Climate Change Websites and Web Film Annotation: Applying Web Tools and Techniques developed in the Living Knowledge Project

At the start of the Internet era, a web page was mainly made up of written texts containing, every now and then, some hot words (i.e. hyperlinks) that took you to a related web page. So, you started reading from the top of the page and ended at the bottom of the same page. But with the development of increasingly visually-oriented programs (e.g. Adobe Flash), in the last 15 years, web pages have evolved greatly: they have become even more complex. Sophisticated animations, short videos, and interactive objects have often taken the place of written text. The real trick for readers and web analysts is in finding ways of keeping track of the complexity of web pages, which is where multimodal web page analysis comes in handy. With specific reference to the issue of climate change, one of the major social issues of the contemporary age, this paper reports on part of the research into websites and web film analysis and annotation carried out within the Living Knowledge Project (Baldry, 2010, 2011a, 2011b; Baldry, Coccetta, in press). In particular, Sections 2, 3, and 4 explore a multimodal model of web analysis inspired by scalar principles (Baldry, Thibault, 2006a, 2006b; Coccetta, 2011) and shows the kind of information researchers can gather when applying a scalar model to film clips and web pages. Section 5 briefly describes the climate change film corpus that the author has compiled for research purposes while Section 6 explores the concept of thematic system (Baldry, 2010; Baldry, O’Halloran, 2010; Baldry, Thibault, 2006a) in relation to this corpus and, in particular, provides some examples of multimodal intertextual thematic formations (Baldry, Thibault, 2006a: 55). Finally, Section 7 examines websites and web film annotation in relation to the McaWeb tools (http://mcaweb.unipv.it) developed as part of the Living Knowledge Project and reports on the benefits they bring to web genre analysis.

Abstract