GeM-HTB: A Multimodal Corpus of Tourist Brochures Produced by the City of Helsinki, Finland (1967-2008)

The corpus is annotated using the Genre and Multimodality (GeM) model, which has been described extensively in “Multimodality and Genre: A Foundation for the Systematic Analysis of Multimodal Documents” by John A. Bateman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

The corpus contains 58 double-pages from 30 tourist brochures produced by the city of Helsinki, Finland, between 1967 and 2008. The double-pages included in the corpus are from the following brochures:

Coming Events in Helsinki (1967)
Helsinki's Four Tourist Islands (1967)
Museums and Exhibitions in Helsinki (1967)
Helsinki: Daughter of the Baltic (1969)
Helsinki: Daughter of the Baltic (1972)
Helsinki's Four Tourist Islands (1972)
Sights In and Around Helsinki (1972)
Helsinki's Four Tourist Islands (1976)
Helsinki Tourist Information (1977)
A Walking Tour in Helsinki (Kruununhaka) (1978)
The Greater Helsinki (1980)
Sculptures and Monuments in Helsinki (1982)
A Walking Tour in Helsinki (Eläintarha-Töölö) (1983)
Helsinki's Four Tourist Islands (1984)
Holiday in Helsinki (1984)
Suomenlinna Seafortress in Helsinki (1986)
See Helsinki on Foot (1987)
Helsinki's Four Tourist Islands (1988)
Welcome to Helsinki (1995)
Welcome to Helsinki (1998)
Helsinki Your Way (1999)
Helsinki: What, Where, When (1999)
Helsinki 1550-2000 (2000)
Suomenlinna Maritime Fortress (2001)
Summer Helsinki (2002)
Winter-Helsinki (2003)
Bohemian Nordic Oddity (2006)
Weekend Delight in Helsinki (2006)
Groovy Nordic Oddity (2008)
Helsinki Visitors Guide (2008) 

In addition to the scanned double-pages, the annotation for each double-page is contained in four files, one for each layer: base (content), layout, rhetorical structure and navigation. These layers and the motivation for developing the corpus and how it has been used in multimodal research has been described in the following works:

Hiippala, T. (2013) Modelling the structure of a multimodal artefact. PhD thesis, University of Helsinki. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-10-9427-9

Hiippala, T. (2015) The Structure of Multimodal Documents: An Empirical Approach. Routledge: London & New York.

If you wish to cite this corpus, which is provided with a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license, please use the following reference:

Hiippala, T. (2015) GeM-HTB: A Multimodal Corpus of Tourist Brochures Produced by the City of Helsinki, Finland (1967–2008). http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-201411281

If you have any questions about the corpus, feel free to contact me at tuomo.hiippala@iki.fi