Multimodality and the register of disciplinary History

Abstract

While many aspects of disciplinary communication have been effectively illuminated by systemic functional linguistics, the ‘multimodal’ turn of communication requires some rethinking of old frameworks. In academic disciplines such as History, recent epistemological changes further highlight this need. From animations used by primary school students to doctoral theses, this paper draws on the systemic functional notion of register to explore how multimodal choices contribute to field, tenor and mode, just as linguistic choices do. Such multimodal examples may occur in forms which can be described as implicitly multimodal, explicitly multimodal or fully intersemiotic. All contribute to emerging forms of epistemology in the discipline and to new textual forms, with particular implications for educational practice.