Janina Wildfeuer

University of Groningen | RUG · Department of Communication and Information Sciences

The book explores the multifaceted nature of media and communication by challenging traditional views that consider media solely as technical infrastructures for transmitting information. Instead, it focuses on mediality as an empirically relevant concept and proposes to understand media as socially constituted semiotic procedures that shape and ar...

VR applications for medical simulations such as emergency situations offer new ways of providing knowledge and practical skills for saving a life and potentially represent a complex communicative environment. The communicative situations constructed by this environment bring with them an increasing level of interactivity and ergodicity and it is pa...

This special issue on innovative methods in multimodal comics research brings together linguistic as well as inter- and transdisciplinary contributions engaging with the semiotic and multimodal wealth of comics, graphic novels, and other forms of visual narratives. The contributions connect to recent research with new challenges and solutions and e...

This article aims to point out some of the specificities of an approach that understands discourse relations in comics within a broader conceptualization of multimodal discourse. It lays out the theoretical foundations of these relations in philosophy, semiotics, and logic, and showcases how a small and concise set of these discourse relations can...

VR applications for medical simulations such as emergency situations offer new ways of providing knowledge and practical skills for saving a life and potentially represent a complex communicative environment. The communicative situations constructed by this environment bring with them an increasing level of interactivity and ergodicity and it is pa...

Der Beitrag skizziert unterschiedliche medienwissenschaftliche Beobachtungen zu visuellen Identitäten des SARS-CoV-2-Virus und der COVID-19-Pandemie, die 2020 und 2021 im öffentlichen Diskurs in den sozialen und professionellen Medien zirkulieren. In vier Kapiteln werden (1) Visualisierungen des Virus, (2) Kontexte, Funktionen und Interpretationen...

This work analyzes the efforts by the company Heineken to address in their marketing campaigns the social responsibility and wellbeing of their customers during the pandemic. By particularly looking at the audiovisual design strategies used in 15 TV commercials produced and published during the years 2020-2022, a multimodal analysis of the filmic m...

This visual essay investigated how material objects frame and represent our self and identity, specifically focusing on curating different parts of identity through objects on bookshelves in online spaces. For the purpose of this study, a mixed method methodology was adopted where data was collected through semi-structured interviews and visual ana...

The study reported in this paper analyzes the specific genre of 'instruction comics' with regard to typical patterns of comic book pages. As a sequential-pictorial genre with a narrative as well as instructive character, 'instruction comics' have recently and increasingly been used in education as a novel way to communicate, for instance, health-re...

The article proposes a multimodal discourse semantics approach to the analysis of video game tutorials that provides a discourse pragmatic analysis of the game canvases in these tutorials. The study mainly builds on linguistic approaches to formal dynamic discourse semantics that have already been successfully applied to other multimodal artefacts....

This chapter presents results of an empirical case study based on annotating an open-world video game and creating datasets in order to describe the semiotic elements of this video game at work. Following the procedure of identifying elements and semiotic modes on canvases of real-time video games presented in Bateman et al. (2017b), it provides a...

Multimodality research has always shown a strong reliance on data. However , the field has primarily developed around more exploratory, descriptive, and interpretative work on smaller data sets-as suggested by results we present from a meta-study of contributions to three multimodality-close international journals (Social Semiotics, Visual Communic...

This volume advances the data-based study of multimodal artefacts and performances by showcasing methods and results from the latest endeavors in empirical multimodal research, representing a vibrant international and interdisciplinary research community. The collated chapters identify and seek to inspire novel, mixed-method approaches to investiga...

This chapter discusses two relevant methodological concepts for the analysis of multimodal media and the resulting artefacts and performances with regard to their usability and appropriateness for comprehensive multimodal analyses: the concept of discourse semantics and the notion of the textual logic of meaning-making. The chapter critically compa...

Combining theoretical and methodological questions, this chapter describes one approach to the multimodal annotation and analysis of audiovisual artefacts using the ELAN annotation tool. In particular, we focus on the multimodal construction and representation of gender differences in contemporary American TV series by qualitatively and quantitativ...

Reading notes in books and other printed matter are of increasing interest in Philology and Cultural History. However, we still lack an understanding of their epistemic foundations. With reference to Thomas Mann’s private library, I suggest viewing the act of annotating with pens itself as an epistemic practice. For this, I introduce the term ‘pen...

