Professor Mark Dressman (Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education) kicked off our Spring Brownbag Series with his talk “Words and Pictures: A Peircean/Saussurean Framework for Multimodal Analysis” on Wednesday March 9th. Professor Dressman shared his recently-developed protocol for semiotic analysis, which he argues is a way to better explain how images “mean” than other such methods offer. He shared his conclusions after applying his analytic protocol to two news videos reporting on the Occupy Wall Street movement: one created by CNN and one created by Al-Jazeera. Dressman found that these movies are quite different in their composition and message and the ways they use multimodality to create meaning. He also found interesting points of intersection where they are in dialogue with each other. His talk demonstrated how such structural analysis can lead to many further potential paths for inquiry, generating more questions about how signs, context, intent, and dialogue work together to create meaning.
Dressman’s overall findings include new insights on the problems in previous attempts to explain how to decode the meaning-making of visual texts (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images), the differences between the indexicality of images and the grammar of images, and the challenges of applying our understanding of literacy and literate practices to decoding multimodal texts.
Dressman has published his findings from this study. To read more, you can find his article “Reading as the Interpretation of Signs” in Reading Research Quarterly 51.1, pages 111-136.