Museum Community Research Articles

The Application of Dramaturgy in Museum Communication

The Application of Dramaturgy in Museum Communication

The Global Museum: natural history collections and the future of evolutionary science and public education.

Natural history museums are unique spaces for interdisciplinary research and educational innovation. Through extensive exhibits and public programming and by hosting rich communities of amateurs, students, and researchers at all stages of their careers, they can provide a place-based window to focus on integration of science and discovery, as well as a locus for community engagement. At the same time, like a synthesis radio telescope, when joined together through emerging digital resources, the global community of museums (the ‘Global Museum’) is more than the sum of its parts, allowing insights and answers to diverse biological, environmental, and societal questions at the global scale, across eons of time, and spanning vast diversity across the Tree of Life. We argue that, whereas natural history collections and museums began with a focus on describing the diversity and peculiarities of species on Earth, they are now increasingly leveraged in new ways that significantly expand their impact and relevance. These new directions include the possibility to ask new, often interdisciplinary questions in basic and applied science, such as in biomimetic design, and by contributing to solutions to climate change, global health and food security challenges. As institutions, they have long been incubators for cutting-edge research in biology while simultaneously providing core infrastructure for research on present and future societal needs. Here we explore how the intersection between pressing issues in environmental and human health and rapid technological innovation have reinforced the relevance of museum collections. We do this by providing examples as food for thought for both the broader academic community and museum scientists on the evolving role of museums. We also identify challenges to the realization of the full potential of natural history collections and the Global Museum to science and society and discuss the critical need to grow these collections. We then focus on mapping and modelling of museum data (including place-based approaches and discovery), and explore the main projects, platforms and databases enabling this growth. Finally, we aim to improve relevant protocols for the long-term storage of specimens and tissues, ensuring proper connection with tomorrow’s technologies and hence further increasing the relevance of natural history museums.

Gitanas without a tambourine: Notes on the historical representation and personal self-representation of the Spanish Romani woman

The performative representation of the Spanish Roma woman reveals a historical journey that brings her closer to many symbolic elaborations of the feminine, giving her a special affinity with the imaginary concerning the colonized woman, particularly with the Orientalist vision. Developed initially by the travelling intellectuals in Spain who sought a fusion of the topics of sexualized exoticism, the myth was reworked by local artists and thinkers without undermining their power to silence and make invisible the reality of the most vulnerable and most represented members of the ethnic group, their women. Today, a growing awareness of the importance of collective action directs Roma women to initiatives such as the revision of their historical memory, at the intersection between the external gaze and self-perception. These searches lead to the pioneering creation of community museum institutions, which have arisen around feminine Roma associations and are a symptom of an emerging desire to be heard. Based on the terminological tools shared by women and memory studies, this article seeks the personal dimension of this invitation to listen. The authors analyse a series of interviews with Roma women that investigate the social agents of representation, self-representation and their conceptual and experiential foundations.

Action Plans Empower Museums to Address Gender Inequality

To achieve long-term impact in the arena of gender equality, museums need to go beyond thematic educational activities and exhibitions. Museums need to become permanent spaces dedicated to problems of gender equality, advocate for changes that promote gender equality internally and externally and become acknowledged on local and national level as trusted organisations that bring together stakeholders and advocate for a more gender inclusive society. They need to serve as permanent places where questions around gender and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are addressed on different levels. To this end, 14 science centres and museums in Europe and Israel worked together for three years as part of a common, European-funded project (Hypatia) in order to become Hubs for gender equality in their communities. Together, they created synergies, working with schools, industry and research centres as agents of change. At the end of the project, they listed a series of recommendations for the long-term implementation of Gender inclusion in STEM communication. They based these recommendations on the findings of the Horizon 2020 funded project ‘Hypatia’ in which they collaborated from 2015 until 2018, on their own experiences, and shared learning. Participating museums selected four places and sectors in which they planned to implement changes, thereby ensuring their actions would be sustainable: their own museum/science centre/network of science centres; research and industry institutions; schools; and within other informal science education organisations. Using tools developed by the project, including a Theoretical Framework for gender inclusion, a Toolkit of ready-to-use, hands-on activities for teenagers that address gender, national ‘Hub’ models, and input from young people, the Hypatia Project offers now insight and information on how the museum community can address gender inclusion in local and national communities. The lessons learned demonstrate how museums can act as tools to promote equitable STEM educational programming, preparing the next gender inclusive STEM-ready workforce.

