Exploring the use of emoji in museum social network sites

This paper aims to explore how emoji make meaning in interaction with other semiotic resources in museum social media posts. In so doing, it examines to what extent emoji are changing the way museums communicate with their audiences. The analysis is based on a corpus of museum social posts and grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics. Findings show that emoji make meaning not only in interaction with language, working as a paralinguistic resource, but also in interaction with visual content. The analysis highlights the presence of image-driven emoji, which create a convergence of meaning in association with details of the post image, limiting or excluding the textual component of the caption from the intermodal semiosis. Image-driven emoji often lead to playful effects and can be exploited by museum communicators for engagement purposes, to create quizzes and games. The study therefore suggests that emoji can contribute to add an informal component to museum communication, according to the 'post-museum' style, which is characterised by a more direct interactional attitude towards the audience.