This book draws on visual data, ranging from advertisements to postage stamps to digital personal photography, to offer a complex interpretation of the different social functions realised by these texts as semiotic artefacts. Framed within the media environment of the city of Hong Kong, the study demonstrates the importance of social context to meaning making and social semiotic multimodal analysis. This book will be of interest to readers in the arts, humanities and social sciences, particularly within the fields of semiotics, visual studies, design studies, media and cultural studies, anthropology and sociology.

"This book makes a striking contribution combining Kress and van Leeuwen's social semiotic analysis with extensive and fascinating in-depth historical research to bring insights into a range of print and digital media showing how multimodality can be fruitfully adapted with the sensitivity to non Western media." - Professor David Machin, Department of Media and Communication, Örebro University, Sweden

This book draws on visual data, ranging from advertisements to postage stamps to digital personal photography, to offer a complex interpretation of the different social functions realised by these texts as semiotic artefacts. Framed within the media environment of the city of Hong Kong, the study demonstrates the importance of social context to meaning making and social semiotic multimodal analysis. This book will be of interest to readers in the arts, humanities and social sciences, particularly within the fields of semiotics, visual studies, design studies, media andcultural studies, anthropology and sociology.

May L-Y Wong is Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of English at The University of Hong Kong. Her research focusses on social-semiotic approaches to visual texts. In particular, she is interested in the relation between multimodality and culture, drawing on research in social semiotics to explain the utility of multimodal resources in various discursive contexts which are of significance to local cultural values and heritage.