“Just as I imagined …’: A multimodal investigation of Sicilian heritage in travel websites”

The prevailing/dominant imaginary of a society expresses itself also via the use of language in the representation of “other” cultures and places. Travel websites such as Trip Advisor (www.tripadvisor.com) provide directory information and reviews of travel-related contents, they often include interactive travel forums. Some of these are also early adopter of user-generated content, that is that the website services are free to users who provide most of the content and the website is supported by an advertising business mode. In multimodal terms, those websites encompass several genres and minigenres (Baldry and O’Halloran 2010) having common patterns and features with semiotic resources working together in the meaning making process (Halliday 1978; Kress 2010; Baldry and Thibault 2006). But how do the web genres contained in the websites compare with “traditional” travel writing? Can we consider them examples of “embedded genres” (Bhatia 1997, 2004) where the definition of embedded genre is that when imported into a new context, a given genre will be altered? How has the representation of some important places changed over the years? What are the features of the imaginary that creates those type of texts? Moving from the assumption according to which texts are often produced by some sort of imaginary (Marzo and Meo 2013), and adopting a blended multimodal corpus-based approach (Baldry 2011; Cambria, Arizzi and Coccetta 2012), this paper investigates key collocates and concordances of multiple keywords to examine how collocations in the representation of some of the most attractive places of Sicilian cultural heritage have changed over the years. It will do so by comparing two corpora, one made up of 18th to 20th century travel writing and the other of comments and descriptions of Sicily posted to www.tripadvisor.com. The aim of the paper is thus twofold. First the study examines the collocation of key words related to Sicilian cultural heritage in travel writing and, second, it explores webgenres in terms of embedded genres of macro/mini genres but also, in a wider perspective, as examples of a social imaginary.