DIGITAL MULTIMODALITY OF MUSEUMS DISCOURSE DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Alla D. Belova
Doctor of Sciences (Linguistics), Full Professor
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/StudLing2021.18.9-23

FULL TEXT PDF (ENGLISH)

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 pandemic triggered radical changes and transformations in modern world, business, professional fields, communication including. In the wake of lockdowns and quarantines museums had taken a hit too. Museums had to remain accessible and visible, at least in the digital domain, therefore they had to shift to virtual realm, to offer digital services, to increase their activity in social media. Museums faced a number of challenges like dealing with global digital audience, cognitive modelling of the online content and online user. Their efficiency in the digital domain was different, so museums evidenced 10 – 200% increase of online visits and growth of global digital audience. Due to implementation of digital technologies small local museums made a breakthrough to multimodal domain and received international recognition. In pre-pandemic world, museums had been working on their virtual environment, opened virtual-real museums and extended multimodality of exhibitions, making visitors impressions multisensory. During the pandemic virtual exhibitions, virtual tours, films, education material have become more multimodal and interactive. In films and virtual tours the focus was on stories not on 3D image of the exhibits and a standard 360 tour only. They experimented with modes and conquered new media, used multimodal storytelling. Museums tried to create a sense of presence and place and to relocate online visitors from their homes to museums. To encourage children, museums implemented gamification and edutainment strategies, created virtual games. Museums started a new trend – collecting online (collecting COVID-19, BLM), creating Big Data and digital collections which might be used for multi-vector multidisciplinary research. Digital multimodality might become an indispensable component of museum online landscape in the post-pandemic world.

Kee words: museum, multimodality, online landscape, digital audience, social media, virtual.

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