ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the issues surrounding large-scale analyses of the modal ensemble through a case study that focuses on one form of contemporary written communication, the Instagram post, and demonstrates an analytical approach that takes into account the whole text, including non-verbal elements. It employs corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis, which entails the triangulation of corpus methods with multimodal discourse analysis. Research examining the whole text as a modal ensemble, bringing analyses of both the verbal and visual elements of a social media post together, and on a large scale. However, a new approach combining corpus linguistic methods with multimodal discourse analysis is a first step in addressing the complex issues surrounding such analyses, and is an attempt at reducing the partiality of corpus and discourse analysis. Analysing both verbal and visual elements of each Instagram post concurrently involves importing all the data into a software interface such as a relational database.
