students in multimodality, digital communication, social semiotics, and media studies.

The Digital Mediation of Knowledge, Representations and Practices through the Lenses of a Multimodal Theory of Communication

Ilaria Moschini, Maria Grazia Sindoni

Section A. The Digital Mediation of Practices

1. Art as Research into Semiotic Technology. The Case of David Hockney’s Digital Art

Theo van Leeuwen, Christian Mosbæk Johannessen

2. What Happened to the Artist? Representation and Positioning in Art Museum Websites

Jennifer Blunden

3. "A War to End All Wars": Re-enacting and Re-embodying War Discourse. A Multimodal Analysis of Agency at WWI Galleries

Mariavita Cambria

4. Website Interactivity as Representations of Social Actions? Developing a Social Semiotic Discourse Approach to Interaction Design

Søren Vigild Poulsen

Section B. Awareness, Identities and Cognition in Digital Mediation

5. Interrelation: Gaze and Multimodal Ensembles

Jarret Geenen, Jesse Pirini

6. "I’m So Confused!". Social Reading Practices and Their Semiotic Affordances on Goodreads

Susanne Reichl, Miriam Mayrhofer and Christina Schuster

7. Interactivity and Multimodal Cohesion in Digital Fairy Tales

Victoria Yefymenko

8. A Look Back at Early Economics Blogs: a Multimodal Analysis of Indexicality and Identity Construction

Franca Poppi

Section C. The Digital Mediation of Texts and Genres

9. Multimodality and Genre Evolution. A Decade-by-decade Approach to Online Video Genre Analysis

Anthony Baldry

10. Video Abstracts: Methodological Reflections When Analyzing a Nascent Genre and its Associated Scientific Community

Francesca Coccetta

11. Healthy Pic Hashtagging in Twitter: the Role of Infographics in #AntibioticGuardian

Anna Franca Plastina

12. Towards a Framework for Video Mediated "Cooper-action". Discourse Practices, Bonding and Distance in Synchronous and Asynchronous Digital Video Spaces

Maria Grazia Sindoni, Ilaria Moschini

Ilaria Moschini, PhD, is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics and Translation in the Department of Education, Languages, Intercultures, Literatures and Psychology at the University of Florence, Italy. Her main research interests are digital media language and political discourse that she investigates adopting a critical multimodal approach.

Maria Grazia Sindoni, PhD, is Professor of English Linguistics and Translation in the Department of Ancient and Modern Civilizations at the University of Messina, Italy. Her main interests include multimodal discourse studies, systemic-functional grammar, applied linguistics and video-mediated communication.