Museums are and have always been multimodal entities, with the materiality of collections being displayed in a designed space, within a building that is either adapted or designed for purpose. Language – spoken or written – is used throughout to facilitate interpretation; collections and exhibition spaces have physical properties of shape, material, colour, lighting, and more; exhibitions might encompass audio-visual materials and performative practices, and beyond the display of collections, a museum may engage in a wide range of diverse related practices, such as tours, film evenings, play spaces for children, and so on. Museums are made up of diverse multimodal practices, but cannot be understood just as a listing of these. Rather, they are meaning-making entities, existing for specific socio-cultural purposes, and arising in and from specific historical conditions. For those of us interested in issues of communication, an understanding of museum communication needs to encompass multimodality, organizational studies, sociality and history (at least!). This paper draws on examples from culturally-diverse museums and builds on the social semiotic work of Halliday (1978, 2014) in relation to language, Kress and van Leeuwen (2021) in relation to images, and Ravelli and McMurtrie (2016) in relation to the built environment, to provide a social semiotic perspective on meaning-making in a museum context. Importantly, this is aligned with some of the concerns of organizational studies, in a novel framework of organizational semiotics (Ravelli et al 2023) which merges organizational theory and social semiotics, in a new research agenda.

References

Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold. 

Halliday, M.A.K. (2014). An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd Edition. London: Edward Arnold.

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2021). Reading Images: the Gramar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.

Ravelli, L. & McMurtrie, R. (2016). Multimodality in the built environment: Spatial Discourse Analysis, London: Routledge.

Ravelli, L.; van Leeuwen, T.; Hoellerer, M., & Jancsary, D. (2023). Organizational Semiotics: Multimodal perspectives on organization studies. London: Routledge.

Louise Ravelli is Professor of Communication in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and Joint Chief Editor of the journal, Visual Communication. She has a long-standing interest in multimodal communication, across language, image and the built environment, using social semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis. Books include Organizational Semiotics: Multimodal perspectives on organization studies (Routledge, 2023, with Theo van Leeuwen, Markus Hoellerer and Dennis Jancsary); Multimodality in the Built Environment: Spatial Discourse Analysis (Routledge, 2016, with Robert McMurtrie), and Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks (Routledge, 2006).