| Abstrakt: |
Websites play a double role in museum communication: on the one hand, they serve as powerful branding tools, where museums establish identity online, and, on the other, they are bridging tools, able to reach out to potential visitors. Both from the perspective of linguists as well as practitioners, little attention has been paid to the interplay of these two dimensions, which defines the quality of the relationship established online with visitors and identifies the museum's commitment to participate and engage ethically. Based on the observation of forty international museum websites, this study aims to develop a methodological proposal for the analytical description of the museum homepage, the showcase par excellence where museums present themselves to their audiences. The methodological toolkit for the analysis relies on a combination of multimodal analysis and discourse analysis techniques. The study lays the foundations for a theoretical distinction between a 'self-oriented' and a 'visitor-oriented' stance, suggesting that a balance between the two is key to the pursuit of ethical engagement in museum communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
