What is it about?
The article traces the main patterns in which images complement texts in popular science pieces as presented on the basis of a sample from New Scientist online. Because biosciences are hard to visualize sometimes, the magazine needs to illustrate the articles about recent deleopments with appropriate, attention-getting imagery, mainly photography or infographics.
Featured Image
Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The question is how the chosen images relate to the popular science texts, how to develop a systematic way of mapping such relationships and how to analyse the ways in which imagery can be used to legitimize some kinds of research at the expense of others.
Perspectives
In communication studies it is useful to resort to qualitative analysis to look in more depth at ways in which meaning is created in sublime and unique ways by combinations of textual and semiotic resources (from font and composition to design and colour). These qualitative analyses could inspire more nuanced ways of coding of larger samples of data for quantitative analysis.
Dr hab. Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska
University of Opole
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Making Biosciences Visible for Popular Consumption: Approaching Image–Text Relations in Newscientist.com Through a Critical Multimodal Analysis, Qualitative Inquiry, August 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1077800418790296.
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