What are multimodal texts? How can we transcribe and analyze them? How can multimedia and internet help us in multimodal discourse analysis? What postproduction and authoring skills are needed to analyze a multimodal text or to develop a corpus of multimodal texts? 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? These questions arise because the ways in which individuals, institutions, communities and cultures interact with each other across diverse space-time scales are being changed by the combined resources of interactive multimedia and the internet. 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.

Paul J. Thibault is Professor of Linguistics and Media Communication, Agder University College, Kristiansand, Norway.