Accessing cultural islands: museum marketisation on the web.

‘Accessing’ cultural islands: Museum marketisation on the web Christina Samson - University of Florence – Italy christina.samson@unifi.it Museums have for long been viewed as heterotopias, that is, spatially isolated places juxtaposing incompatible objects and discontinuous times (Foucault 1998), wherein material evidence has not simply been exhibited but also collected, preserved, and studied. Museums are thus cultural authorities and repositories of authentic knowledge (Harrison 2005). After an egalitarian mission of public and individual education eventually resulted in addressing small, already well-educated samples of population, many of these institutions have undergone changes. These are linked to neoliberal notions of culture which consider museums a consumer product (Barry 1998) subject to marketisation. Many museums have therefore turned into active cultural agents (Bondi 2009) exploiting, as companies do, the use of the Internet by creating websites to communicate with, and promote themselves to, a vast heterogeneous public (Samson 2007; 2009). Museum websites are interactive spaces wherein the combination of visual and verbal components of multimodal communication has allowed these institutions to engage web surfers for more than one communicative purpose at a time, thus calling for a ‘multiperspective model of analysis’ (Bhatia 2004). Despite a growing interest in the effects of new technologies on written communication (Boardman 2005), on promotional discourse (Salvi and Bamford 2007; Janoschka, 2004), and on visual communication in multimodality (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001), museum websites have received limited attention (Bondi 2009; Samson 2009). This paper therefore analyses the language used in museum descriptions on the Web. Drawing on Hunston (2008), quantitative analyses of a small specialised corpus divided into three sub-corpora focus on the groups of semantic sequences associated with core keywords. The qualitative analysis attempts a pragmatic interpretation of the data across the three sub-corpora. The findings highlight the role of semantic sequences typifying museum descriptions in this institutional genre under the pressure of technological innovation. References Bhatia, V. K. 2004. Worlds of Written Discourse. London: Continuum. Boardman, M. 2005. The Language of Websites. London: Routledge. Bondi, M. 2009. Perspective and position in museum websites. In Radighieri, S. and Tucker, P. (Eds.) Point of view: description and evaluation across discourses. Roma: Officina. Foucault, M. 1994. Dits et ècrits 1954-1988, vol. IV. Paris: Gallimard. Hunston, S. 2008. Starting with the small words: Patterns, lexis and semantic sequences. IJofCL 13, 271-295. Janoschka, A. 2004. Web Advertising. New Forms of Communication on the Internet. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kress, G. R. and T. Van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse. London: Arnold. Salvi, R. and J. Bamford (Eds.) Business Discourse: Language at Work. Roma: Aracne. Samson, C. forthcoming. Ex-sacred territories on the internet. Examples of space, identity and discourse interconnectedness in museum websites, RILA. Samson, C. 2009. Business in the 21st century: description and evaluation in a corpus of “product” pages in business to consumer websites. In Radighieri, S. and Tucker, P. (Eds.) Point of view: description and evaluation across discourses. Roma: Officina. Samson C 2007. Academic and professional website identities: anything to share? In Quaderni del