Semiotically-grounded distant viewing of diagrams: insights from two multimodal corpora

TL;DR

This paper combines multimodal communication theories with computational methods to analyze primary school science diagrams, revealing structural patterns through multimodally-informed annotations across two corpora.

Contribution

It introduces a multimodally-informed annotation approach for analyzing diagrams, bridging digital humanities and computational analysis to uncover structural patterns.

Findings

Annotations reveal structural patterns in diagrams

Patterns extend across different topics

Supports automatic diagram processing research

Abstract

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.