The medium and its characteristics
6.1 Why the notion of a medium matters
Defining a medium (or its plural formmedia) is challenging due to the widespread use of the concept in both academia and everyday life. To exemplify, print media, digital media and social media are some of the frequently used concepts. For the sake of lending more analytical value to the concept, I shall now consider why the medium matters when describing the structure of a multimodal artefact.
To begin with, Bateman considers medium “a historically stabilised site for the deployment of some selection of semiotic modes for the achievement of varied communicative purposes” (forthcoming, p. 12). In this view, examples of me-dia that fall under the umbrella of print meme-dia could include — for instance — newspapers, books, magazines, brochures and leaflets. Each of the aforementioned media may prefer a selection of certain semiotic modes. Depending on the kind of genre realised in the medium, specific choices within the semiotic modes may be favoured. As a part of a rhetorical strategy, these choices are considered effective for the genre and its communicative goals (cf. Hiippala in press).
At this point, thegenre of a tourist brochure, which was described in Section 4.3.1, needs to be clearly contrasted with the medium of a brochure. The main question is: does the medium provide something besides the material substrate to realise the genre? Bateman (forthcoming, p. 11) argues that features such as page numbers, text spacing and paragraphing, the conscious use of empty space for margins, etc. do not contribute to the multimodal genre structure, neither does their presence, absence, form or placement.
These highly conventional features are independent of any genre, because they arise as a result of the process of pagination and layouting — the placement and organisation of content on pages — and can appear in any genre realised using the medium. Consider, for instance, this very page as a part of the genre of a doctoral dissertation (see e.g. Paltridge 2002; Bunton 2005), which is realised in
the medium of a book. The genre of a dissertation, in turn, is realised using the semiotic mode of paragraphed text-flow, surrounded by margins and accompanied by a page number. Yet the paragraphs, margins and page numbers are not here to advance the argument of this dissertation: they increase legibility and help to navigate the manuscript.
As a part of the multimodal artefact, these features perform an equally im-portant task as the content, whose organisation they support. Collapsing their contribution into a single, unified structure would do justice to neither the genre nor the medium. The distinct contributions of the medium, the semiotic modes and the genre come together in a multimodal artefact — the target of the current investigation — and for this reason, their contribution needs to be taken apart clearly in the analysis (Bateman forthcoming, p. 13).
Now, in contrast to the common features of the medium of a book, what can be said about the brochure as a medium? In the following section, I shall attempt to describe the medium of a brochure and to establish its properties. This also sets the stage for the discussion of the semiotic modes and their relation to the medium of a brochure.
6.1.1 The brochure as a medium
In previous research, the tourist brochures have been described as “polysemic”
constructs and texts (Edelheim 2007; Valde´on 2009), as “communicative acts” (Yui Ling Ip 2008), as texts belonging to the “institutional tourist genre” (Francesconi 2011), and as a genre of print media (Hiippala 2007, 2012b). Naturally, these definitions reflect the analytical interests of the particular studies. However, none of the previous research has considered the brochure as a medium. Therefore, I shall now explore the brochure as a medium, which carries the semiotic modes that are used to realise the genre of a tourist brochure.
Initially, the broad criteria for describing the medium of a brochure need to be set out. As Bateman points out, “no meaning can be realised in a medium”, be-cause “meaning can only berealised in a semiotic modeparticipating in a medium”
(forthcoming, p. 12). Therefore, the medium of a brochure acts as a carrier of the semiotic modes, which realise the genre of a tourist brochure. Consequently, the umbrella term of print media may be loosely described according to the semiotic modes they can deploy. Due to the same material substrate, print media can also deploy the same semiotic modes.
However, the actual difference between the media is likely to emerge in the configuration of the semiotic modes and their use. Consider, for instance, the remarkable differences in the use and configuration of text-flow in the medium of a newspaper and the medium of a book. Capturing the structure and the function of the semiotic modes is precisely what the GeM model is used for in
this dissertation and for this reason, the results may also inform us about the properties of the used medium to a very high degree of detail. To achieve such a detailed view, it is necessary to begin by considering the basic properties of the medium, which leads us to the issue of materiality.
As said, the medium of brochure is defined by its material substrate (see Section 3.3.1). At the core of the medium is the material substrate of a printed page, which provides a range of semiotic modes in theirstatic form while simultaneously constraining the deployment of their dynamic forms. One simply cannot use the brochure to realise a film, because the printed page cannot carry the semiotic mode of dynamic image-flow. Furthermore, similar to other forms of print media, such as newspapers and books, the physical space available for the semiotic modes in the medium of a brochure may differ. In the annotated corpus, the size of the brochures ranged between 2128 cm2 for the largest brochure (HDB 1972) and 295 cm2 for the smallest (SHE 2002).1
To explore the issue further, I shall now consider two relevant properties of the medium: the method of binding and the fold geometry. The method of binding is concerned with how the pages are joined together. The fold geometry, in turn, describes how the pages may be folded to manipulate the size of the artefact.
6.1.2 Brochures and leaflets
A quick look at the entire data set revealed a difference that could be used to divide the data into two different categories. This difference was the method of binding, that is, whether staples were used to join the pages or not. The method of binding has consequences for artefacts that rely on a “page metaphor” to organise the content (Bateman 2008, p. 9): whereas a staple-bound brochure can add up to four content pages by adding a single sheet of paper, a leaflet without staples may only expand the available content space by adding a folding point.