This is a book review of Ledin & Machin's second edition of "Introduction to Multimodal Analysis, published in 2020, 13 years after the publication of the first edition.

This manifesto stems from a transmedia initiative for collective research designed to shape-from the bottom-up-a socially responsive and responsible culture of inquiry, in observing, recording, sharing and reflecting on the changes to communication and interaction caused by the COVID-19 crisis and their enduring effects post-pandemic. The objective...

This manifesto stems from a transmedia initiative for collective research designed to shape-from the bottom-up-a socially responsive and responsible culture of inquiry, in observing, recording, sharing and reflecting on the changes to communication and interaction caused by the COVID-19 crisis and their enduring effects post-pandemic. The objective...

Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach den multimodalen Spezifka digitaler Spiele nach. Er gibt zunächst einen Überblick über internationale multimodal-analytische Ansätze zur Untersuchung von Computerspielen. In einem zweiten Schritt liefert er einen Fragen- und Kriterienkatalog zur eigenständigen Durchführung einer multimodalen Analyse von Grand Teft Au...

Die wissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit Comics in all ihren vielfältigen Formen hat sich in den vergangenen Jahren auch in Deutschland zu einem lebhaften interdisziplinären Forschungsfeld entwickelt, dem zudem ein steigendes Interesse an der Comicanalyse in universitären Lehrveranstaltungen gefolgt ist. Die vorliegende Einführung verbindet vor dies...

In this introduction, we discuss the idea of establishing a discipline of multimodality, considering both how this might be defined and potential benefits and challenges of attaining such an independent status. This builds on previous rounds of discussion within the Bremen Conferences on Multimodality (BreMM) series concerning this issue, where div...

Multimodality’s popularity as a semiotic approach has not resulted in a common voice yet. Its conceptual anchoring as well as its empirical applications often remain localized and disparate, and ideas of a theory of multimodality are heterogeneous and uncoordinated. For the field to move ahead, it must achieve a more mature status of reflection, mu...

›Semiotisch‹ heißen wissenschaftliche Verfahren, die sich für Zeichen interessieren. Eine typische zeichentheoretische Frage lautet: Woraus besteht das Verhältnis zwischen der materiellen Beschaffenheit eines Gegenstands, etwa eines Comichefts aus farbig bedrucktem Papier, und dem damit bezeichneten, vielfältigen Inhalt, etwa den Figuren der erzähl...

Der Begriff der ›Intersektionalität‹ hat Hochkonjunktur. Immer häufiger ist sowohl im akademischen wie auch im öffentlichen Kontext von ›intersektionaler Perspektivierung‹, ›intersektionalem Denken‹ oder dem ›Paradigma der Intersektionalität‹ die Rede. Doch was genau bezeichnet der abstrakte Begriff der ›Intersektionalität‹ überhaupt? Was ist unter...

Vielleicht mehr noch als viele andere Medien lassen sich Comics als narrative Formen verstehen. Es mag zwar einige Beispiele nicht-narrativer Comics wie etwa Robert Crumbs »Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics« (1967) geben, aber die allermeisten Comics erzählen – kurze und lange, heitere und ernste, fiktive und nicht-fiktive – Ges...

Die multimodale Analyse von Comics setzt sich mit der Frage auseinander, wie die unterschiedlichen semiotischen Elemente innerhalb eines Comics als Zeichenmodalitäten in ihrem Zusammenspiel Bedeutung konstruieren. Dabei geht es nicht allein um die Elemente Bild und Text bzw. schriftlicher Text, sondern auch um kleinere Einheiten wie zum Beispiel (B...

Seit den Anfängen des Comics zählen Genres zu den zentralen Verständigungsbegriffen zwischen Produzent_innen und Rezipierenden. Sie können an bestehende literarische Traditionen der Phantastik, der Romanze und der Abenteuerliteratur anschließen. In einigen Fällen stehen sie in enger Verbindung mit dem Format der Publikation, von den Sonderseiten de...

