Don't Forget to Ask a Blessing From the Monk: A Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Representations of Hosts in Online Travel Reviews About Bangkok.

The article analyzes the multimodal representations of hosts in online travel reviews (OTRs) about Bangkok and what these representations tell us about power relations reflected and potentially shaped by the reviews. Following Hollinshead's conclusions on the worldmaking agency of tourism, I argue that user-generated tourism discourse can produce and reproduce particular representations of people and contribute to shaping power relations in the tourism industry. One of the aspects critically discussed by researchers is the representation of hosts in promotional and media tourism discourse. Hosts tend to be excluded or represented as servants, cultural markers, or a part of the scenery, which might contribute to maintaining client–servant attitudes and even lead to discrimination against hosts. Surprisingly, there is a lack of research on usergenerated genres such as OTRs. Moreover, previous research indicates that there can be differences in the representations of destinations with different sociocultural backgrounds. The aim of this article is therefore to conduct a systematic analysis of the multimodal representations of hosts in 300 Tripadvisor OTRs about Bangkok. I applied a corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis approach to identify patterns in the representations in titles, texts, images, and captions. The results indicate that user-generated tourism discourse (UGTD) possesses worldmaking power in that it not only reproduces the representations of institutional discourse but also expresses resistance to the discourse of the inferiority of hosts and contributes to establishing more balanced power relations in tourism. The findings also demonstrate that the sociocultural background of the travel destination can be reflected in representations of hosts in UGTD. The topics specific to the sociocultural background of Bangkok are the titulation of hosts, portrayal of host trainers as mentors and friends, representation of monks as tourist attractions, and generic representation of Thai artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]