Academic Posters: A Textual and Visual Metadiscourse Analysis

✍ Scribed by Larissa D’Angelo

• Publisher: Peter Lang
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 386
• Series: Linguistic Insights; 214
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume presents a cross-disciplinary analysis of academic poster presentations, taking into consideration the text and visuals that posters display depending on the discipline within which they are created. As the academic poster is a multimodal genre, different modal aspects have been taken into consideration when analysing it, a fact that has somehow complicated the genre analysis conducted, but has also stimulated the research work involved and, in the end, provided interesting results.
The analysis carried out here has highlighted significant cross-disciplinary differences in terms of word count, portrait/landscape orientation and layout of posters, as well as discipline and subdiscipline-specific patterns for what concerns the use of textual interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources and visual interactive resources.
The investigation has revealed what textual and visual metadiscourse resources are employed, where and why, and as a consequence, what textual and visual metadiscourse strategies should be adopted by poster authors depending on the practices and expectations of their academic community.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 The poster session: the ‘open market’ of research
1.2 Rationale for the study
1.3 Overview of the volume
Chapter 2: Review of the literature
2.1 Overview of the chapter
2.2 The academic community, its disciplines and subdisciplines
2.3 What is academic discourse?
2.4 What are academic genres?
2.5 What is an academic poster presentation?
2.6 What is metadiscourse?
2.7 What is multimodality?
2.8 Principles underlying corpus design
2.9 Summary of the chapter and Research Questions
Chapter 3: Data collected
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Why a corpus of academic posters?
3.3 Selection of subdisciplines
3.4 Principles underlying my corpus design
3.5 The survey
3.6 Retrieval of posters
3.7 Interviews with poster presenters
3.8 Naming and formatting of files
3.9 Summary of the chapter
Chapter 4: Framework of analysis
4.1 Overview of the chapter
4.2 A new framework of analysis
4.3 Metadiscourse resources in texts
4.4 Metadiscourse resources in visuals
4.5 Searching the corpus
4.6 The limits of description
4.7 Summary and conclusions
Chapter 5: Results and analysis by subcorpora
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Textual and visual analysis of the High Energy Particle Physics subcorpus
5.3 Textual and visual analysis of the Law subcorpus
5.4 Textual and visual analysis of the Clinical Psychology subcorpus
5.5 A cross-disciplinary comparison of academic posters
Chapter 6: General discussion and conclusions
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Research question 1
6.3 Research question 2
6.4 Research question 3
6.5 Research limitations and recommendations
for further research
6.6 Conclusions
Appendices
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Appendix 4
Appendix 5
Appendix 6
Appendix 7
References
Index