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This paper presents a survey of research into interactive robotic systems for the purpose of identifying the state of the art capabilities as well as the extant gaps in this emerging field. Communication is multimodal. Multimodality is a representation of many modes chosen from rhetorical aspects for its communication potentials. The author seeks to define the available automation capabilities in communication using multimodalities that will support a proposed Interactive Robot System (IRS) as an AI mounted robotic platform to advance the speed and quality of military operational and tactical decision making.

This review will begin by presenting key developments in the robotic interaction field with the objective of identifying essential technological developments that set conditions for robotic platforms to function autonomously. After surveying the key aspects in Human Robot Interaction (HRI), Unmanned Autonomous System (UAS), visualization, Virtual Environment (VE) and prediction, the paper then proceeds to describe the gaps in the application areas that will require extension and integration to enable the prototyping of the IRS. A brief examination of other work in HRI-related fields concludes with a recapitulation of the IRS challenge that will set conditions for future success.

Using insights from a balanced cross section of sources from the government, academic, and commercial entities that contribute to HRI a multimodal IRS in military communication is introduced. Multimodal IRS (MIRS) in military communication has yet to be deployed.

Multimodal robotic interface for the MIRS is an interdisciplinary endeavour. This is not realistic that one can comprehend all expert and related knowledge and skills to design and develop such multimodal interactive robotic interface. In this brief preliminary survey, the author has discussed extant AI, robotics, NLP, CV, VDM, and VE applications that is directly related to multimodal interaction. Each mode of this multimodal communication is an active research area. Multimodal human/military robot communication is the ultimate goal of this research.

A multimodal autonomous robot in military communication using speech, images, gestures, VST and VE has yet to be deployed. Autonomous multimodal communication is expected to open wider possibilities for all armed forces. Given the density of the land domain, the army is in a position to exploit the opportunities for human–machine teaming (HMT) exposure. Naval and air forces will adopt platform specific suites for specially selected operators to integrate with and leverage this emerging technology. The possession of a flexible communications means that readily adapts to virtual training will enhance planning and mission rehearsals tremendously.

Interaction, perception, cognition and visualization based multimodal communication system is yet missing. Options to communicate, express and convey information in HMT setting with multiple options, suggestions and recommendations will certainly enhance military communication, strength, engagement, security, cognition, perception as well as the ability to act confidently for a successful mission.

The objective is to develop a multimodal autonomous interactive robot for military communications. This survey reports the state of the art, what exists and what is missing, what can be done and possibilities of extension that support the military in maintaining effective communication using multimodalities. There are some separate ongoing progresses, such as in machine-enabled speech, image recognition, tracking, visualizations for situational awareness, and virtual environments. At this time, there is no integrated approach for multimodal human robot interaction that proposes a flexible and agile communication. The report briefly introduces the research proposal about multimodal interactive robot in military communication.

The purpose of this paper is to address the need to reconsider online external communication that integrates diversity management (DM) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) by examining the multimodal discursive strategies purposefully employed by organizations to reflect the symbiotic relationship between these two areas of management practice and to communicatively emphasize their corporate commitment.

Building on the recently emerged stream of literature linking DM and CSR, and adopting a critical perspective on discourse analysis, this study delves into the multimodal discursive strategies that help bridge DM and CSR in online external communication. The analytical approach proposed is used for the qualitative analysis of 43 web pages selected from Microsoft company’s “Global Diversity and Inclusion” website.

Findings highlight the discursive efforts made by the organization to strategically integrate DM and CSR communication into one single framework. The analysis reveals how the coordinates of social practices (social actors and social actions) are purposefully and multimodally recontextualized in the corporate discourse when communicating this integration.

This study extends the focus of critical discourse analysis from exclusively language to the interplay of different semiotic modes, offering a fine-grained exploration of the multimodal meaning construction performed by organizations in the context of online external communication.

Children’s emerging conceptions about literacy and its functions are influenced by their experiences with a wide range of written and oral literacies, including the use of digital technology, in their homes and communities. Now that mobile technologies have become intuitive to use, relatively inexpensive, small and easy to move around and networked, they have provided an entry point for transformations in the creation and sharing of texts – they are changing the way young children ‘do’ literacy. In this chapter, the authors discuss the ways that children learn about multimodal texts; how mobile technology can facilitate the reading, creation and sharing of multimodal texts in preschool and primary classrooms; the literacy skills necessary for reading multimodal texts, and; strategies for planning instruction into which multimodal texts and mobile devices are integrated. Examples of how children may engage in multimodal reading and writing in and out of the classroom are also provided.

This article aims to investigate evaluative framing of global plastic pollution as discursively performed by two opposed categories of social actors, namely corporations versus environmental movements.

The article builds on the literature related to framing, issue arenas and moral evaluations to unravel how evaluative framing and counterframing are implemented in multimodal digital spaces and how social practices get legitimized or delegitimized according to different communicative purposes. It presents a longitudinal critical discourse analysis of the issue-related webpages and press releases of PepsiCo, one of the worst global plastic polluters, and of the global environmental movement #breakfreefromplastic.

Findings suggest that the systematic recurrence of specific evaluative strategies has a double macro-function: (a) organizing discourses strategically through its presence or absence; (b) signalling the moral significance of recontextualized social practices by conferring legitimacy to remedial actions and/or illegitimacy to deviant actions.

This study contributes to increasing accountable environmental action and trustful communication for overcoming global sustainability issues.

