A window to the world: visual design and research visibility of European research projects’ homepages

Abstract

ABSTRACT Websites, as an internet product, provide us with a multimedia content: they combine written text, images, audio, video, and hyperlinks. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the ways content is organised through design and the semiotic resources that are actually put to use by the European research groups in their homepages as a means of facilitating visibility of their work. The study comprises a corpus of 10 homepages from Horizon 2020 research projects. I draw on Systemic Functional Linguistics−Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SFL−MDA) The analysis takes two analytical layers, going from the study of the homepage as a multimodal ensemble in order to identify the semiotic resources at work, and then carry out a cluster analysis to describe layout, which builds up visibility through the textual organisation of content.