Factual reporting in the ‘About’ pages of university websites

The ‘About’ page plays a relevant role in the general framework of a website, in that it provides a quick overview of the characteristics and goals of a company, organization or institution. Recognized as a web genre in studies geared towards information retrieval and web genres classification (Santini 2008, Rhem et al 2008), it has so far received little attention in relation to its discursive features. Although a full account of the meaning making of the page as a whole has to consider the wide range of attendant modalities at stake (Kress/van Leeuwen 2006, Bateman 2008), the verbal component plays an important, in some cases still prominent, role. With reference to the language of university websites, which can be seen to fall into the category that Biber (2006) labels ‘institutional writing’ in his analysis of university registers, previous research (Benwell/Stokoe 2006, Caiazzo 2011b) has shown that the ‘About’ pages of British university websites mainly display informative and descriptive texts. Often produced by committees (like other types of institutional writing), these texts are addressed to prospective students, but also to academic and non-academic staff (Melewar/Akel 2005). However, beyond the informative surface of the text, the general profile of the university outlined is conveyed through promotional strategies such as evaluative adjectives and stance devices (Caiazzo 2009, 2011a). This is a feature that can be related to the process of ‘marketization’ (Fairclough 1993, Mautner 2005) universities are undergoing as a result of the growing importance of knowledge, research and innovation for the global economy, which is changing their social role (Välimaa/Hoffman 2008). From a perspective of narration as the “context for interpreting and assessing all communication” (Fisher 1987: 193), this chapter adopts a narrative approach as a further interpretive lens to investigate the ‘stories’ universities tell about themselves. Drawing on corpus linguistics methodologies, a small corpus consisting of 115 British university websites is investigated, focusing on the events reported, with an interest in the emerging narrative patterns and in the interplay between factual and evaluative self-representation.