Bringing a museum of language to life: the use of multimodal resources for interactional engagement in the Museu da Língua Portuguesa, Brazil

Do museu da língua para a vida: o uso de recursos multimodais para engajamento interacional no Museu da Língua Portuguesa, Brasil

Abstract:

The popular and highly successful Museu da Língua Portuguesa¹ in São Paulo, Brazil, is renowned for its visitor engagement strategies. While this success is often attributed to high levels of technological interactivity enabled in the museum displays, we argue that the success of the museum also comes from a range of other multimodal resources. Using a social semiotic approach to spatial discourse analysis, we examine each of the three levels/floors of the museum, identifying the various meaning-making resources across the representational, organizational, and interactional metafunctions. These both differentiate the separate levels of the museum, and bring them together as a unified whole, creating a strong focus on cultural identity and on placing the visitor in the centre of meaning-making practices.

Keywords:
Museu da Língua Portuguesa; multimodal resources; social semiotic approach; interactive engagement; spatial discourse analysis