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A hypermodal discourse analysis of the Shanghai tourism website
Author
Zhu, Kai
Supervisor
Teo, Peter
Abstract
The goal of this study is to investigate the hypermodal discourse in a tourism website. A specific discourse analysis approach, Hypermodal Discourse Analysis (HDA), is proposed as an expansion of the existing Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) framework. This study distinguishes the interactivity of the website as an important feature of discourse in a hypermodal context. A HDA analytical framework is proposed by adapting the works of Djonov and Knox (2014) on multimodal analysis of webpages and Adami (2015) on website interactivity. This framework integrates the multimodal analytical branch and hypermodal interactivity analytical branch for website analysis. This framework is applied to the Official Shanghai China Travel website, which has been chosen due to Shanghai’s importance as a tier one city in China and its international reputation as a business and economic centre. By analyzing the homepage and seven subsection webpages of this website, it was found that the images of Shanghai on each page empower viewers with privilege and promote Shanghai as an attractive tourist destination. The highly cohesive website structure portrays the institution behind Shanghai’s tourism as rational and well-organized. However, the limited interactivity, restriction of dynamism and highly unified representation reflect the institution’s authoritativeness and power over web users. This study of the Shanghai tourism website illustrates how the use of the HDA framework can provide researchers with fine-grained results and facilitate an in-depth probing of hypermodal interactivity.
Date Issued
2020
Call Number
P302 Zhu
Date Submitted
2020