Museum Context Research Articles

SHOAH, ÉMOTION ET MODES DE PENSÉE DE LYCÉENS

L’article présente les conclusions sur la place et le rôle de l’émotion dans le mode de pensée de lycéens sur la Shoah / L’article présente une démarche de recherche qui s’intéresse à l’émotion comme facilitateur et / ou obstacle à l’apprentissage de l’histoire par la Shoah et ce dans un contexte muséal.

Technology-Enhanced Interaction with Cultural Heritage

Digital technology in museum practice provides new means of interaction with artifacts and collections. In particular, we need interactive installations in order to encourage and stimulate visitors to learn and understand archaeological musical instruments through engagement and active participation: these instruments (i.e., interactive artifacts per se ) are de facto unplayable and inaccessible to visitors, as a consequence of their preservation issues. However, presenting artifacts to the general public is a complex task for their multifaceted nature, and digital technology must not sacrifice accuracy or depth of information for the sake of entertainment. Moreover, deploying digital technology is a multidisciplinary effort that requires an interplay among different fields, from history and archaeology to information engineering and craftsmanship. In this article, we present a methodology to relate such disciplines in order to design a digital multimedia installation that promotes archaeological musical instruments in a museum. In defining the problem, we identify four different aspects to consider: the museum collection, the museum environment, the manufacturing opportunities for the installation, and the user experience. Such aspects are integrated in a design approach that is centered on Design Thinking . The proposed methodology is exemplified in the designing and manufacturing of an installation for a Pan flute from Egypt dated back to 700 A.D., a case in which multisensory interaction is particularly important to convey the lost sound of the instrument. We describe in detail an installation (exhibited at the Museum of Archaeological Science and Art at the University of Padova), which virtually recreates the Pan flute and communicates information related to its history, iconography, acoustics, and musicology. Just after the deployment of the installation, we also carried out an assessment with a group of experts in the fields of information engineering, music, musicology, and archaeology. The good results obtained demonstrate that the installation is a convenient way of interaction, simple to use and aesthetically integrated in the museum context.

Ecological Art Experience: How We Can Gain Experimental Control While Preserving Ecologically Valid Settings and Contexts.

One point that definitions of art experience disagree about is whether this kind of experience is qualitatively different from experiences relating to ordinary objects and everyday contexts. Here, we follow an ecological approach that assumes art experience has its own specific quality, which is, not least, determined by typical contexts of art presentation. Practically, we systematically observe typical phenomena of experiencing art in ecologically valid or real-world settings such as museum contexts. Based on evidence gained in this manner, we emulate and implement essential properties of ecological contexts (e.g., free choice of viewing distance and time, large scale of artworks, and exhibition-like context) in controlled laboratory experiments. We found, for instance, that for large-scale paintings by Pollock and Rothko, preferred viewing distances as well as distances inducing the most intense art experiences – including Aesthetic Aha insights – were much larger than typical viewing distances realized in laboratory studies. Following Carbon’s (2019) terminology of measurement strategies of art experience, the combined use of “Path #1” (real-world context) and “Path #2” (mildly controlled, still ecologically valid settings and contexts) enables us to understand and investigate much closer what is really happening when people experience art.