The Museum Community and Community Museum Governance

Ontario has more than 500 museums, varying in type, size, and expressed need. They have different relationships to both government policy and the associations that represent them. Yet, research on museum governance often focuses on provincial or national organizations, neglecting community museums (i.e., smaller institutions with local or regional roots). Due to their limited resources, community museums rely on the work of spokespeople to advocate for their interests. Within Ontario museum governance, these spokespeople use the term “museum community” to indicate consensus on a course of action. According to a sociology of translation perspective, when a spokesperson speaks for others, they must first silence those in whose name they speak. As such, this paper considers how those governing the sector construct the “museum community” as actors in support of particular action. It asks who and what forms the museum community? Which voices are given a platform as museum advisors and which associations represent the so-called community? The paper concludes that municipal museums have historically had a privileged position within museum associations’ articulation of community, while provincial museum advisors have more successfully included the voices of small historical society museums. As the museum advisor’s resources have become more limited, the Ontario Museum Association (OMA) has taken a more active role in assembling those voices. However, the association has limited financial resources. As such, there continues to be a stratification of museums in museum governance.

Art History and Museology: Points of Intersection and Points of Contact

«Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Искусствоведение» — научно-теоретический рецензируемый журнал, обобщающий результаты исследований ученых всего мира в различных областях искусства, включая музыковедение, культурологию и художественное образование.

ПОТЕНЦИАЛ МУЗЕЙНОЙ ПЕДАГОГИКИ ДЛЯ ФОРМИРОВАНИЯ ЯЗЫКОВЫХ КОМПЕТЕНЦИЙ В РАМКАХ ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОЙ ЯЗЫКОВОЙ ПОДГОТОВКИ НА ФМОИЗР

Visiting the museum is always useful and has a huge potential for learning foreign languages, because there this process is not singular and individual, and there are opportunities for communication, exchange of views and discussion in the study group. In addition, the Museum can be seen as a window into another culture, actualizing personal development beyond the acquisition of language. Museum exhibits encourage productive (speech) activities and allow for a wide variety of activities and disputes. The cross-cultural experience is initiated by the Museum subject and communication with other students. Visiting museums contributes to the formation of an intercultural dialogue. In the Museum classes, various types of speech activities can be used to promote the progress of such communicative skills as direct and reverse translation, posing various types of questions, making assumptions, evaluating, generalizing, abstracting, drawing conclusions and conclusions. Museum exhibits are an impulse for spontaneous speech, which is the goal of teaching a foreign language. Simultaneously with the development of language competence, students continue to develop such important competencies as tolerant coreference to different views, creativity. The only restriction for classes in museums is the time limit for completing tasks.

Treasures from the Tablelands: communities, collaboration and collections

The First World War Centenary has stimulated numerous activities throughout Australia, activating interest in heritage projects that have involved the broader community. This paper explores the value of community museum projects by analysing the development and delivery of the Tablelands Heritage Network’s Anzac Treasures of the Tablelands exhibition. By examining the collaborative nature of the project, what it takes to develop participatory projects and showcasing some of the objects uncovered during the project, it reflects on the community and museological benefits of working collaboratively.

