Condensing Meaning

Abstract

In this chapter we address the challenge of interpreting and teaching complex infographics of the kind read and viewed in secondary school science in Australia. Inspired by the work of Bateman and his colleagues we adopt a complementary bottom-up and top-down perspective – analysing infographics bottom-up in terms of general gestalt grouping principles (for both micro- and macro-groups) and interpreting images top-down with respect to abductions based on modelling of the relevant field (as activity, item, and property), in Systemic Functional Linguistic theory (SFL). We then compare two infographics in detail, considering how mitosis is intermodally construed as activity and composition in verbiage and image. The key finding arising from this analysis is that in spite of the complexity of the infographics, considerable information has to be abduced, drawing on additional knowledge of the field – information that the co-text in the textbooks accompanying these infographics may not make explicit. This highlights the importance of multimodal literacy pedagogy as a crucial part of science education. We show how such a pedagogy can address the complexity of reading infographics in conjunction with verbal co-text. In this kind of carefully scaffolded methodology, the synoptic view of complex knowledge aggregation provided by infographics can play a significant role in the dynamics of knowledge building.