Museum Priorities

This editorial is being written as the first terrorizing wave of a global pandemic, known as COVID-19, is washing across the world. Government agencies are struggling to stay ahead of the infection rate and asking citizens around the world to withdraw from civic gatherings, to stay at home, and to limit our social contact. The museum community is matching this call to action, canceling events and closing their doors, sending most staff home and maintaining themselves with skeleton maintenance and security services. A few innovators are using this opportunity to provide access to virtual tours, lectures, and activities as ways to help people sheltering in place with respite from the daily deluge of data. We are still early in the pandemic but the devastation this virus will cause to our spirits and the economy will echo for years to come. When we first assembled this issue, the museum sector was healthy, debating large budget museums and how the non-profit sector operates in a robust global economy. But today we face a completely changed future. It seems that this crisis has surfaced some critical issues that can be the foundation for scholarly study, and just possibly some time to think about how a new vision for the museum sector might emerge as our communities make the slow return to civic engagement and public life. In this issue, and prior to the pandemic, Associate Editor, Vince Dziekan curated a series of reflections on the tension between art and archives. The first of two sets of papers that organized around the idea that museum experience is motivated by a continuum thinking approach that accepts intersectional narratives. That is, that the archive will soon cease to be a a static catalogue, replaced by a relational dataset that can be rewritten. What was once difficult for archivists to develop in past eras is now a common affordance of digital tagging and representation. As we reviewed these papers on this emerging trend in knowledge (re)construction, I believe the concept is particularly useful for rethinking our natural history assets, city museums, the role museums of conscience play in shifting social perspectives, and how science finds representation in museum contexts. Indeed, the opportunity to explore new relationships in the record of material culture and natural history assets might help us recraft our relationships with the world around us. We welcome manuscripts that focus on how our community is coming to terms with past oppressions and exclusions. In Volume 63 issue 1, we introduced our first Curator: The Museum Journal/Knology Writing Scholars Workshop for emerging or mid-career museum professionals in the USA. Participation in this workshop made possible through a 50% matching grant funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (award #MG-50-18-0044-18). Since they joined us in December 2019, the scholars have been hard at work exploring our archives to develop virtual issues that explore emergent questions facing the museum sector. With the global pandemic leaving many museum workers in their homes, we’ve now partnered with Wiley to release seven of virtual issues and the framing papers developed by our scholars as open access for the next six months. A new virtual issue will be released every two weeks between April 8th, 2020 and the middle of June. All of these issues and the introductory essay will be released as open access on both CuratorJournal.org, our social media site, and on Wiley’s Curator: The Museum Journal’s web page: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/21516952 We invite museum scholars around the world to share these resources widely, and to take this time to reflect on where we can go as the world moves in to a post-pandemic recovery period. We may be facing radical economic stresses as we move into the recovery cycle. We hope that our resources offer some support for the new museum sector that is bound to emerge from this challenge the coming decades. John Fraser (johnf@knology.org), Editor. John Fraser is President & CEO of Knology Ltd., a social science research institute based in the USA, and the 2019–2020 Past President of the Society for Environmental, Population, & Conservation Psychology, Division 34 of the American Psychological Association.

Electronic music on show in museum context

Questions such as Is electronic music the sound of the future? or Does electronic music still have its liberating capacity? or Is electronic music capable of renewing itself? were pivotal for the whole exhibition, as explained by Marie-Pauline Martin, Director of the Music Museum in Paris and Laurent Bayle, General Director of the Cite de la Musique-Philharmonie de Paris, in their introduction to the exhibition. The answer to this set of questions was a rich, immersive experience that present...

Neuroaesthetics of Art Vision: An Experimental Approach to the Sense of Beauty

Objective: NEVArt research aims to study the correlation between a set of neurophysiological/emotional reactions and the level of aesthetic appreciation of around 500 experimental subjects, during the observation of 18 different paintings from the XVI-XVIII century, in a real museum context. Methods: Several bio-signals have been recorded to evaluate the participants’ reactions during the observation of paintings. Among them: (a) neurovegetative, motor and emotional biosignals were recorded using wearable tools for EEG (electroencephalogram), ECG (electrocardiogram) and EDA (electrodermal activity); (b) gaze pattern during the observation of art works, while (c) data of the participants (age, gender, education, familiarity with art, etc.) and their explicit judgments about paintings have been obtained. Participants were invited to respond during the observation of paintings, reporting the degree of pleasantness, perceived movement and familiarity with the painted subject. Results: Each recorded bio-signal will be correlated with the explicit evaluations obtained by participants during the museum experience. These results may contribute to enlarge the theoretical framework on the physiological, cognitive and emotional responses of people when viewing pictorial artworks. Conclusion: The NEVArt research, both in term of technical skills and upgrade in neuroscientific awareness, can be the basis to proceed with a set of further research topics in the near future. Ground-breaking and statistically significant observations can be derived from the present research, mainly at the biological, medical and didactical point of view, by paving the way for many other multidisciplinary research developments on art exhibit, architecture, etc.

