The role of language in visitor engagement in current Hong Kong virtual museum

The concept of virtual museum has existed for a long time, even preceding the advent of the Internet (Schweibenz, 2019). However, in recent years, it has become a prominent subject due to technological advances enabling the presentation of museum information online and even 3D virtual walks (Carvajal et al., 2020). During the pandemic, where physical visits were widely deemed unviable or unsafe, virtual museums have sprung up worldwide, including in Hong Kong, to provide humanity with a substitute. Although there has been an increasing number of studies investigating visitors’ experience and learning, supporting technology, and multimodal interface design (Li et al., 2022), the agency of language in visitor engagement is often assumed rather than specifically examined. This preliminary study attempts to scrutinise the role of language in current Hong Kong virtual museums by browsing through eight virtual museums. While language was found to play an essential part in art interpretation, signage, and audio and video guides, a few issues have been observed. For example, the wall labels in many 3D virtual walks are impossible or difficult to view due to low resolution. A few typical inaccessible writing features in physical museums have been transferred to online museums, such as extensive use of nominalisation and a lack of interpersonal language (Ravelli, 2006). There is also a lack of signage for guiding virtual visitors. On the other hand, a few virtual museums creatively provide interpersonal metadiscourse to encourage visitors to walk on and simple quizzes to encourage learning. This initial study sheds light on the issues that warrant further applied linguistic studies to support virtual museum text construction.