«KAZAN MUSEUM HERALD» ON MUSEUM WORK IN TATARSTAN IN THE 1920S

The article is devoted to the consideration of the problems of formation and analysis of the content of one of the first specialised museological periodicals – Kazan Museum Herald, published in 1920-1924. The sources of the research were both the materials of the publication itself and the works of museologists who actively participated in the creation and activities of the journal. The application of methods of source study analysis allowed to consider the main range of problems that worried the museum community in the early 1920s, the directions of museum work that should have been covered in the pages of the publication and, for one reason or another, were not developed, to analyse the subject of publications and reflected in materials of the publication of museum work in different regions of the country. The conclusions of the work emphasise the importance of the publication for the development of museum work in the territory of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in the early years of Soviet power, an important place occupied in the journal by materials on the problems of the exposition, research and educational activities of the Central Museum of the TASSR. However, the specifics of the publication was the way the topic went beyond solving exclusively local problems, considering the state of provincial museums in the country, issues of theory and practice of museum work, and problems of protecting monuments. The broad scientific approach of the publication to these problems, attracting to work and publications not only local scientists, museologists, but also art historians and pedagogues made Kazan Museum Herald a unique source on the history of the formation of Soviet museum work.

ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЯ ФУНКЦІЙ МУЗЕЮ І ВИНИКНЕННЯ НАРАТИВНИХ ЕКСПОЗИЦІЙ У СУЧАСНИХ УМОВАХ

The article considers the role, the function and the place of museums in the modern world in the conditions of the electronic revolution, change of generations, the beginning of the postmodernism era. Accordingly, to these statements, there are questions related to the revision of the museum communication system relatively modern forms, understandable to the new generation. Speaking of museum communication, first of all, we mean a change in approaches to the formation and creation of a museum exhibition, which is the main platform for interaction with the public, and therefore communication with the visitor. The author pays attention to the issue of separating the second main function of the museum, along with storage. In today's digital and post-industrial society, the availability of collections for visitors comes to the fore in museums, as well as the form of exhibitions and the way it constructed. The article analyzes the reasons for the change of museums forms and their activities, following the functioning of various models in society and their conflict. It argued that the situation in museums reflects a broader conflict between two models of democracy, which, although unevenly, but coexist today: pedagogical and performative model. The first, among other things, provides that a person, to be a citizen, must be prepared through education, to participate in high culture. The second considers each person as a consumer/customer who consciously has the right to accept or reject a product. Therefore, the author paid special attention to the narrative museum as one of the forms of the postmodern museum, which functionates within the framework of the performative model, the construction of its exposition and the perception of its visitors. Also, considers the range of ways of displaying objects as well as its expansion in comparison with the classical modernism museum. Additional modern presentation methods provided, including story virtualization and related educational activities that added to the classical exposition base. The author present signs characterize the narrative of the museum.

“Bones in the sandbox”: museum as “world picture” vs museum as “lifeworld”

This article deals with the issues of museum communication and interpretation of museum exhibits in a philosophical and cultural context. As an example, it considers two different ways of presenting palaeontological material – specifically, the skeleton of a southern mammoth – revealing differences in how the semantic content is interpreted. The first method – the traditional approach of assembling the skeleton – gives a “world picture” of a certain era, as it appears to a palaeontologist. The second approach presents the skeleton in a “sandbox”, representing how it was found during excavations, such that viewers deal not with the interpreted “ready-made” material, but with the contemporary experienced reality – the “life-world”, the “raw” source material. This allows visitors to realize their own creative potential and to recreate the nature of the Pleistocene epoch in their imagination. Thus, through the mutual correlation of the roles exhibition’s author and of the visitor as an interpreter, the semantic field of museum communication expands. In Heidegger’s conception, a “ hides the world rather than explains it, while the “life world” represents it as it is.

