What are timelines? How has the Internet changed them? What contribution can they make to teaching and research?

Despite the current focus on multimodal genre analysis, little work appears to have been carried out on embedded multimodal genres that bob up here, there and everywhere in the Internet. This presentation systematically reconstructs the evolution, functions and cultural status of one such genre: timelines − viewed as an emergent textual level binding lower-level multimodal genres (e.g. word units, graphs, diagrams, charts) to higher level genres. Part of a long-term commitment to constructing an evolutionary approach in multimodal research (Baldry, 2000, 2011; Baldry, O’Halloran, 2010), the presentation attempts to provide a definition of the very different notions of printed and digital timelines and to answer the questions posed above, using a corpus-based, scalar-oriented model of multimodality, to characterize timelines as part of Internet’s cultural diversity and as a game-changer in digital literacy and digital communication.

Participants are welcome to bring their own examples in order to stimulate an interactive discussion and to send them to anthony.baldry@gmail.com beforehand in order to facilitate their presentation.