Internally funded project
Start date : 03.06.2025
Digitization in professional discourse: An interdisciplinary multimodal register analysis of art descriptions
Digitization has pervaded professional communication, shaping new practices of sharing and engaging with information, causing changes in access to resources, audiences, and communicative goals – effects widely discussed in digital humanities (Finnemann, 1999, 2014; Hockey, 2000; Terras, 2012) and cultural heritage studies in particular (Keene, 1998; Andraschke & Wagner, 2020). Distinctions in mode, author-audience relations, degree of shared general and specialist knowledge, and differences in communicative purpose of texts are the fundamental communicative characteristics accounted for in the register-functional research paradigm in corpus linguistics (Biber, 1988). These communicative distinctions are central to the study of register as they have been shown to systematically predict language use and correspond to functionally interpretable linguistic patterns across and within registers (e.g., Biber, 2012; Biber & Egbert, 2018; Egbert et al., 2024). The register framework is thus uniquely positioned to inform communication studies in various professional domains, connecting disciplinary practices.
We illustrate such interdisciplinary links by investigating the linguistic effects of digitization in a prominent community of practice—museum communication—that, despite its visual focus, relies heavily on linguistic resources. We present a multimodal corpus of art descriptions (min. 100 words each) from the Art Institute of Chicago (N = 300) containing visual art and accompanying text in analogue and digital sources. The corpus is designed to target the same visual artwork—paintings, objects, and drawings—from a recent analogue catalogue (Rondeau, 2017) and the online catalogue of the museum (Art Institute Chicago, 2025). We apply keyfeature analysis (Egbert & Biber, 2023), including lexico-grammatical features (Biber Tagger, Biber, 1988) and vocabulary lists for standardizing cultural artifacts documentation (Getty Vocabularies, n.d.), to identify and systematically describe the unique linguistic characteristics associated with the digital versus analogue modes. We interpret our findings in light of communicative differences between the modes and propose guidelines for digital professional communication.