Reorganization of the “Peterhof ” State Museum-Reserve in the 21st century

The article reveals the content of the “Peterhof ” State Museum-Reserve’s stages of modernization in 2009–2020, analyzes the effectiveness of measures developed by the management of the museum-reserve to support new areas of development, and presents the stages of transformation of a linear management system to a multi-level museum complex. The basis for the article are reports and a number of program documents from the “Peterhof ” State Museum-Reserve, made available for scientific circulation for the first time. The key document of the analysis is the Concept of Development of the Federal State Budgetary Institution of Culture “State Museum- Reserve” Peterhof “for the period 2012–2016, which formulates the main theses of the museum’s transition to a strategic planning system. Along with the preservation of traditional museum functions, in the practical activities of the Peterhof State Museum-Reserve special attention is paid to the innovations introduced in museum practices of the 21st century: creating a museum management system and museum policy in general, a system of external museum communications, a museum positioning system and organizing sustainable interaction with visitors. Relevant components of the concept “image of a modern museum-reserve” are revealed, which correlate with the practical activities of the departments and divisions of the museum under analysis. The author proposes and substantiates an innovative system of continuous visitor support, in which it becomes possible to effectively manage the interaction of the museum and the visitor. The most important economic result of the modernization of the museum-reserve is the formation of effective mechanisms that improve the work of the museum in the conditions of market relations and allow for the establishment of a stable system of interaction with visitors. The presented experience of the Peterhof State Museum-Reserve can become a guide for Russian regional museums-reserves when choosing directions for the development of museum complexes.

Bookplates and Inscriptions with F. Vovk’s Name

This research identifies the scientific novelty of the study of Fedir Vovk’s book collection and libraries of institutions named after him (the object), bookplates and inscriptions with the scientist’s name on editions in Ukrainian libraries and selected museum libraries (the subject). The objective of the research is to collect information about bookplates and inscriptions on books (old printed books, antique books, books of the late 19th – early 20th century) with the scholar’s name to observe the respect of the scientific and museum communities to his contribution to the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation and Ukrainian studies. The historiography and sources of the research (121 rare books of the 19th – early 20th century), studied on “de visu” principle, are systematized and commented on. Attention is paid to Oleksandr Alesho’s book collection, which was presented to the library of the Cabinet of Anthropology and Ethnology named after Fedir Vovk. Some specification of his bookplate and the inscription associated with his name has begun. The French (sub)collection of Vovk’s library is in our focus too, namely some sources of its creation, partial description of its content, and institutions that keep it nowadays. The author publishes book statistics, defines theoretical and empirical research methods as well as challenges of the research: difficulties with investigation of the library and book collections in the funds of the National Museum of Ukrainian History (hereafter – NMUH) and the lack of the card-file catalog in the library of NMUH. The main part of the article is structured in the form of two annexes with commentaries, which include results of historiographical and source studies. Typology of every bookplate is presented, and the list of bookplates and inscriptions with the name of Fedir Vovk is set (23 units). Prospects of the research as a public and historical project are determined.

Integrating Cultural Landscapes for Community Museum Development: Architecture, Design, Strategies

Nestled in the high mountainous region of north-west Pakistan is the valley of Laspur, which has remained an important locality on the route connecting the Karakorams (71° -79° E, 35° -36° N) and H...

Community museums and rethinking the colonial frame of national museums in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we present the Marange Community Museum as an empirical example of how decoloniality can be approached within the museum practice. We argue that the Marange community made use of indigenous ontologies and epistemologies in establishing their museum where rituals and cultural objects are connected in use and in an ongoing dialogue. Ritual processes associated with burials of chiefs and rain petitioning ceremonies are discussed in this paper as inseparable from the physical fabric of cultural objects on display in the Marange Community Museum. We also posit that the way in which this museum was formed is an empirical illustration of how the museum practice can be decolonised because it embraces collaborations with community members. Hence, a decolonial perspective represented by a community museum acknowledges that objects are not mundane but rather represent the coming together of a multiplicity of factors and it also questions the binary division between tangible and intangible heritage knowledge production.

Augmenting Museum Communication Services to Create Young Audiences

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how museums use Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance communication services with their audiences and attract new ones. Still, there is no definite answer to how young audiences perceive the educational effects of experiencing this augmented space of communication as an immersive medium. This study is based on a survey of 400 students after they visited an AR technology-enhanced exhibition held by a local history museum. Two stimulus–response marketing scale metrics, widely used to assess TV commercials, were adapted for AR experiences and validated. The mediation analysis revealed an intervening emotional mechanism, in which the multisensory AR experience has educational effects through entertainment and empathy. An improved stimulus–response empirical model is proposed, in which AR technologies, as environmental multisensory stimuli, produce cognitive responses through emotional immersion. The findings have significance in improving how museums encode their message using AR technologies as a secondary communication medium with young audiences. This study could help museum professionals and application developers to find AR implementation solutions as service tools to enhancing user experience by using a widely tested scale for evaluating TV commercials applied to measure AR experiences.

