Sumin Zhao

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

As an iconic image of our time, the selfie has attracted much attention in popular media and scholarly writing. The focus so far has been on the representation of the self or subjectivity. We propose a complementary perspective that foregrounds the intersubjective function of the selfie. We argue that the presence of selfhood is often an assumption...

Interactivity is often considered as the defining feature of a book app. However, what constitutes interactivity in the context of apps is not always clear. We postulate in this chapter a multimodal social semiotic theory of interactivity, which considers interactivity as not simply a function of technology, but also a resource for meaning-making....

The ubiquitous software PowerPoint has significant influence on evaluations of professional and academic success, and has attracted considerable attention from both social commentators and researchers in various fields. Existing research on PowerPoint considers the software, slideshows created with it, and PowerPoint-supported presentations in isol...

This article employs multimodal discourse analysis to explore how mothers represent their everyday experiences of motherhood on Instagram through different forms of self-portraiture. It investigates whether the ‘selfies’ that they share can be characterized as a visual genre and identifies four subgenres: presented, mirrored, inferred and implied s...

There have been extensive public and academic debates on the role platform algorithms play in shaping social media (sub)cultures. Little attention, however, has been paid to how platform (sub)cultures are discursively constructed by the design of the platform interface. This study examines Bilibili, a leading Chinese video platform, and investigate...

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...

There are two stories to tell in this multimodal special issue of Digital Culture and Education. One story involves a group of female academics in need of inspiration during pandemic days who decided to produce a multimodal special issue. The other story is a colourful whistle-stop tour of public and private shelves. The through-line connecting bot...

This article collection is a response to the rapid acceleration of research interest in 'motherhood online', defined here as a field concerned with the production and reception of digital media that is produced by mothers and/or about motherhood, and is related to issues of maternal identities, communities or practices. It contributes to this field...

Diaspora vloggers–migrants who produce video blogs in the language of their home countries for a transnational diaspora community–have been a largely overlooked group in the studies of social media. This paper focuses on the unique role of Chinese diaspora vloggers during an unprecedented global event—the COVID-19 pandemic. Using manual keyword sea...

In this paper, we present a research approach that makes visible how young children in Chinese immigrant families muster their multilingual, multimodal and multisemiotic repertoires as they interact with distant family and friends on social media. The approach brings multimodal social semiotics into conversation with translanguaging to problematize...

Selfies are self-portraits typically taken with the front camera of a mobile device. This chapter considers how these images are recontextualised across different social contexts. While most research has focused on selfies that directly depict the photographer’s face, we consider how what we term ‘implied/inferred selfies’ and ‘still life self-imag...

There are a growing number of young children around the globe whose lives now move across the boundaries between nations, languages and cultures. This new phenomenon – childhood on the move – is shaped by the interaction of two types of mobility, population and technologies (mobile phones and social media apps). The literacy practices of these typi...

The selfie is one of the most widely publicized, criticized, and debated visual phenomena of our time. However, formulating a definition of the selfie is not straightforward, as visual clues – be they representational or compositional – alone are not sufficient for identification. Recognizing an image as a selfie, rather than a portrait, often requ...

In this paper, we explore the semiotic dimension of digital scrapbooking. In particular, we look at how technological affordances of social media platforms, such as reposting and scrolling functions, facilitate the creation of a unique form of semiotic artefact—curated visual blogs. We argue that the curatorial practices of digital scrapbooking cre...

This chapter reports on three research projects concerned with websites. All three have adopted a social-semiotic, multimodal approach (cf. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic. London: Arnold; Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Oxon: Routledge; Kress G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2...

In this paper, we propose a social semiotic approach to studying PowerPoint in university classrooms. Our approach is centred on two premises: (1) PowerPoint is a semiotic technology that can be integrated into the pedagogical discourse of classrooms, and (2) PowerPoint technology encompasses three interrelated dimensions of social semiotic practic...

This thesis is concerned with the construal and the recontextualisation of primary social science knowledge in hypermedia texts. More specifically, it provides an account for the relations between verbiage and image in web-based multimodal interactive leaning materials, known as Multimodal Interactives (MIs). Based on the linguistic description, th...