“Perspective and Position in Museum Websites"

The chapter reports on an exploratory study of museum websites, focusing on the interplay between description and evaluation in multimodal art texts. Of the various genres involved in such websites – ranging from FAQs to annual reports – it was decided to focus on that most likely to illustrate this interplay: exhibition presentations. The study is based on the analysis of exhibition presentations in the websites of five London museums. The focus is on the presentation pages, but pages of virtual tours and “room guides” have also been considered for a qualitative analysis. Presentations of exhibitions are an obligatory feature of the websites of museums that hold temporary exhibitions. In general, they belong to a macro-section called “Exhibitions” – mostly divided into current, past and future exhibitions - and they may themselves be micro-sites, rather than simple pages. The corpus shows great variety in dimension, ranging from single-page and single-paragraph presentations (especially of future exhibitions) to full-length micro-sites, including a range of pages and options. The chapter also deals with background theoretical and methodological issues, while looking at websites from a genre analysis perspective. Section 3 provides an overview of exhibition presentations and their generic features. Section 4 deals with issues of description and evaluation, focusing on the expression of perspective and position and looking at their interplay in a small sample of cases.