Viele der Begrifflichkeiten und Analysemethoden, die in den ersten Kapiteln dieses Bandes vorgestellt wurden, sind weder an bestimmte Gattungen noch an Comics bestimmter Epochen oder Kulturkreise gebunden. Sie sollten prinzipiell überall fruchtbar zur Anwendung kommen (können), wo sich Gegenstände finden lassen, die typischen Comics mehr oder minde...

As a multimodally complex medium, graphic narratives have long been approached from a semiotic perspective, though the latter’s focus on general decoding mechanisms for reading meaning out of signs has increasingly come under criticism. Only recently has the applicability of inference to the analysis of visual narratives begun to attract attention,...

Der Beitrag will sich mit der Frage beschäftigen, welche Rolle die Einheit Text innerhalb der Diskurslinguistik spielt. Dabei soll der Fokus auf dem Objekt und nicht auf der Disziplin liegen und seine Eigenschaften gegenüber denen des Diskurses abgrenzen. Der dabei entstehenden Problematik der Unterscheidung zwischen den Begriffen ‚Diskurs‘ und ‚Te...

The article deals with fundamental and broadly discussed issues within the paradigm of multimodal analysis concerning how the intersemiotic interplay of semiotic resources constructs meaning. Taking a specifically linguistic focus on theories and methods within this paradigm, the article orientates particularly towards discourse analytical and text...

This edited volume brings together work in the field of empirical comics research. Drawing on computer and cognitive science, psychology and art history, linguistics and literary studies, each chapter presents innovative methods and establishes the practical and theoretical motivations for the quantitative study of comics, manga, and graphic novels...

This paper highlights the notion of dynamic context as an indispensable pragmatic aspect of multimodal argumentation and exemplifies a context-based approach to multimodal arguments with an analysis of the Mophie 2015 Super Bowl commercial. Whereas in dynamic semantics and verbal discourse analysis the notion of dynamic context and its context chan...

This paper focuses on questions concerning the process of making meaning out of the filmic text by asking for the argumentative patterns that enable the recipient’s inference processes during his/her interpretation. Film analysis, and multimodal analysis in general, is no longer seen as simply decoding the semiotic resources, but asking for inferen...

This collection advances the study of context-dependent characteristics of argumentative discourse by examining a variety of media genres in which text and image (and other semiotic modes) combine to create meaning. The chapters have been written by an international group of senior and junior scholars researching multimodal argumentation in the las...

Multimodality is one of the most influential semiotic theories for analysing media artefacts nowadays, and it enjoys growing popularity globally. However, this popularity does not imply universality: the empirical application and even the conceptual anchoring of multimodality often remain geographically and disciplinarily grounded within local syst...

This textbook provides the first foundational introduction to the practice of analysing multimodality, covering the full breadth of media and situations in which multimodality needs to be a concern. Readers learn via use cases how to approach any multimodal situation and to derive their own specifically tailored sets of methods for conducting and e...

The paper is aimed at proving the hypothesis that multimodal construction in video games can follow specific discursive aims in the process of persuading game players. In order to prove this, we have performed a multifaceted analysis which elaborated the ways in which different modalities in a representative video game combine so as to convince the...

This book is a first attempt to map the broad context of performance studies from a multimodal perspective. It collects original research on traditional performing arts (theater, dance, opera), live (durational performance) and mediated/recorded performances (films, television shows), as well as perfor-mative discursive practices on social media by...

Traditional performing arts, such as theatre, dance, and opera, are multimodal meaning-making events, as they incorporate a wide range of semiotic resources, such as language, music, and body movements, for example, which are orchestrated to produce meanings in specific contexts and cultures. Other less easily classified performance-related events,...

This book examines film as a multimodal text and an audiovisual synthesis, bringing together current work within the fields of narratology, philosophy, multimodal analysis, sound as well as cultural studies in order to cover a wide range of international academic interest. The book provides new insights into current work and turns the discussion to...

This paper introduces the Special Issue on the languages of performing arts and is therefore aimed at designing how the context of the latter can be illuminated by socio-semiotic and multimodal approaches to communication. In this Special Issue, performances and performing arts are described as multimodal semiotic acts that co-deploy a range of sem...

Analytic interest in comics, graphic novels and similarly visual media is currently experiencing considerable growth. In order to pursue empirical investigation of such media, it is useful to explore how data of this kind can be made accessible for the application of established empirical methods, such as linguistic corpus analysis. Many forms of c...

