Abstract
Emoji are often used in museum social network sites (SNS) to create innovative pictorial representations and generate new forms of storytelling. These may range from improvisational approaches to narrative to straightforward “emoji stories”, whose interpretation is co-constructed and shared among members of a close community (Sargeant, 2019; Kelly & Watts, 2014). Little attention has been paid, however, to the use of emoji in museum communication from a social semiotic and discourse-analytical perspective; it remains to explore, in particular, whether emoji are used to express ideational or interpersonal meaning (Martin, 1992; Martin & White, 2003) and to what extent they are gradually replacing elements of standard evaluative language.Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics and, in particular, on a recent analytical framework to classify emoji developed by Logi & Zappavigna (2021), the present study aims to analyse how emoji make meaning in interaction with other semiotic resources in museum SNS. The dataset is comprised of a corpus of posts collected among museum social media accounts over a six-month period. Particular attention is paid to cases of micro-narrative reinforced by emoji, “emojifiction” (Sargeant, 2019: 163), and the “rebus use” of emoji (Wicke & Bolognesi, 2020), involving users in playful activities. The analysis suggests that the use of emoji builds an integral part of the digital strategies currently adopted by museums to implement interactive and participatory activities, such as puzzles and quizzes, reinforced by emoji at the iconic and paralinguistic level. The analysis also highlights the prevalence of some specific emoji in the context of museum communication, such as the ‘sparkles’ emoji, extensively used to convey a positive, yet semantically vague, attitudinal meaning, and others, such as the ‘palette’ and ‘camera’ emoji, typically employed to caption artworks and thus metonymically evoke the artistic process. Moreover, several posts whose text relies mostly or exclusively on emoji have been observed, reflective of an increasing experimentation by museums with the emoji-language.