“From cultural islands to popular sites. Semantic sequences typifying museum descriptions on the Web”

Many museums, by exploiting the web, are turning from cultural islands into active cultural agents to face economic pressures and/or needs in a rapidly changing market and societal environment. Websites enable museums to popularise themselves by addressing a less elitist public on a one-to-one level with simple narratives and a combination of sign systems. Despite growing literature on the popularization of pedagogical and scientific genres, the effects of new technologies on written and visual communication in multimodality, there is a paucity of studies on the popularization of museums through their websites. This paper thus analyses: the semantic sequences typifying a small specialised corpus of Italian and South African museum websites; if meaning in the sequences varies across the corpus; if the medium impacts on the sequences and the relationship between web-writer and browser. The methodology adopted is quantitative and qualitative. The findings indicate that the narratives in the museums’ webpages are typified by informative-descriptive-evaluative discourses affected by the medium. Moreover, the data suggest that popularisation may be viewed in this web-related genre as sliding along a continuum between narrative and promotional discourse wherein information, description and evaluation overlap and intertwine while addressing a vast heterogeneous public.