The gate of the gateway: A hypermodal approach to university homepages

Abstract

This paper adopts a social semiotic perspective to investigate how hypermodal resources (e.g., text, image, hyperlinks) integrate on two university homepages to simultaneously create an official gateway and an institutional identity. In the first case, the homepage of National University of Singapore foregrounds and promotes its identity as a vibrant community that is global and welcoming by appealing images, interpersonally-orientated linguistic choices, rich navigation content, and various navigation styles. Tsinghua University in China, on the other hand, adopts a university-centric position in its homepage design by presenting its identity as a traditional and authoritative institution that keeps its distance from society at large through the impersonal nature of the images and linguistic texts, and the repetitive hierarchical navigation styles. These semiotic choices are interpreted from a socio-cultural perspective and the universities' involvement in marketization. The present study builds upon and extends multimodal approaches to hypermedia by considering the relations between hypermodal analytics and higher-level cultural and ideological meanings.