CLIS Home > Research & Projects > Students Publications & Presentations

Emily Marsh

Rhetorical Relationships Between Images and Text in Web Pages
Emily Marsh

Advisory Committee:
Professor Dagobert Soergel: Chair/Advisor
Professor Eileen Abels
Professor Mariam Dreher
Professor Anne MacLeod
Professor Marilyn Domas White

This study examined the ways images relate to text and fulfill rhetorical functions in Web pages. Secondary subjects were the physical nature of images, relevance relationships within image-text pairs, and a demonstration of Reader-Response literary theory as a tool for analyzing the ways images interact with text. Its findings should interest both the documents. A system of image and text retrieval and one of display using illustration functions could 1. Reveal the presence and physical position of image-text relationships in documents, 2. Describe their nature, and 3. Provide an overall sense of a document's conceptual structure so that users and designers alike could make informed decisions about its quality and potential usefulness.

Analysis of forty-five popular home pages from three genres (educational pages for children, newspapers, and retailers) resulted in 954 discrete image-text pairs. An original three-faceted typology of over 40 illustration functions was applied to the dataset.

The three facets were: A. Functions expressing little relation to text, B. Those expressing a close relation to text, and C. Those going beyond the text. Three-quarters of all pairs displayed one or more A functions and one or more B functions; only one quarter of the pairs used one or more of the C functions. The educational pairs used the A functions twice as often as the B functions and three times as often as the C functions. The newspaper pairs showed the following pattern: B functions most often, followed distantly by A and C. The retail pairs used both the A and B functions very frequently, with C functions used only occasionally.

Web authors use images to fulfill relatively complex rhetorical programs. Pairs in the educational pages illustrated the meaning of text while also working to attract and motivate their young readers (A and B functions). Newspapers used the same strategy of combining A and B functions but relied much more heavily on the B functions alone. The retail pairs worked in much the same way as did the educational ones, combining A and B functions, only with a heavier emphasis on the latter functions.

The quantitative analysis showed the educational pages to contain the most images, using the highest relative percentage of screen space than any other genre. Newspapers used the fewest number of images, occupying the smallest area, with the largest image-to-text ratio. The retail pages used images more often than newspapers, linked to fewer text segments, and placed closest to text.

Other findings on the form of images, images as rhetorical figures, and ways to apply critical analysis to image-text relationships were also analyzed on the basis of conceptual significance and practical application.