Multimodal Web Concordancing and Annotation

This article describes the McaWeb tools developed within the Living Knowledge project concerned with detecting diversity in the Internet. A diversity-aware approach must necessarily analyse the compositional aspects of texts, what Halliday and Hasan have called its texture and which they see as consisting of three basic components: theme systems, information systems, and structure of discourse. Thus, among its many fields of investigation, contemporary linguistic and semiotic theory is concerned with information management, or to apply the principle to the matter at hand, how websites function as meaning-making units. Different modes of analysis are, indeed, central to any form of contemporary text analysis. The McaWeb tools with their capacity to analyse text and genre automatically and semi-automatically are no exception. MWS promotes the idea of analysing diverse modes through its Level 3 function, called the MGA (Multimodal Genre Analysis) mode which is used to relate micro and macro level website units in an explicit way.