A taxonomy of relationships between images and text

The paper establishes a taxonomy of image-text relationships that reflects the ways that images and text interact. It is applicable to all subject areas and document types. The taxonomy was developed to answer the research question: how does an illustration relate to the text with which it is associated, or, what are the functions of illustration? Developed in a two-stage process – first, analysis of relevant research in children’s literature, dictionary development, education, journalism, and library and information design and, second, subsequent application of the first version of the taxonomy to 954 image-text pairs in 45 Web pages (pages with educational content for children, online newspapers, and retail business pages) – the taxonomy identifies 49 relationships and groups them in three categories according to the closeness of the conceptual relationship between image and text. The paper uses qualitative content analysis to illustrate use of the taxonomy to analyze four image-text pairs in government publications and discusses the implications of the research for information retrieval and document design. Documents are complex tools created to communicate messages to readers. Among the elements used in developing documents are prose, images, font types, color, and spatial relationships. The message is a wedding of these components, and the interplay among all elements is a critical concern to people who need to convey information effectively. This paper focuses on an increasingly important aspect of this problem – the relationships between text and images. In writing about the design of Web sites, where images are widely used in conjunction with prose, Karen A. Schriver (1997, pp. 406-7) says: We have almost no knowledge about how best to structure the relationships between words and pictures on the Web . . . too much time in document design circles is being spent arguing over the details of HTML code . . . It’s the interplay of prose and graphics that ought to concern us. The paper creates a taxonomy of relationships between images and text that can be used for analyzing the way that images and text interact. It is applicable to all subject areas and all types of documents. Writers and illustrators can use it as a tool as they create documents, and researchers can analyze the relationships between image and prose to identify and predict the effects of combinations once documents have been published. The taxonomy was The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm The authors gratefully acknowledge the thoughtful comments of Dagobert Soergel, Eileen G. Abels, Mariam Dreher, and Anne MacLeod on a related version of this paper. Image-text relationships