This website hosts material mostly relating to my PhD project, Localizing pack messages: A framework for corpus-based cross-cultural multimodal analysis. This work was done at the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Leeds.
I have uploaded various papers and slides which present this and other work.
The thesis provides an in-depth study of localization between English and Chinese in an under-researched genre, pack messages. It is available to download in full-fat (55MB) and semi-skimmed (37MB) versions.
Building on previous empirical research on multimodal discourse analysis, especially that carried out as part of the Genre and Multimodality (GeM) project, I developed and refined existing theoretical approaches, extending these to cross-cultural contrastive analysis. In particular, the thesis presents novel accounts of multimodal texture and genre. The role of typography in expressing language in graphic mode is central to both.
The other main contribution of the work was the implementation of a suite of software tools to support the capture, annotation and analysis of data from static artefacts. Thus I attempted to make tractable the problem of building and working with multimodal document corpora.
The annotated data in the pack message corpus is made available as two gzipped tar archives, one containing just the XML files and DTDs (150KB), the other also containing high resolution packshots (437MB).
A more significant development during the same period was the arrival of The Little Boy, in November 2007. This is documented on this rather unwieldy page.
On completing the PhD, I collaborated with information design specialists at the Simplification Centre at the University of Reading on another corpus development project. I am currently engaged full-time in various research and teaching activities back at CTS.
More information about my past and present activities is given on this CV.
If you would like to contact me, please send mail to: m.thomas [at] leeds.ac.uk