The Visual and Multimodal Research Forum is a student run platform for academic discussion on multimodality and open to all postgraduate research students and other researchers at UCL Institute of Education and elsewhere. Participation is free. Please contact Sophia Diamantopoulou, Forum Coordinator, at sdiamantopoulou@ioe.ac.uk for any queries.

Date: Monday 20th of April, 5:00-6:30 pm

Venue: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, WC1N 3QS

Multimodal genre hybridity in digital travel videos

Dr. Sabrina Francesconi, Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Humanities of the University of Trento

The presentation illustrates the research design for an ongoing project on multimodal genre hybridity within tourism discourse. It concentrates on a corpus of digital travel videos narrating the Basilicata region in Italy, produced by young and international web-artists worldwide within the ‘Can’t Forget Italy’ contest, launched by the Basilicata destination marketing organization (DMO). The main research questions are concerned with how the multimodal travel diaries creatively relate to traditional and stable conceptualizations and configuration of tourist text genres and how multimodal generic hybridity is used to shape the Basilicata region as worth-visiting destination.

Within the framework of multimodal genre analysis, 1) a micro-analysis will be conducted, based on shot-by-shot observation, followed by 2) a macro-analysis addressing the travel diaries within the context of tourism and travel discourse. The fine grained examination will identify a) the adopted modes and their modal resources and then will observe b) their interaction modes and forms. The macro-analysis will finally position and discuss the instance within the overall genre of tourism-travel material.