Theory and Method for the Statistical Investigation of Multimodal Promotional Practices in the Digital Era: A Data-driven Approach Based on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Social Semiotics.

This paper provides an overview of the research design, corpora, and methodological tools developed to investigate multimodal online tourism discourse in an ongoing digital humanities research project. The overall aim of this study is to analyze the interconnections between static imagery and written text on the official websites and Instagram accounts of three popular tourist boards through the lens of SFL and using a multimodal, mixed methods approach. In other words, the project presented in this paper attempts to explore how the three metafunctions of this linguistic theory are realized in interconnected corpora of promotional textual and visual materials, and to investigate if their meaning varies according to their respective online channels.