CURATORIAL NETWORKS AND MUSEUM CULTURE: Objects and Evidence in Museums of African Art

ABSTRACTThe valuation and display of African art in museum contexts entails contrasting strategies of objectification. In this process, objects may be used as material evidence for larger cultural trends and new movements. This essay examines the role of curatorial networks in creating discourses about African art objects that reframe their cultural significance and economic value. These curatorial networks are treated as a habitus for the art and a discursive framework for its valuation. This analysis builds upon a taxonomic nodal model, which may be used to identify the reconfiguration of museum discourses, curatorial knowledge, and markets for artistic circulation. Two case studies, examining the paintings of Congolese artist Tshibumba Kanda Matulu (1947–circa 1981) from the 1970s and the collection of legendary Malian photographer Seydou Keïta (1921–2001) from the 1960s and the 1970s, demonstrate how curatorial networks reframe the circulation and evidential status of African art over time. The article concludes with an assessment of repatriation claims with relationship to a framework for analyzing the evidential claims of museums.

Situated Tangible Gamification of Heritage for Supporting Collaborative Learning of Young Museum Visitors

Museums offer an ideal environment for informal cultural learning on heritage artifacts, where visitors get engaged in learning due to an intrinsic motivation. Sharing the museum space among visitors allows for collective learning experiences and socializing with each other. Museums aim to design and deploy Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) in order to embrace the physical materialities of artifacts in the visiting experience. TUIs are believed to be more collaborative, attract more visitors, and persuade them to explore further. Cultural learning on heritage artifacts is particularly meaningful from the early age when opinions and attitudes are shaped. Museums accordingly follow a gamification approach (i.e., using game elements in a non-game context) to provide a collaborative and entertaining learning experience to young visitors. In this study, we investigate the implications of merging these two approaches in order to take advantage of the qualities of both TUIs and gamification in an educational museum context. Accordingly, we present TouchTomb and its evaluation in a real-world museum environment. TouchTomb is a situated tangible gamification installation that aims to enhance informal cultural learning for young visitors and to foster engagement and collaboration among them. The basis of the installation is a shared progress bar and three games with different spatial configurations, embedded into a custom fabricated replica of an original ancient Egyptian tomb-chapel wall on a 1:1 scale. Our field study involved 14 school visits with a total number of 190 school pupils (from 10 to 14 years old). We deployed a mixed-method evaluation to investigate how such a tangible gamification approach entertains and educates 15 pupils collectively for a maximum of 15 minutes, including the evaluation procedures. We particularly investigated how the different spatial configurations of the game setups influenced the stages of pupils’ cultural learning, and the levels of engagement and collaboration among them. We conclude the article by discussing the qualities of tangible gamification and its role in facilitating cultural learning. For instance, cultural learning is enhanced by situating heritage artifacts in the experience, and embedding learning in the reward system. Engagement and collaboration among visitors are fostered by creating a sense of ownership and designing a diversity of goals.

The Reconstruction of Traumatic Memory in the Case of Nanjing Museum of the Site of Lijixiang Comfort Stations from the View of Museum Context

The Reconstruction of Traumatic Memory in the Case of Nanjing Museum of the Site of Lijixiang Comfort Stations from the View of Museum Context

Does digital technology improve the visitor experience A comparative study in the museum context

The purpose of this study is to verify the impact of visitor experience (VEX) on memorable experience, overall satisfaction and behavioural intentions, through an empirical study between a digital and a traditional museum. Findings reveal that in the case of the digital museum, VEX shows more satisfactory results in terms of memories and behavioural intentions. For museum managers, this study sheds light on the importance of creating an experiential cultural platform by visiting museums and providing evidence for the critical role of digital technology. Despite the richness of works on the tourism experience, few studies have investigated the VEX in museum management, and no study has analysed the impact of VEX on memorability, satisfaction and behavioural intentions when comparing traditional and digital museums. Therefore, this study is adding to the body of the knowledge in relation to this context and contributing to both theory and practice.