In this article, we summarize and review approaches to the analysis of comics within a German research perspective that have adopted a predominantly linguistic or textlinguistic orientation. We focus particularly on research combining both linguistics and semiotics in order to treat verbal and graphical material as integral components of unified ac...

Multimodality is one of the most influential semiotic theories for analysing media artefacts. The concepts of this theory are, however, heterogeneously widespread, especially with regard to approaches in Germany on the one hand and those within the international context on the other. The book takes these differences as a starting point and aims at...

Wildfeuer, Janina: " Diskursive Performance – Zur textuellen Verarbeitung der Erfahrungen im Diskursprojekt " 30 junge Menschen " " , in: Schnell, M.W./Schulz, Christian (eds.) (2015): Dem Sterben begegnen. Junge Menschen sprechen mit sterbenden Menschen und deren Angehörigen. Huber-Verlag. Die Ausrufung des Projekts " Junge Menschen sprechen mit s...

In this article, we pursue a critical and multimodal discourse analysis of texts in the context of the innovative German discourse project ‘30 young people talk to dying people and their relatives’ – an initiative by two German universities encouraging young people to develop an explicit attitude towards death. We take a detailed look at the variou...

The paper deals with the question of filling in the gutter or gap between comic panels by inferences and abductive reasoning. This is a highly discussed topic in comic studies and we choose a new and innovative way of approaching it, namely by combining linguistic, multimodal discourse analytical as well as logical and formal accounts in order to d...

There have been many attempts to provide accounts of visually expressed narratives by drawing on our understandings of linguistic discourse. Such approaches have however generally proceeded piecemeal --- particular phenomena appearing similar to phenomena in verbal discourse are selected for discussion with insufficient consideration of just what i...

According to Hans Kamp, discourse is the principal unit of semantic analysis. With this statement, he follows a path within discourse semantics that has been shaped, on the one hand, by a turn in linguistics from sentence to text since the 1960s and, on the other hand, by the dominating trend in theories of meaning towards formalizing language mech...

Although regularly contested and rejected, the idea of a ‘grammar of comics’ continues to be applied to the analysis of comics in many disciplines and frameworks. The motivation for this is the evident regularity and systematicity exhibited by the comics medium as a form of expressive communication. Less commonly realized is that nowadays there are...

Im Anschauen erschöpft sich die Tätigkeit der Zuschauer keineswegs. Imaginative Ergänzungen sind notwendig, um einen Film verstehen zu können. Auch die Vorstellung wird gelenkt durch zum Teil explizite Markierungen im Filmtext. Diese steuern ganz erheblich die emotionale Einbindung der Rezipienten. Sie müssen Schauplätze erkennen, handelnde Figuren...

This book contributes to the analysis of film from a multimodal and textual perspective by extending formal semantics into the realm of multimodal discourse analysis. It accounts for both the inferential as well as intersemiotic meaning making processes in filmic discourse and therefore addresses one of the main questions that have been asked withi...

http://www.rabbiteye.de/2013/5/wildfeuer_interaktiv.pdf

Mit diesem ersten Buch der Reihe, Film, Text, Kultur. Beiträge zur Textualität des Films wird das Spektrum aktueller Forschungsansätze aus verschiedenen Teildisziplinen ausgeleuchtet; zugleich liefert der Band neue Impulse zu einer zeitgemäßen interdisziplinären Film- und Textualitätsforschung.

According to Hans Kamp, discourse is the principal unit of semantic analysis. With this statement, he follows a path within discourse semantics that has been shaped, on the one hand, by a turn in linguistics from sentence to text since the 1960s and, on the other hand, by the dominating trend in theories of meaning towards formalizing language mech...

http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/287

This article is concerned with the analysis of multimodal filmic text from a formal-functional perspective. It presents a new and integrative framework which has been developed on the basis of a formal description of coherence and structure in verbal discourse in order to be able to articulate in detail how inferential strategies and defeasible rea...

This talk is concerned with the analysis of concrete textual qualities of multimodal filmic text based on fundamental textlinguistic methods. The analysis seeks to present the coherent structure of some film excerpts by exposing crossmodal ties, i.e. intersemiotic relations (cf. Liu/O'Halloran 2009) between different modalities. The result will giv...