Anthony Baldry

Multimodal Corpus Based Approach to Website Analysis Anthony Baldry

What should a theoretical model for website analysis look like? What can detailed comparative corpus-based semiotic analysis teach us about the trends, goals and image-promotion strategies of major institutions such as the world?s leading universities? What special targeting is given towards specific communities: language and other minorities, the needs of women, mature students and so on? What regional differences exist in websites between the three major world areas of America, Europe and Asia/Pacific? The aim of the book is to present a theoretical and applicative approach to corpus-based multimodal analysis of website texts. The approach is demonstrated through the analysis of websites using the MCA multimodal concordancing and corpus construction system. The book is based on a corpus of University websites that have been converted into a film format. The book raises issues about research into website analysis from a semiotic as well as a social and cultural standpoint. A broad-based theoretical platform is adopted for the analysis of multimodal websites and user sessions drawing on social semiotics, mass media and communication studies, film theory, systemic-functional linguistics and genre theory.