Does digital technology improve the visitor experience A comparative study in the museum context

Does digital technology improve the visitor experience A comparative study in the museum context

Ephemeral Storytelling With Social Media: Snapchat and Instagram Stories at the Brooklyn Museum

The usage of social media in the context of the museum visit continues to grow. This research examined Instagram and Snapchat stories shared by visitors at the Brooklyn Museum via semi-structured interviews and photo-elicitation. The results provide insights into the characteristics of this ephemeral media and the motivations behind these posts. Similar to traditional photography, ephemeral content on social media is often motivated by capturing an artwork found to be aesthetically pleasing, documenting a feeling, sharing an experience, or building self-identity. However, the content shared is shaped by the ephemeral aspect that motivates minimal curation and editing. The study results add to the rapidly evolving field of social media within the museum context. Moreover, it advocates for an active role for the museum to have policies and opportunities that respond to these behaviors and learn from the content shared informing interpretation and learning materials.

Museums as Disseminators of Niche Knowledge

Accessibility has been facing several challenges within Audiovisual Translation Studies and has also gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Audiovisual translation modes have achieved a crucial role in the transmission of what scholarly studies have discussed in relation to media accessibility as a set of services and practices providing access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment. Today accessibility has become a concept involving more and more universality, since it is extensively contributing to the dissemination of audiovisual and visual products about issues on minorities, and also addressing all human beings, regardless of cultural and social differences.
 Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised within the context of aesthetics of marginalisation, migration, and minorities as modalities which encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, and as universal processes of translation and interpretation that provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar for interlingual translation and subtitling applied to museum contexts of marginalisation, migration and minorities.
 Drawing upon well-established research in the field of audiovisual translation and media accessibility, and by adopting systemic-functional and lexical-semantic methodological approaches for translation quality assessment of museum text types, this study aims to put emphasis on accessibility as a societal instrument that contributes to giving voice to minorities through knowledge dissemination in English as a lingua franca by means of aesthetic narrative types within the field of the visual arts (i.e. museum settings). In this sense, accessibility is viewed as the embodiment of universality that ensures universal access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle, while acting as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications.

ERMi esemekogud ja -analüüs

Human artifacts are part of a culture. Whatever aspect we consider—their material, manufacture, ritual use or meaning—the world of human-made objects is closely intertwined with technological, social, economic, religious and other fields. An artifact can be a valuable source of study for a scholar delving into either the past or contemporary culture. Insofar as objects from past cultures are concentrated in museum collections, several questions arise in the mind of a researcher regarding the object as a source material: both at the level of describing and analysing an individual item and more broadly, at the level of the museum collection. A museum’s collection of artifacts is not a neutral and objective representation of real life. Nor is any other ethnographic source preserved in our museum’s collections a neutral and objective representation of life. Field diaries, reports, photographs, descriptions of objects and collections reflect the theoretical views of the times, or the understanding of the mission of ethnography/ethnology and the Estonian National Museum. Source criticism must always take into account the background, which in the case of object research will also involve the museum context.

‘Whose Object is it Anyway?’ – Four Workshops at the Aga Khan Museum investigating the ‘Properties of Things’

In October 2018, the Aga Khan Museum was invited to contribute to the conference ‘Properties of Things: Collective Knowledge and Objects of the Museum’, sponsored by Ryerson and Mount Allison Universities. The event was conceived to throw an innovative, and intellectually bold, multidisciplinary spotlight onto curatorship within a museum context, and to engender discussions around the multifarious ways in which objects might be re-considered, re-contextualised, and re-interpreted for the benefit of and in line with the interests of a broad, contemporary public. What follows is a summary of the conceptual considerations and questions that underpinned the workshop explorations the Museum devised for four distinct display contexts: the Bellerive Room, the Permanent Collection Gallery, and two temporary exhibitions on show at the time: ‘Emperors and Jewels – Treasures of the Indian Courts from the Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait’ and ‘Transforming Traditions,’ an exploration of the arts ofnineteenth-century Iran.

