Len and I had lunch at Thai Times 9 (yummmmmm) today and he sends a message to Brian (via my blog!) - Merry Christmas Brian!! I told Len that one of my most popular links is the one to his blog so watch that space for more adverts about books, conferences and research opportunities!
I also promised to link to his research project about Image/Text Relations in Narrative and Information Texts for Children in Print and Electronic Media. Here’s a project overview:
This project focuses on image/text relations in print and electronic materials designed for children in primary school and early secondary school. Both narrative and information texts will be considered. The research is informed by systemic functional linguistic theory and its social semiotic applications to other modalities of communication. To date, the main focus of the project has been on relations between images in narrative picture books. Work on the affective dimension of these relations is currently underway. As this theme nears completion our research is shifting to consideration of the mutually informing relation between words and images in narrative and information texts, including CD-ROM and web based materials. Information texts recontextualising science, history and culture for children are being considered, concentrating on themes from the Australia, Asia and the Pacific.
One of the interesting things they are doing is looking at the human body and the expression of affective meanings, so I told him to look at the avatars on Second Life because they are capable of infinite expressions, and it would be a fun way to illustrate their point in presentations! (Nothing worse than presentations without images, ESPECIALLY when discussing multimodality)
OK, messages over *laugh*
