Semiotically-grounded distant viewing of diagrams: insights from two multimodal corpora
This work addresses the challenge of interpreting educational diagrams for digital humanities and computational analysis, though it is incremental in applying existing theories to new corpora.
The researchers tackled the problem of analyzing primary school science diagrams by combining multimodal communication theories with computational methods, showing that multimodally-informed annotations reveal structural patterns across diagrams on different topics.
In this article, we bring together theories of multimodal communication and computational methods to study how primary school science diagrams combine multiple expressive resources. We position our work within the field of digital humanities, and show how annotations informed by multimodality research, which target expressive resources and discourse structure, allow imposing structure on the output of computational methods. We illustrate our approach by analysing two multimodal diagram corpora: the first corpus is intended to support research on automatic diagram processing, whereas the second is oriented towards studying diagrams as a mode of communication. Our results show that multimodally-informed annotations can bring out structural patterns in the diagrams, which also extend across diagrams that deal with different topics.