Helsingin kaupungin matkailuesitteiden multimodaalinen korpus

Abstract

This article describes a data set – a multimodal corpus – which consists of 58 double-pages from English-language tourist brochures published by the city of Helsinki, Finland, between 1967 and 2008. The corpus, which has been released for public use, was compiled to investigate how language, photographs, illustrations and other modes of communication interact in the tourist brochures. For this purpose, each double-page was annotated for its content, layout, appearance and interrelations using multi-layered stand-off XML annotation. The article describes each annotation layer in detail, while also considering how the corpus may be queried and transformed into visualizations. Finally, the implications of multimodality to human geography are considered briefly.