ABSTRACT
This chapter describes MCA (Multimodal Corpus Authoring system), a web-based multimodal concordancer, which allows researchers to analyze multi-modal film genres for the general public (cinema, DVD, TV or web-based films) as well as for more restricted audiences (company training films, recordings of university lectures, recordings of children telling stories). MCA is the product of three interuniversity projects—Citatal, Linguatel, and Didactas—that have been undertaken in Italy. It was originally designed to carry out searches in a corpus of car advertisements as part of a multimodal approach to corpus linguistics (Baldry & Thibault, 2001, in press-a) but has since contributed to other research projects (Taylor & Baldry, 2001a, 2001b; Baldry, 2004; Baldry & Thibault, in press-b). This chapter reconstructs MCA’s development path from its origins in 1998 to the latest version (MCA 3, January 2004), highlighting its growth from a concordancing tool with a highly restricted user base to one that caters to the needs of a much wider research and teaching community. In ways that are detailed shortly, the latest version, MCA 3, consolidates MCA’s role as a tool that can contribute to interuniversity projects concerned with research into film genres and related teaching projects. This latest release adds a much-needed security system that allows teams of researchers working in different universities to access, develop, and suitably protect their collective work while providing other research teams with an appropriate level of access to this research.
