Abstract
From the premise that cultural and heritage assets – especially religious, historical and urban sites – are the features of a nation’s branding that most readily distinguish it from its competitors, Stoian examines the growing phenomenon of cultural tourism through an analysis of websites for heritage sites in Romania, Spain and Great Britain. The book applies an analytical framework that draws on Hallidayian systemic functional grammar (SFG) for the written dimension and its visual application by Kress and Van Leeuwen for the visual, seeking to explore similarities and differences between institutional and commercial websites and the roles of different national cultural factors in determining their appearance.
After a theoretical section, a thorough literature review and a general introduction, the author presents a comparative study of three heritage sites from each country: in the case of Spain, for example, these are El Escorial, Santiago de Compostela and the Alhambra. The author explores first the institutional websites devoted to these sites and then moves to commercial web pages, comparing findings in terms of national versus commercial identity construction, branding and representational strategies. This description serves the second aim of the book, that of contributing to the understanding of the processes involved in creating tourist websites, with a view to assisting producers of web pages to achieve the goals of ‘more effective communication’ and ‘successful promotion’ (p. 7).
Typical in this sense is the admonition (p. 108) that ‘sites with great content, but little design sensitivity, may not always work’, and there are many other instances of advice to web designers, such as the critique of the long sentences about Sighișoara which may be ‘too complicated for readers to follow’ (p. 102). An occasional critical note is sounded where we read that websites only present the ‘positive and attractive side of the potential tourist experience’ (p. 35) or where reference is made to ‘cognitive and emotional manipulation’ by tourist product designers (p. 37). Generally, however, the book is descriptive rather than critical. The use of the AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) as an interpretative key is a choice that consistently led to interesting results when applied to the web pages.
In the nature of things, although the book has come out very recently, some of the analysis is already out of date – the national Romanian site, for example, has changed its homepage, as has the Spanish tourism portal. This is a reason why illustrations might have been preferred to the verbal descriptions that are sometimes given, though unfortunately some of the images are blurred. There are also some typos, linguistic imprecisions and simple slips, as in the introduction, where we are told that there will be four chapters in part 2; the contents of each are summarised, then a fifth chapter is mentioned (p. 15).
In the methodological section, the presentation of SFG analytical categories is probably insufficient for the needs of the uninitiated reader. Too much is taken for granted here: for example, terms are used in highly specialised senses with no prior explanation (p. 45), and tables list values without an explanatory legend (p. 91). More importantly, there is little explanation of what this technical repertoire specifically contributes to the task in hand. If the aim is to assist tourist operators to improve their promotional material, they will find the SFG terminology a significant obstacle.
This is less of a problem in the visual dimension, where the categories can be more intuitively grasped, though here too there are issues. For example, in the section on the Horezu Monastery, we read that ‘the text is placed on the left and stands for given information, while the image, situated on the right and embedded in the text, depicts new information and can be interpreted as an illustration of the text’ (p. 87). This is the kind of analysis that critics of multimodality, or even sympathetic would-be users, struggle with. Earlier (p. 58), we are told that given information means that ‘the viewer is assumed to be familiar with the information and to accept it as a point of departure for the message’. But viewers new to the site will most probably know nothing about the Horezu Monastery. Presumably, they read the page with a view to learning about it; furthermore, providing information is unquestionably the function of this text. In what sense, then, can this information be said to be ‘given’? To be pedantic, one might also enquire what is ‘new’ about the picture, if it can be interpreted as an illustration of the text which, as we have seen, was supposed to be ‘given’.
The book might have benefited from the adoption of a less ambitious analytical framework: it is not clear that the painstaking application of the methodology, to which the ample and detailed appendix bears witness, is really repaid by the insights reported in the text. Too often the significance of SFG analytical categories is left unexplained; a professional audience would be hard-pressed to make sense of their relevance for applied goals of more effective information and promotion. Despite these issues, the book makes a worthwhile contribution to a growing area of study. It explores the connection between the context of culture and its value systems and the content of tourist texts, and will interest both the student of web pages and their designers.