The tourist brochures may be considered to have a dual function (Hiippala 2007, p. 10). On the one hand, the brochures provide the tourists with information about the destination and its surroundings, touristic activities, culture and so on (Valde´on 2009, p. 23). On the other hand, the tourist brochures are a form of marketing and advertising: they encourage the tourist to consume and perform the various activities associated with tourism (see e.g. MacCannell 1989; Jaworski and Thurlow 2009; Berger 2011).
Regardless of their informative or persuasive function, the tourist brochures are known to influence the image of a destination in the reader’s mind, partic-ularly through the visual modes of communication (Molina and Esteban 2006).
This observation, in combination with our knowledge of the linguistic structure of tourism discourse, supports the proposal that the tourist brochure is a multimodal artefact that is designed to do particular kinds of communicative work. These kinds of artefacts and their structure are the primary target of this dissertation, thus making the tourist brochures a suitable object of study.
1.4.1 The tourist brochure as a multimodal artefact
What may be broadly defined as ‘tourism discourse’ has been studied in both lin-guistic and multimodal research. In this context, tourism discourse stands for the particular ways of using language and image to communicate information related to tourism (Thurlow and Jaworski 2010).
Previous research has established that tourism discourse has spread over print (Thurlow and Jaworski 2003; Hiippala 2012a) and digital media (Hallett and Kaplan-Weinger 2010). The discourse is often evaluative (Kaltenbacher 2007) and portrays the destination in a positive light (Hiippala 2007). Moreover, the artefacts participating in tourism discourse are inherently multimodal.
In this sense, the tourist brochures are a prime example of a multimodal artefact participating in tourism discourse. This may also explain why the brochures have been frequently studied in multimodal research. The multimodal structure of the tourist brochures has been previously explored in Yui Ling Ip (2008), Valde´on (2009), Francesconi (2011) and also in Hiippala (2012b), which was a pilot study conducted as a part of this dissertation. Additionally, potentially relevant work has been conducted within the fields of semiotics (Culler 1988; Edelheim 2007), cultural geography (Jokela 2011) and tourism studies (Scarles 2004; Molina and Esteban 2006; Garrod 2009). Looking at the previous research, it may be said that multimodality is an overarching theme in the analysis of the tourist brochures.
Despite the wealth of research, the previous work has not provided an exhaus-tive description of the tourist brochures as a multimodal artefact by asking why the brochures are structured the way they are? This is exactly the question that this dissertation attempts to answer to by developing a model of artefact structure.
The research questions, which direct the dissertation in this task, are presented shortly in Section 1.5. Before presenting the research questions, I will briefly con-sider some commercial factors related to the study of the tourist brochures in Section 1.4.2 and their availability for multimodal research in Section 1.4.3.
1.4.2 Commercial factors and applications
The work presented in Molina and Esteban (2006, p. 1051) shows that the tourism industry needs to understand how the tourist brochures work. They write:
It is thus important to establish some criteria for brochure design in order to adapt brochures to the specific needs of tourists and, conse-quently, to improve their appeal and efficacy in forming images ...
Molina and Esteban continue by pointing out that because the tourist brochures are heterogeneous in form, “it is necessary to define how brochures should be designed and what features they should have in common” (2006, p. 1051).
These features are multimodal, and for this reason, the brochure design is an area to which multimodal research can certainly contribute. In addition to the research presented above in Section 1.4.1, a model of the tourist brochure’s multi-modal structure can bring new insights precisely in line with the requirements set out by Molina and Esteban (2006). By drawing on a multimodal corpus of het-erogeneous data, it becomes possible to identify patterns in the tourist brochures’
multimodal structure.
There is also a considerable economic incentive to undertake this kind of multi-modal research, because the worldwide tourism industry was valued at 740 billion euro in 2011 (World Tourism Organization 2012). Besides the possible applica-tions, another reason to choose the tourist brochures as the data was their avail-ability, which I will discuss next.
1.4.3 Access to research material
The access to the research material also spoke in favour of choosing the tourist brochures as the data of this dissertation. In the case of the Helsinki tourist brochures, two organisations were the main sources of data: (1) the Helsinki City Archives and (2) the National Library of Finland. Both organisations store and maintain information on all types of documents and publications produced by the city of Helsinki. From these sources, I collected a data set that covers the period between the years 1967 and 2008.
There was also a concrete reason for acquiring the data from two different sources. For an unexplained reason, the Helsinki City Archives had lost the tourist brochures produced during the 1990s. Fortunately, these brochures were stored in the collections of the National Library of Finland. In addition, the most recent data were acquired by myself from the Helsinki City Tourist and Convention Bureau for previous studies (Hiippala 2007, 2012a).
A detailed description of the data collected for this dissertation will be provided in Chapter 5. I will now continue with the research questions of this dissertation.