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Text: Define

Text traditionally means written words. But because we want to talk about the visuals, sounds, and movement that make up multimedia, we use the term "text" to refer to a piece of communication as a whole. Texts include artwork such as photographs, sculptures, and band flyers, but also poems and novels, Twitter feeds, sound effects and radio essays, and multimedia works such as YouTube videos and Flash animations. All texts are multimodal—made up of different arrangements of visual, aural, and linguistic elements (and maybe others as well). Each mode and each element within that mode adds meaning to a text.

This photograph by Lauren Greenfield is a purely visual text.