Non-invasive identification of polymers in cultural heritage collections: evaluation, optimisation and application of portable FTIR (ATR and external reflectance) spectroscopy to three-dimensional polymer-based objects

The conservation of polymer-based cultural heritage is a major concern for collecting institutions internationally. Collections include a range of different polymers, each with its own degradation processes and preservation needs, however, they are frequently unidentified in collection catalogues. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is a useful analytical tool for identifying polymers, which is vital for determining storage, exhibition, loan and treatment conditions. Attenuated Total Reflection (ATR), and External Reflection (ER) are proven effective FTIR sampling techniques for polymer identification and are beginning to appear in conservation labs. This paper evaluates and optimises the application of these two FTIR techniques to three-dimensional plastic objects in the museum context. Elements of the FTIR measurement process are investigated for 15 common polymers found in museum collections using both authentic reference sheets, and case study objects to model for surface characteristics. Including: use of the ATR and ER modules, the difference between clamping and manually holding objects in contact with the ATR crystal, use of the Kramers–Kronig Transformation, signal-to-noise ratios for increasing number of co-added scans, resultant time taken to collect each measurement, associated professional, health and safety considerations, and the use and availability of reference materials for polymer identify verification. Utilising this information, a flowchart for applying FTIR spectroscopy to three-dimensional historic plastic objects during museum collection surveys is proposed to guide the conservation profession.

MUSEUMS AS A NETWORK REPOSITORY OF LATE-LIFE CREATIVITY

Through collaboration and exchange for exhibitions, art museums represent an under-explored network for displaying late-life creativity and the longevity dividend. Drawing on the collection from many galleries brought together for the Letzte Bilder (Last Pictures) exhibition by the Schirm Gallery Frankfurt, this talk will illustrate the possibility of creating educational programs, Late Life Creativity trails both virtual through podcasts and structural, as well as specific exhibitions of late-life creativity as a catalyst for reimagining and reframing ageing. Further approaches are the focus on the life course of works of artist like Cy Twombly at the Museum Brandhorst Munich or Pablo Picasso at the Museum Barberini Potsdam, as well as studying aging in artists self-portraits. The interaction of creativity with age, diseases, and functional decline in the museum context can promote the changing of role models and our understanding of productivity and creativity by ourselves as well as in the society.

MUSEUMS AND AGING: VISTAS, SYNERGIES, AND OPPORTUNITIES

Against a background of an overall decrease in attendance at museums, older Americans represent a contrast with a marked increase in attendance of those aged over 75. Drawing on theorists of museums and the narratives on ageing in the literature of museums, this introductory presentation gives an overview of the socio-political context of museums, the activities and roles of older people as currently presented through networks such as the Network of European Museums Organizations, and propose a fresh vision of the networks and synergies between older people, museums and gerontology.

Asja uuritakse. Mõttevahetus materiaalse kultuuri uurimise üle Eestis ja Ameerika Ühendriikides / All Things Considered. An interview about the material culture research in Estonia and in the United States of America

Asja uuritakse. Mõttevahetus materiaalse kultuuri uurimise üle Eestis ja Ameerika Ühendriikides / All Things Considered. An interview about the material culture research in Estonia and in the United States of America

You Can Handle It: 3D Printing for Museums

OVERVIEW3D printing is a rapidly developing technology that has been championed as a revolutionary tool for the museums and heritage sector. Prints can provide innovative and engaging haptic experiences with objects in collections that cannot be handled, akin to craft replicas that have traditionally been employed. Large museums now regularly commission prints, yet evidence for the success of their deployment is largely anecdotal. This review considers how 3D prints have been utilized in museum contexts, with a focus on their successes and weaknesses as tools for public engagement.