Edited volumes take particular patience, a high amount of cooperation and across-chapter coherence-generating skills. I found all these gifts in my co-editors, Jana PFLAEGING and Helen CAPLE, to whom I’m indebted for their endeavors and zest. We look back on a time-consuming and laborious process of re-editing individual chapters and finally getting the manuscript ready for print. The book has now seen the light of day and we hope it’ll make a fair contribution to a rapidly expanding field. Here is what the blurb says:
Bringing together contributions from both established and emerging researchers in multimodality and social semiotics, the book presents case studies on a variety of image-centric genres and domains, including magazines, advertising discourse, multimedia storytelling, and social media platforms.
The concept of ‚image-centricity‘ is defined as both perceptual dominance and a strong rhetorical-semantic weight of all kinds of image types in a multimodal artifact. Our introductory chapter fleshes this out in some detail, connecting the idea to the research tradition in the field and claiming a historical shift towards image-centric media of all kinds.
We’re glad to have a wide array of experienced multimodality researchers on board, providing a kaleidoscope of media, genres and varieties of image-centricity, which are being analyzed in different ways, mostly on the basis of corpora and always with a fair amount of solid theoretical footing. Our hope is to inspire the multimodality research community and give a fresh impetus to their train of thought and empirical projects.
Prof. Dr. Hartmut Stöckl 