Integrating computational and statistical methods into the Humanities: Investigating tourism discourse with empirical social semiotics

This paper analyzes the Instagram and website visual content posted by three popular English-speaking tourism boards, namely Tourism Ireland, Destination Canada, and Tourism Western Australia, with a semiotic approach involving manual annotation. By developing a framework integrating empirical multimodality, systemic functional linguistics and corpus studies, the paper shows how data-driven, customized taxonomies may foster evidence-based discourse interpretations and help develop analytical skills to actively interpret signs and decode purposes, which is key in an increasingly artificial context in which algorithms organize and create data through automatic entity recognition. Specifically, results reveal that Instagram imagery prioritizes emotional engagement over concrete information, promoting instant gratification and escape through highly positive, visually appealing positive expectations about leisure experiences of passive contemplation and extra-ordinary, peaceful solitary fruition of nature. This emphasis impacts digital literacy and fosters a consumerist mindset within neoliberal societies, highlighting the necessity for a systematic and critical engagement with visual narratives.