A folding point, which I will define shortly, provides more content space without increasing the space needed to store the brochure. The small size is important for the consumption of the tourist brochures, as they are meant to be carried around easily (Hiippala 2007, p. 11).
To investigate this issue, each instance in the entire data set was coded accord-ing to its method of bindaccord-ing: the artefacts were either bound usaccord-ing staples (n = 44) or not (n = 45). This resulted in two categories: brochures for staple-bound artefacts and leaflets for artefacts without staples. The categories of brochures and leaflets were then compared using two continuous variables: (1) the number of content pages and (2) the number of folds per content page.
1The identifiers given here and afterwards refer to the identifiers in Table 5.2 in Section 5.3.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70
leaflets
brochures
number of content pages number of folds
Figure 6.1: The number of folds and content pages in brochures and leaflets At this point, it is necessary to provide the definitions related to variables (1) and (2). First of all, a content page is delimited by a fold or the edge of a page in any direction. In this case, a fold is considered a point where the physical page is folded to reduce the artefact’s overall size. Moreover, a content page has to realise some stage of the genre, which were defined in Section 4.3.1. Pages that contained only navigational elements, such as indices, and the pages arising from the medium itself, such as covers and leftover pages, were excluded from the count.
The resulting distribution of the brochures and leaflets (n = 89) is shown in the scatter plot in Figure 6.1.
As Figure 6.1 shows, the leaflets grow their content space by increasing the number of folding points. The brochures, in contrast, increase the available space by adding more pages. Interestingly, in the region between 10 and 30 pages, a number of the brochures (n = 13) also use the fold geometry to increase their content space. In some cases, an additional folding point is used to reduce the overall size of the artefact.2 In other cases (SHF 1987), a folding point is added to enable the inclusion of maps. This is done by embedding a smaller, bound brochure within larger cover pages, which contain a fold-out map. It should be noted, however, that exploiting the fold geometry is not a new phenomenon: the expansion of content space by adding folding points can also be found in other print media, such as magazines (see e.g. O’Halloran and Lim 2009).
In more general terms, Figure 6.1 shows that staple-bound brochures include more content pages. The mean values and standard deviation for the number of
2HFT 1976, 1984, 1988;TGH 1980.
Table 6.1: The number of content pages in brochures and leaflets Brochures Leaflets
Mean 24.6 6.8
Standard deviation 16.7 4.5
P-value <0.01
content pages in both brochures and leaflets are given in Table 6.1. In both cases, the standard deviation is relatively high. This means that the instances of data, which reflect the number of content pages, are spread out over a range of values.
In terms of the mean value, the number of content pages in the brochures is three times as high as the number of content pages in the leaflets. This suggests that a staple-bound binding makes it easier to increase the space available for content, because a single sheet of paper can add up to four content pages to a brochure.
Concerning the validity of the categories in Table 6.1, a two-tailed t-test showed a statistically significant difference between the number of pages in the brochures and leaflets (P<0.01). Following the convention in humanities and social sciences, a P-value of less than 0.05 is considered a cut-off point (Levon 2010, p. 71). It is therefore reasonable to believe that the two categories differ in terms of the number of content pages.
What does this observation imply? From the perspective of the GeM model, a production and consumption constraint may explain the difference between brochures and leaflets (Bateman 2008, p. 16). In simple terms, the planned number of content pages seems to determine whether the artefact should be either staple-bound or folded. Including 67 content pages — the largest number of con-tent pages in a brochure — into a folded leaflet would present the artefact’s user with serious challenges: accommodating this number of content pages would re-quire nine horizontal and nine vertical folding points. Anyone familiar with large, folded maps will also know the difficulty of folding them back together.
In contrast, a staple-bound brochure can easily include the same number of pages (HVG 2008). However, Valde´on has observed in a study of Spanish tourism texts that “the distribution of information in the brochures and leaflets differs considerably” (2009, p. 26). Due to the linguistic focus of Valde´on’s study, he did not pursue this issue further.3 For the multimodal analyst, the follow-up question is naturally whether the choice of the material substrate and the method of binding also affects the configuration of the semiotic modes. In short, the entire data set
3In personal communication on 25 January 2013, Valde´on stated that the main difference between the brochures and the leaflets was their layout. Whereas the leaflets were of the “folding and unfolding type” and had to be turned around to locate different information, the booklets were “less beautiful to look at” but easier to use.
revealed two possible variants of the medium: the brochure and the leaflet. The annotated corpus, in turn, can be used to study the multimodal structure of the brochures and leaflets, which I hereby term medial variants, adopting the term proposed by St¨ockl (2004), albeit in a different context (see Figure 2.3). I will return to the potential differences of the medial variants in Section 8.5.
So far, I have covered certain basic properties of the brochure as a medium.
These properties consisted of standard medium-related features, such as para-graphs, margins and page numbering, which result from the process of pagination.
I also considered the method of binding as a key feature that distinguishes the staple-bound brochures from the folded leaflets. The method of binding also de-termines the amount of content that can be included in the artefact realised using the medium. In the following section, I take a step towards the content by consid-ering the role of advertisements, which may co-exist in the medium alongside the genre of a tourist brochure.