This project will be innovative in four ways:
- through its multidisciplinary approach combining multimodal social semiotic text analysis with multimodal conversation analysis of face-to-face interaction and ethnographic observation, and through relating these approaches to insights from marketing studies
- through its modelling of new approaches to text, context (including genre and literacy) and resemiotisation theory and analysis
- through its comparative orientation, examining both online shopping and shopping in brick-&-mortar shops
- by taking a Humanities approach to an apparently mundane everyday practice whose contemporary development is nevertheless set to have a profound effect on our everyday life, on our environment, and on the way we interact with each other, and which is ideally placed to throw light on the much wider social and cultural changes brought about by the rise of the market-driven, global world in which we now live