ABSTRACT
Using a mixed methods approach, this chapter examines how images function in collaboration with linguistic text to construct the notion of austerity in two British newspapers from the Multimodal Multimedia Austerity Corpus. The approach involves categorising 301 images from The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph newspapers (January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2016) into distinct image types (e.g., peaceful protest groups, violent acts, poverty) and classifying the different types of texts in which these images appear (e.g., business/financial news, main news articles, comments and opinion pieces). To facilitate the analysis, the Multimodal Visualisation App is used to explore the distribution of different image types across the two newspapers and the relations between the image categories and the article types in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. We also explore the visual-verbal relations established between images, captions and article headlines and where these photographs appear in online media sites, both before and after their publication in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph newspapers. Interpreted from a social semiotic perspective, the results permit us to make informed observations about the functions of the image-article combinations in the AuBriN corpus and how these images are used to reinforce these views in online media platforms over time.
