Open Access

Henning Lobin

• In recent times presentations have drawn the attention of scientific interest as a new form of communication. In visualization of abstract structures or relationships in scholarly presentations using diagrams, different medial layers of meaning are conjoined in a very special way. The present paper examines firstly the multimodal structure of presentations and the mechanisms of establishing cross-modality coherence. Then the results of a reception experiment are discussed that gives rise to the assumption that multimodality can in fact improve the understanding of scholarly presentations. In the final part of the paper the production of an abstract visualization in a scholarly presentation is exemplified with regard to the solution of disambiguation and linearization problems. We claim that abstract visualizations in presentations are used to produce narratives by the speaker, and without such narratives this kind of visualization cannot be understood properly.