The article offers a nuanced understanding of the role of evaluative framing in communicating global sustainability issues. Methodologically, it extends existing categories of moral evaluations and articulates a framework for future studies.

This paper aims to examine language learners’ critical multimodal literacy practices with a moving-image text, focusing on text comprehension and interpretation rather than text production. It takes a critical perspective towards multimodality and proposes the simultaneous emphasis on critical and multimodal literacies.

This qualitative teacher-inquiry adopts critical multimodal literacy as the framework for understanding learners’ literacy practices. The course implementation highlights images, sounds and words as encompassing the five modes of visual, aural, linguistic, gestural and spatial (Arola et al., 2014) in emphasizing the multimodal in critical multimodal literacy, and the purposeful organization of the images, sounds and words as reflecting the critical in critical multimodal literacy. The analysis also adopts Serafini’s (2010) concentric perceptual, structural and ideological perspectives as the tenets of critical multimodal literacy.

The findings show that focusing on images, sounds, words and their purposeful organization enabled the students to critically examine a moving-image text through considerations for the multiple modes and arriving at the structural and ideological interpretive perspectives.

This study fills a gap in the literature, as very little research has been done to investigate the ways in which language learners engage with, that is, comprehend and interpret, moving-image multimodal texts. In addition, it presents a critical multimodal literacy framework based on Serafini’s (2010) tripartite perspectives and offers pedagogical suggestions for incorporating critical multimodal literacy in language classrooms.

Recent interest in the multimodal accomplishment of organization has focused on the material and symbolic aspects of materiality. We argue that current literature invokes diverse “multimodal imaginaries,” that is, ways of conceiving the relation between the material and the conceptual, and that the different imaginaries support a plurality of perspectives on materiality. Using the empirical case of a large urban renewal project in São Paulo, Brazil, we illustrate three different multimodal imaginaries – the concrete, the semiotic, and the mimetic – and indicate how each imaginary determines the way in which the site in question is discursively constructed. After outlining the different approaches, we discuss their theoretical implications, advantages, and constraints, setting an agenda for future studies of materiality in organizational and institutional contexts.

Our world had always been multimodal, but studying how young children enact and embody literacy practices, especially reading, has often been overlooked. The purpose of this study was to examine how young children respond to nonfiction picturebooks in multimodal ways. This paper aims to answer the question: What multimodal resources do readers use to respond to and construct meaning from nonfiction picturebooks?

Undergirded by Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading and social semiotic multimodality, a 9-min video clip of three boys making sense of one nonfiction picturebook during reading workshop was analyzed using Norris’ approach to multimodal data analysis. This research stemmed from a five-month-long case study of one kindergarten class’s multimodal and collective responses to nonfiction picturebooks.

Findings demonstrate how readers use gesture, gaze and proxemics in addition to language to signal agreement with one another, explain new ideas or concepts to one another and incorporate their background knowledge. In addition to reading images, the children learned to read each other.

This research indicates that reading is inherently multimodal, recursive and complex and provides implications for teachers to reconsider what kinds of responses they prioritize in their classrooms. Additionally, this research establishes the need to better understand how readers respond to nonfiction books and a broader examination of multimodality in the literacy curriculum.

A multimodal perspective highlights the importance of attending to the different modes, mostly verbal and visual, which organizations use when conveying messages. We complement this perspective by adding an additional layer, namely the medium through which messages appear. We suggest that organizations can fine-tune messages not only by playing with possible interactions across modes, but also across media. We build our reasoning around the communication of identity claims. Specifically, we are interested in how identity elements are referenced in verbal and visual modes of meaning making, and how these modes interrelate both with one another and with the respective channels of communication on which they appear. We propose that organizations differentially select identity elements across diverse media and draw on specific identity elements modally in their quest for legitimate distinctiveness. We propose three ways in which multimodal identity claims interact: intensifying, in which messages draw from the same theme to reinforce claims; complementing, in which messages complement each other to enhance meaning; and transposing, in which a dominant theme in one message is transposed into another theme elsewhere. We provide an illustration with identity claims made by single-malt Scotch whisky distilleries.

The aim of this paper is to study the development of a smoldering crisis over time. The focus is on a nationwide news media and online news communication related to a smoldering crisis running in the Danish healthcare system since 2016: the problematic implementation of a large-scale electronic health record (EHR), technology entitled Sundhedsplatformen (SP), in the hospitals of the capital region of Denmark.

Based on insights from crisis communication theories and in particular rhetorical arena theory (RAT), traces of SP smoldering crisis and patterns of discursive strategies are identified and explained from a longitudinal perspective to explain the communicative complexity that characterizes this smoldering crisis. To build an understanding of how this smoldering crisis is perceived, followed and kept alive, an analysis of (de)legitimation discursive strategies employed strategically by various actors and voices in news articles is conducted in relation to four communicative themes: issue identification, warnings, blame attribution and potential solutions.

It has been found that a legitimacy deficit emerges communicatively through specific (de)legitimation strategies during this smoldering crisis. New insights into RAT (Frandsen and Johansen, 2017) are also provided.

This study is not only of theoretical relevance, but it is also of practical relevance for public relation professionals who aim to identify characteristics of starting smoldering crises as well as to find strategic responses to the ongoing challenges and the developing over time of smoldering crises.

New insights into RAT (Frandsen and Johansen, 2017) are provided.