Abstract
After several decades of development, multimodality is now growing into its maturity and incorporating a range of new perspectives. This volume, the 19th addition to the Routledge Studies in Multimodality series (edited by Kay O’Halloran), applies Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) to multimodality to unveil the ideology underlying social practices, thereby deepening our understanding of multimodality in communication. The 12 chapters of this volume discuss visual elements along with other meaning-making resources in a variety of contexts. The critical study of these resources has shed considerable light on how and why we legitimate social practices in communication (Machin, 2013). This book is also a dedication to Professor Theo van Leeuwen, who has made a significant contribution to multimodality and social semiotics, and has inspired a great deal of interdisciplinary research in those fields.
The collection can be divided into three parts. Part One comprises the first three chapters and sets the key for the rest of the book by summarizing Professor van Leeuwen’s academic contribution and presenting his collaboration with other scholars (Gunther Kress and Ruth Wodak).
The contributors in the next two parts follow this key and pay tribute to Professor van Leeuwen through their innovative application of social semiotics and multimodality. The five chapters in Part Two are concerned with visual communication and various other semiotic resources, such as touch and sound. Two of the five chapters discuss a topic usually taken for granted: truth status in visual representation. In Chapter Four, Philip Bell pays tribute to Reading Images by complementing semiotic analysis with epistemology; his analysis demonstrates that, in visual communication, truth status is a vital factor influencing the representation of race. In Chapter Five, Staffan Selander develops the concept of context by putting forward an epistemic context, and argues the value of knowledge aspects in understanding the (visual) signs produced in unfamiliar contexts.
Part Three consists of the final four chapters, and explores several key concepts in social semiotics, such as New Writing, recontextualization, and transformation, in the contexts of movies, fitness, the economy, and politics. Chapter Twelve will be particularly appealing to readers of Visual Communication as, in this chapter, Kay O’Halloran, Sabine Tan, Peter Wignell and Rebecca Lange present us with a pilot study for their ambitious project that aims to integrate multimodal discourse analysis with big data analytics and machine learning. With the aid of software such as the Multimodal Analysis Visualization app and TinEye, the authors visualize the outcome of this research and examine the ways in which images are recontextualized in the ISIS magazine Dabiq. This visualization is eye-catching and extremely impressive.
The collection is rounded off with a visual essay consisting primarily of photographs taken and edited by the author Morten Boeriis himself. Boeriis uses these images to fully apply the grammar of visual design, manipulating semiotic resources such as frontal planes, vertical and horizontal viewpoints, viewpoint distance, and so on.
The success of this well-edited volume is three-fold. Its most substantial contribution lies in its demonstration that multimodality and CDS are mutually beneficial; CDS provides insights into the ideologies underlying our social practices, while multimodality expands CDS with its focus on a variety of semiotic resources. The collection also makes an important contribution to social semiotics, with its focus on key concepts of social semiotics, their development, and their applications in various contexts and disciplines, thus showing the vitality of social semiotics. Another creditable point, and one of particular interest to readers of this journal, is that this volume discusses various aspects of visual communication, including the visual representation of truth, the ways in which visual elements, language and sound combine to make meaning, and graphic design. In short, perspectives from CDS revitalize multimodality, which thereby becomes better equipped to critically examine visual elements in communication and contemporary society, where multiple modes of communication are increasingly assisted by new technologies.
There is also room for improvement, however. An interesting dimension might be added, for instance, if the actors utilizing semiotic resources were also studied. This could be remedied by employing the ethnographic method. Another, admittedly minor, point is that the size of some of the figures in Chapter Twelve might frustrate some readers, and ought to be enlarged.
There are a few misprints to report: both ‘Raqiaya’ (p. 51) and ‘Ruquaia’ (p. 218) should be spelled ‘Ruqaiya’; and in Chapter 9, the reference to ‘Tseng, 2017’ (p. 145) actually refers to ‘Tseng, forthcoming’ (p. 136), as confirmed by the author herself via email. However, these do not impair the academic value of this volume.
In a nutshell, this book brings considerable depth to the study of multimodality and provides an excellent showcase of the type of interdisciplinary research inspired by Professor van Leeuwen. With its rich content, fine-grained analysis, multiple contexts and new perspectives, the volume will be a useful reference for discourse analysts interested in visual communication, multimodality and critical studies. Its interdisciplinary nature would also make the book a valuable resource for economic professionals and film directors.