ABSTRACT
This chapter synthesizes and discusses research on multimodal approaches to youth digital video composition. First, it highlights the ways in which the multiple modes that comprise digital video afford new opportunities for youth to represent and explore meanings related to their cultures, lived worlds and discourse communities. The chapter then outlines a semiotic approach to understanding youth-produced digital videos, illustrating how a focus on the sign and semiotic resources as analytical units has led to insights into how modes shape the potential of youth digital video creation. In order to illustrate how a semiotic approach can be further articulated and specified, the author then illustrates signifier-based discourse analysis, in which the signifier is the focal unit. This approach draws upon insights into discourse that have been gained by problematizing the signified and theorizing the signifier as the fundamental unit of discourse. Two examples of such an approach, drawn from the author's recent work in this area are provided. In an effort to add dimensions to existing knowledge in this area, this chapter illustrates how a signifier-based approach positions youth-created videos as multimodal discourse and illustrate how the operation of signifiers across modes can be conceptualized as imaginative and agentive.
