Before going on to the second part of her interview, here’s a little more about Kay O’Halloran. She has a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Murdoch University (Australia), a B.Sc. in Mathematics and a Dip. Ed. and B.Ed. (First Class Honours) from the University of Western Australia.

The Multimodal Analysis Lab of which she is the Director brings together researchers from engineering, the performing arts, medicine, computer science, arts and social sciences, architecture, and science working together in an interdisciplinary environment. (This is the first instance where I’ve seen the word interdisciplinary and can wholeheartedly agree with its use. As I have found, interdisciplinary can mean that an organic chemist is having to collaborate with an inorganic chemist or an historian is working with an anthropologist. I understand that there are leaps between, for example, history and anthropology but by comparison with engineering and the performing arts, the leap just isn’t that big.)

There’s more on Kay O’Halloran’s page here and more on the Multimodal Analysis Lab here.

2. Could you describe the research  questions, agendas and directions that are most compelling to you at this  time?

Multimodal research involves new questions and problems such as:

– What are the functionalities of the resources (e.g. language versus image)?

– How do choices combine to make meaning in artefacts and events?

– What types of reconstruals take place within and across semiotic artefacts and events and what type of metaphors consequently arise?

– How is digital meaning expanding our meaning-making potential?

The most compelling agendas and directions in multimodal research include developing new approaches to annotating, analysing, modeling, and interpreting semiotic patterns using digital media technologies, particularly in dynamic contexts (e.g. videos, film, website browsing, online learning materials). The development of new practices for multimodal analysis (e.g. multimodal corpus approaches) means we can investigate social cultural patterns and trends and the nature of knowledge and contemporary life in the age of digital media, together with its limitations. Surely new media offers us the potential for new research paradigms and making new types of meanings which will lead us to new ways of thinking about the world. Also, multimodal approaches offer the promise of new paradigms for educational research where classroom and pedagogical practices and disciplinary knowledge can be investigated in their entirety. Multimodal research opens up a new exciting world, one which is being eagerly embraced by academic researchers and postgraduate students as the way forward (in my experience at least).