VIRTUAL MUSEUMS - NON-FORMAL MEANS OF TEACHING E-CIVILIZATION/CULTURE

Abstract

Considered repositories of objects(Cuno 2009), museums have been analysed through the object-oriented policies they mainly focus on. Three main purposes are often mentioned: preservation, dissemination of knowledge and access to tradition. Beyond these informative and cultural-laden functions, museums have also been labeled as theatres of power, the emphasis lying on nation-oriented policies. According to Michael F. Brown (2009: 148), the outcome of this moral standing of the nation-state is a mobilizing public sentiment in favour of the state power. We consider that the constant flow of national and international exhibitions or events that could be hosted in museums has a twofold consequence: on the one hand, a cultural dynamics due to the permanent contact with unknown objects, and on the other hand, some visibility strategies in order to attract visitors. This latter effect actually embodies a shift within the perception of museums from entities of knowledge towards leisure environments. Within this context where the concept of edutainment(Eschach 2007) seems to prevail in the non-formal way of acquiring new knowledge, contemporary virtual museums display visual information without regard to geographic location (Dahmen, Sarraf, 2009). They play ?a central role in making culture accessible to the mass audience(Carrazzino, Bergamasco 2010) by using new technologies and novel interaction paradigms. Our study will aim at analyzing the way in which civilization was e-framed in the virtual project ?A History of the World in 100 Objects, run by BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum in 2010. The British Museum won the 2011 Art Fund Prize for this innovative platform whose main content was created by the contributors (the museums and the members of the public). The chairman of the panel of judges, Michael Portillo, noted that the judges were impressed that the project used digital media in ground-breaking and novel ways to interact with audiences. The two theoretical frameworks used in our analysis are framing theories and critical discourse analysis. ?Schemata of interpretation? (Goffman 1974), frames are used by individuals to make sense of information or an occurrence, providing principles for the organization of social reality? (Hertog & McLeod 2001). Considered cultural structures with central ideas and more peripheral concepts and a set of relations that vary in strength and kind among them? (Hertog, McLeod 2001, p.141), frames rely on the selection of some aspects of a perceived reality which are made more salient in a communicating text or e-text. We will interpret this virtual museum as a hypertext which ?makes possible the assembly, retrieval, display and manipulation? (Kok 2004) of objects belonging to different cultures. The structural analysis of the virtual museum as a hypertext will focus on three orders of abstraction (Kok 2004): item, lexia, and cluster. Dividing civilization into 20 periods of time, from making us human (2,000,000 - 9000 BC) up to the world of our making (1914 - 2010 AD), the creators of the digital museum used 100 objects to make sense of the cultural realities which dominated our civilization. The History of the World in 100 Objects used images of these objects which can be considered ?as ideological and as power-laden as word (Jewitt 2008). Closely related to identities, ideologies embed those elements which provide a group legitimation, identification and cohesion. In our analysis of the 100 virtual objects framing e-civilization we will use the six categories which supply the structure of ideologies in the critical discourse analysis framework (van Dijk 2000: 69): membership, activities, goals, values/norms, position (group-relations), resources. The research questions will focus on the content of this digital museum: (1) the types of objects belonging to the 20 periods of e-civilization; (2) the salience of countries of origin for the 100 objects; (3) the salience of social practices framed in the non-formal teaching of e-civilization/culture; and on the visitors? response: (1) the types of attitudes expressed in the forum comments; (2) the types of messages visitors decoded from the analysis of the objects; (3) the (creative) value of such e-resources.