The phenomenon of multimodality entails that almost every discourse is multimodal. Multimodal refers to the combination of images, videos and languages with either a spoken- (posture, hand-gesture, etc.) or a written- (illustrations, colours, etc.) discourse (Van Leeuwen, 2015). For this edition, we make use of multimodality since we utilise images, audio recordings and videos to help the reader to better understand and contextualise the articles. Furthermore, thanks to the affordances of using digital devices and screen-technologies it is now possible to significantly write text and reconfigure images to shape new meanings (Jewitt, 2015). Screen-based texts, such as this 3D scholarly edition, are multimodal since they consist of audios, videos, animations, images and more. Here the written texts are only one mode thus, its meaning needs to be understood by also taking the multimedia into consideration (Jewitt, 2015).
The Smithsonian Voyager website was developed to show and share digital 3D models and the stories hidden behind them (Smithsonian Voyager, n.d). It is multimodal since in order to tell these stories, the creator can utilise various features and interactive tools offered by the Voyager web explorer. Instances of these features and tools are: customisable annotations, articles, measurement tools, 3D animated tours, etc (Smithsonian Voyager, n.d). To tell the story of the Vincent van Gogh Funko Pop! we created three interactive tours that included both annotations and articles. Thus, to help the reader fully immerse in our tour we tried to make use of many tools offered by the Voyager website. On the model, it is possible to note an example of how we used annotations and another 3D model to narrate our story about the Vincent van Gogh Funko Pop!. From our experience with it, the interactive tours are a great way to tell different stories that share the same topic. For instance, we were able to first give an introduction of the Funko Inc. company which produced the Vincent van Gogh Pop! and then delve into the life of the artist and how he became so popular in the 21st century. Although these two stories do not seem to be strictly related, thanks to the structure of the website and the presence of the tours we were able to make strong connection and create one unique discourse.