Social taste and meaning at glance: A multimodal framework of aesthetics in webtexts

This working paper presents a social semiotic framework for the analysis of aesthetics in digital texts. It observes modal configurations in layout, font, colour, writing, visuals and interactivity to derive a webtext’s aesthetic meaning potential, which could hardly be accounted for in traditional analysis of writing alone. A multi-stage process of descriptor assignment associates subjective and social evaluations to objectively observable descriptors attributed first analytically to each modal feature, and then considered in combination. Intended to work for all webtexts, the framework is applied to the analysis of two food blogs and provides a fine-grained analysis of a text’s social positioning and orientation towards its author and audience.