Multimodal analysis of aesthetics: Two versions of a food blog compared

Even when considering visuals besides language, current research on digital texts generally focuses its analysis on contents. Investigations on the visuals of a website usually involve counting, coding and analysing the images that are published as contents along with the written texts (e.g., Carpenter 2010; Jeffres and Lin 2006; Kenix 2009; Kim, Coyle, and Gould 2009). Among qualitative studies in the social sciences, in communication and media studies especially, when it comes to analysing visuals, content analysis seems to be the preferred methodology (Kim and Weaver 2002; Peng, Zhang, Zhong, and Zhu 2013). Even more, irrespectively of the different theoretical perspectives or methodologies adopted (for an overview, van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001), most visual analyses on texts focus solely on their contents, i.e., still/moving images (for an example in multimodal studies, Knox 2009).