Comics and multimodal analysis: grammar of visual design in information representation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62758/re.v3i3.213Keywords:
Comic Books, Social Semiotics, Grammar of Visual Design, Information Representation, Document AnalysisAbstract
The growing inclusion of comic books in institutional collections highlights their relevance in pop culture and academia, a factor that implies care in their acquisition, treatment, and preservation. The complexity of comics requires strategies for information representation for access and retrieval, given their unique language that combines visual and verbal elements. This study explores how social semiotics can assist in information representation in comics, aiming to identify studies related to visual design grammar and comic book analysis to ascertain which elements can be employed in the information representation process. Social semiotics, although less explored in Information Science, focuses on communication and meaning as social practices. Multimodality and grammar of visual design are relevant here, as they emphasize the diversity of semiotic modes present in informational objects. Using a qualitative approach, a systematic literature review was conducted, selecting 20 studies after filtration. The analysis of these studies reveals that social semiotics underpin the analyses of comics, structuring them in the representational, interactional, and compositional metafunctions that shape visual language. Relevant concepts from the grammar of visual design include narrative and conceptual structure, action processes, image acts and gazes, perspectives, value systems, and salience. This approach guides information professionals in reading and describing comics, highlighting content and main themes, contributing to documentary representation. It is concluded that this semiotic approach provides guidelines enabling the comprehension of rhetorical potential and sense creation in visual and multimodal documents, as well as the development of semantic metadata.
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