Interrogating the layout structure

I shall begin with an analysis of a leaflet describing the 18^th century fortress of Suomenlinna, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a major tourist attraction located on the islands in front of Helsinki. The leaflet, published in 1986, is entitled Suomenlinna Seafortress in Helsinki. In the annotated corpus, the leaflet was assigned the identifierSSH 1986: I shall refer to the leaflet using this identifier (see Table 5.2).

In terms of the fold geometry, the leaflet is two-sided with three folding points.

The side of the leaflet with the most content is illustrated in Figure 8.4: I shall refer to it as the content side. The calculations performed for Figure 6.4 show that 13% of the layout area is taken up by visual elements. A quick look at Figure 8.4 also reveals that the leaflet combines several types of content discussed in Chapter 7: paragraphed text-flow, image-text-complexes and a colour-coded table.

In terms of the “visual perceptual resources”, the leaflet matches several char-acteristics of page-flow outlined in Section 8.2 (cf. Bateman 2011, p. 26). The

Figure 8.4: The content side in SSH 1986

content is grouped into a total of four columns on the content side. Moreover, each column realises stages of the genre of a tourist brochure, which mainly take the form of location and event descriptions (see Section 4.3.1). As I will show below, these descriptions follow a consistent structural pattern, which closely re-sembles what Waller et al. (2012) have described using the notion of a pattern language (see Section 4.4.3). In short, a pattern provides a solution to a commu-nicative need by providing the required means of expression. These patterns are the “building-blocks” of a genre, which St¨ockl (2004) conceptualised in his work on modal interrelations (see Section 2.3.1.3).

The structures identified in Chapter 7 exemplify the patterns necessary for realising the genre of a tourist brochure. The key to identifying these patterns was the co-deployment of the GeM model and the notion of the semiotic modes. As I will show below, the same analytic tools can take us further in the analysis of entire pages. In the case of Figure 8.4, I would argue that the active semiotic mode is page-flow, but to understand how page-flow operates, the multimodal structure of the leaflet needs to be brought under closer analytical attention. To move forward, I propose that special attention should be paid to the layout structure.

Note, however, that owing to limited space, the layout structure in Figure 8.5 only covers the fourth column on the right in Figure 8.4.

First of all, two image-text-complexes may be identified in the layout structure.

Both are marked using a grey background in Figure 8.5. The white boxes, in turn, indicate layout leafs with text-flow. For a closer look at the rhetorical structure of the image-text-complex with the identifier image-text-complex-1, see Section 7.2.1. In Section 7.2.1, I argued that the image-text-complex relies on the spatial proximity of the semiotic resources to signal that they are to be interpreted to-gether. But to consider how the image-text-complexes work as a part of a page, it is necessary to take a step back in the analysis.

There are a total of six layout chunks in Figure 8.5. In addition to the two image-complexes, there are four layout chunks that consist entirely of text-flow. To realise the genre of a tourist brochure, each text-flow chunk uses the same structural pattern, which may be captured using the GeM model. In each case, a typographically emphasised header is followed by two text columns, which are separated by a demarcating vertical line. Moreover, several horizontal lines — situated directly under the parent node (column-4) — are used to separate the text-flow chunks and image-text-complexes in Figure 8.5. While the layout layer can capture the visual perceptual resources present on the page, it is the rhetorical layer which allows us to describe how the content is presented and argued for.

In this context, the key to understanding how page-flow operates is to ac-knowledge that the layout structure signals that rhetorically, the content is to be interpreted separately, chunk by chunk. If multimodal artefacts indeed consist of

image line

image

line

line column-4

image-text-complex-1

line header

paragraph-1 header

image-text-complex-2 line

paragraph-2 header

line

paragraph-3

header

paragraph-4

header

line line

line line

Figure 8.5: The layout structure of the fourth column in Figure 8.4

articulated parts that the users put back together during the interpretation process (Bateman and Schmidt 2012, p. 48), then I would argue that by organising the content under separate layout chunks, the layout structure in Figure 8.5 strongly encourages the adoption of a selective reading strategy (see Section 4.4.2) (cf. also Waller 2012, p. 239). This kind of reading strategy supports the kind of discourse semantic interpretation associated with page-flow.

A completely different interpretation might take place upon encountering an-other layout structure, which nevertheless realises the same genre of a tourist brochure. Such a structure may be found on the other side of the same brochure, which contains the cover of the leaflet and a description of Suomenlinna as a des-tination (see Figure 8.6). From now on, I shall refer to this side as the cover side.

As opposed to the content side, the cover side is mainly visual: 87% of the layout space is occupied by graphic elements (cf. Figure 6.4). The layout structure of

Figure 8.6: The cover side inSSH 1986

2d

element illustration

photo map

ssh-1986-l-side-1

side-1-header

header header side-1-column-1

text-flow

side-1-column-2

text-flow

Figure 8.7: The layout structure of side one in SSH 1986

the entire cover side is represented in Figure 8.7. In contrast to the example of page-flow in Figure 8.5, I propose that Figure 8.7 exemplifies a layout structure that is consistent with the semiotic mode of text-flow.

I base my argument on the following observations. Firstly, unlike the highly fragmented structure of the page-flow, the layout structure shown in Figure 8.7 is relatively simple with only three layout chunks for the entire page. The layout chunks that carry the actual content (side-1-column-1 and side-1-column-2) both contain two child nodes. In both chunks, a layout leaf with text-flow is accompanied either by a photograph or a map. Moreover, no demarcating lines are present in these layout chunks. Secondly, the layout structure contains only a single layout chunk with two headers (side-1-header), both placed on the brochure cover. The content side, in contrast, contains a total of six headers, which help the reading process by organising the content: I argue that this organisation is consistent with the semiotic mode of page-flow.

To further emphasise the difference between the two layout structures, Table 8.1 quantifies the layout structures in the Suomenlinna Seafortress in Helsinki leaflet. Whereas the layout structure of the cover side contains a total of three chunks and nine layout leafs (see Figure 8.7), the corresponding structure on the content side consists of 36 layout chunks and 154 layout leafs. The high number of layout leafs may be explained by the presence of the colour-coded table and its many cells (cf. Figure 7.1).

In addition, the layout structures on the two sides are of different depth. In the case of the content side, a move through the layout structure from the topmost parent node to the last layout leaf on the bottom requires a total of six steps. On the cover side, the same process requires only three steps. On the basis of Table