ТЕАТРАЛЬНІСТЬ СУЧАСНИХ МУЗЕЙНИХ КОМУНІКАЦІЙ: СОЦІАЛЬНО-ФІЛОСОФСЬКИЙ АСПЕКТ

The purpose of the study is to identify and comprehend the socio- philosophical foundations of the theatricality of modern museum communications. The methodological research strategy is based on the concept of theatricality of sociocommunicative manifestations of culture (using the methodological apparatus of sociocultural analysis). This approach made it possible to find out that the museum space is communicative in its goals, objectives and forms of existence. This space is not closed, because museum communication is not only the exchange of information within the museum. The exit of museum communication into social reality is facilitated by the theftricalization of museum space and the formation of on appropriate information and semantic field (environment) using works of fiction.

PERSONALIZATION ENVISAGED IN MUSEUM APPLICATION GUIDES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS: UNDERSTANDING THE CONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM WITHIN THE MUSEUMS OF KOREA

Abstract. The emergence of innovative technologies in the museum environment has influenced the development of guide application tools for personalization, greatly contributing to the enhancement of collection accessibility and enriching the museum experience. Most Korean museums have thus developed strategic objectives for the application of evolved technological advances in their guide applications over the past decade. Beyond such endeavors, the critical analysis and understanding of technical aspects, the information and interactive approach of the applications, and their personalization strategies, are still not broadly explored. This study aims to investigate the various types of technologies that museums use to envisage the personalization of museums exhibits in light of a range of classifications and their correlations. In addition to providing an overview of personalization, the paper aims to access the level and degree of user experience and engagement found in different forms of digital storytelling to investigate the realization of virtual museum(VM) within the museum sector of Korea. To this end, this paper contributes toward filling the gap in the literature by addressing how museum communities can do critical thinking on the reflection of resources when creating their application guides in developing the appropriate digital strategies.

Memory Quilts and Hope Chests: Adult Learners Craft Counterstories in Their Community Museum

AbstractThe authors describe how a community museum created and curated by adult education students acted as an innovative and student‐centered model to support learners in developing and demonstrating their literacy skills and knowledges. Using a case study approach to document and analyze students’ counterstories (i.e., stories that disrupt dominant narratives), the authors highlight the ways in which creating and curating a community museum leveraged adult students’ expertise and opened opportunities for meaningful civic action through counterstorying. The authors aim to provide adult literacy educators with a concrete example of how an expansive understanding of literacy skills within their curriculum, including the literacies of making and design, can support students’ development of relevant content literacies and workforce competencies, including researching, multimodal composing, speaking, and collaborating.

Spectroscopic characterization of selected French paper negatives (1843-1856): how to see through many processes?

Photographic negative images on paper are certainly the earliest types of photographs ever produced, giving access to multiple photographic prints using a unique matrix. As early as 1841 in France, many variants of the paper negatives processes have been developed by skilled chemists and photographers covering a wide spectrum of practical and aesthetic concerns. Nowadays, due to their inherent historical and esthetical values, those negatives are getting an increasing interest from the art and museum community. However, their materiality has been poorly studied despite a large variety of processes involving many different chemicals and organic coatings; limiting our possibilities of identification, attribution or even preservation. The aim of this work was to develop a methodology to better assess the way those images were produced based on physical and chemical characteristics. A non-invasive approach combining optical, vibrational and X-ray spectroscopies was implemented on a collection of 138 historical images between 1841 and 1856 from French collections. A survey was carried out on these negatives to provide a series of relevant physical data (dimensions, thickness, weight, etc). Non-invasive reflectance FTIR showed great potentiality in revealing the presence of organic sizing (gelatin) or impregnation (wax). Multivariate analysis was applied on XRF data to help clustering negatives that have similar elemental composition and highlight relationships between makers. Finally, the morphological, physical and chemical results were all combined to answer historical questioning on the paper negative process.