Abstract
This paper examines the role of emoji in museum communication, an interdisciplinary domain at the intersection of professional communication, art discourse, advertising, and media discourse. Specifically, it explores how museum writers use emoji to reinforce verbal expressions of evaluation and engage in dialogue with diverse audiences.
Evaluation, as defined by Thompson and Hunston (2000), involves the expression of attitude, stance, or viewpoint toward entities under discussion. Museum digital communication, which spans genres such as websites and blogs, involves evaluation across linguistic, textual, and paralinguistic dimensions. Paralinguistic aspects, including non-verbal semiotic resources, gain importance when considering emoji, which are known to resonate with interpersonal meaning either independently or in tandem with verbal language (Zappavigna and Logi, 2024).
For this study, I collected a multimodal corpus of museum social media posts and manually annotated the emoji in each post according to the three subsystems of interpersonal meaning identified by Martin and White (2005) in their APPRAISAL theory: AFFECT (emotional states), APPRECIATION (aesthetic evaluations), and JUDGMENT (social/moral evaluation). The analysis aims to assess the ability of emoji to convey interpersonal meaning and to enhance evaluative parameters, such as the novelty of the exhibition, the quality and the importance of the artworks or artists, the exclusivity and newsworthiness of the museum events.
Preliminary findings highlight that the shift from print to digital communication has brought with it the potential for museums to enhance evaluation through emoji, particularly in conveying intangible, emergent values that are difficult to articulate verbally, such as ‘museum coolness’ (Loureiro and Blanco, 2021). Emoji excel at suggesting and evoking the immaterial, making a unique contribution to communication. However, they do not seem to be able to match the nuanced richness of evaluative verbal features. While they can enhance textual communication, they are unlikely to fully replace the subtleties of verbal expression.