Blurb:

How can we go about describing a website? Are web pages in fact pages? Or is the idea of the page just a metaphor? How do we account for the web page in terms of resources and the kinds of meanings that people make? And what about the web page as genre? Can we describe web pages in terms of different genres? How can we describe a particular pathway through a website and how can we relate a particular pathway to the virtual resources of a specific website as a whole? And what transcription techniques can we develop? How do websites work? How does this connect back to the notion of transcription? To what extent does the transcription speak for itself as a description of the web page?

As we can see from these questions, there are many possible starting points in the analysis of web pages. Our chosen approach is to make some general observations about the nature of websites, which we illustrate with some examples. We then discuss a number of websites in detail applying the technique of multimodal transcription and text analysis to them.



3.0 Introduction

3.1 Page or screen?

3.2 Decoupling of material support and information on the computer screen

3.3 The relationship between web page, website, web users and web genres

3.4 The home page

3.5 The Nasa Kids home page

3.6 Creating a hypertext pathway

3.7 The British Museum Children’s COMPASS website

3.7.1 Children’s COMPASS home page: description of multimodal objects

3.8 A multimodal hypertextual thematic formation: daily life in Asia

3.8.1 Thematic system analysis: preliminary observations and an example

3.8.2 Multimodal thematic system development along a hypertext pathway

3.9 The action potential of hypertext objects

3.9.1 Experiential meaning

3.9.2 Interpersonal meaning .

3.9.3 Textual meaning

3.10 The virtual world of hypertext

3.11 Community or social network of users and practices?

3.12 The WWW as technological infrastructure and meaning-making resource

3.13 Conclusion