Abstract
Storytelling is at the core of museum activities (Bedford 2001), but little attention has been paid to its role in museum communication (MC) from a discourse-analytical perspective. This paper aims to show how narrative has developed as part of MC since the 1970s, appearing in a wide array of museum texts, from press releases to digital genres. Typically, museum storytelling goes hand in hand with evaluative language, lexical markers of affect and forms of non-standard language (emoji). The methodological toolkit for the study is qualitative in focus and draws on frameworks developed for the analysis of museum discourse (Ravelli 2007). The dataset consists of a corpus of museum press releases, dating from 1950 to 2016, and a sample of digital museum texts, dating from 2015 to 2021. The study confirms that MC represents an interesting field for discourse studies, providing a repertoire of innovative practices not only in terms of storytelling techniques, but communication strategies in general.