Museum Narratives Research Articles

Dialogues and Narratives Surrounding Confucius and His Disciples in the Shanghai Museum Manuscripts (上博楚簡有關孔子師徒的對話與故事)

This article is a study of narratives and dialogues surrounding Confucius and his disciples in the Shanghai Museum Manuscripts, focusing on their relationship with received texts, as well as their periodization and genre division. The Shanghai Museum narratives seem to be situated between Lun yu (Analects) and Han Shi waizhuan (Han Ying’s Outer Commentary to the Poetry), in that they are not as succinct and precise as the former, but also not overly elaborate like the latter. These narratives are possibly the work of Confucians from the mid to late Warring States period. 通過討論上博簡中孔子與顔淵、子路、子貢等的對話或故事與經典的關係及其文字屬性問題,本文認爲其中有關內容,介於《論語》與《韓詩外傳》諸書之間,不如前者精煉、準確,又不像後者鋪陳太過。這可能就是戰國中後期的儒家作品。

Reinterpreting and Transforming ‘Red’ Museums in Yugoslavia

This article examines the evolution of the so‐called ‘red museums’ in Yugoslavia (1945‐1991). Focusing on how Yugoslavian post‐war museums were established, organised and operated, the article reveals changes in the way historical discourses were reinterpreted in efforts to promote new national narratives. In recent years, the use of personal narratives in national museums, particularly at the National Museum of Contemporary History, has played a central role in reshaping national narratives of the past.

Flow, Staging, Wayfinding, Personalization: Evaluating User Experience with Mobile Museum Narratives

Flow, Staging, Wayfinding, Personalization: Evaluating User Experience with Mobile Museum Narratives

Flow, Staging, Wayfinding, Personalization: Evaluating User Experience with Mobile Museum Narratives

A multitude of challenges comes into play when attempting to design (and evaluate) an interactive digital storytelling experience for use by visitors in a museum. This paper reports on the evaluation of the prototype mobile-based storytelling “guides” designed, developed and deployed as part of a research project at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece. Experiences designed for different visitor profiles were evaluated several times throughout the iterative design process, in a number of on-site studies, and with more than 180 museum visitors of all ages (with this paper reporting on two studies conducted with a total of 53 users visiting individually or in pairs). The evaluation methods included ethnography (i.e., observation of visitors in the Museum’s galleries), pre- and post-experience in-depth interviews and questionnaires to measure the Users’ Experience (UX), as well as data logging. The analysis of the data focused on themes representing components of the experiences, such as interactive story plot and narration, staging and way-finding in the physical space, personalization and social interaction. Our findings confirmed that understanding UX and what makes it effective or not in the rich context of a cultural setting is a complex endeavor. The paper discusses our findings and proposes relevant recommendations for the design of digital experiences for cultural, educational, and recreational purposes.

Following the story: narrative mapping as a mobile method for tracking and interrogating spatial narratives

ABSTRACTMuseums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method’s utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives.

Who Owns the Museum Narrative?

Who Owns the Museum Narrative?

Cultures on tour: the roots and routes of a British museum exhibition on Assam

The 2016 British Museum 'Krishna in the Garden of Assam' exhibition was built around a nine-metre textile embellished with Hindu iconography known as the Vrindavani Vastra. As part of the exhibition programming, the museum hosted a 90-minute performance by eleven monks and artistes from northeast India, entitled Vrindavani Paal. This article analyses these two cultural productions - the textile and the dance - in relation to narratives of 'home'. Whilst both are represented as being 'from Assam' by museum narratives and in the literature surrounding Indian classical dance respectively, a close look at their histories and forms reveals a far more complex relationship to this northeast Indian state than is usually acknowledged. Bringing together diaspora theory of Paul Gilroy and James Clifford, and post-colonial dance scholarship by Margaret Walker and Davesh Soneji, the article de-constructs the narratives surrounding these 'Assamese' arts and examines the stories of travel and translation which have produced their current forms.1 It explains how these stories are visibly manifest in the textile and the dance, and questions why such stories are side-lined in favour of originating myths.

Object narratives and the enslaved at Sam Houston memorial museum

ABSTRACTObjects offer an opportunity to narrate the past. Tourism scholarship has found that plantation museums in the American South give considerable attention to objects associated with the planter class to engage visitors with stories about them and their lifestyle. At the same time, museum stakeholders have cited a lack of objects associated with the enslaved as a barrier to greater representations of slavery. However, the concept of an interface object indicates objects can be used to make connections between things that are not intrinsic and to insert issues into stories that are told. These objects can even become charged with such issues. Using the case study of the Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Texas (USA), this paper considers the use of objects in narrating the past, particularly as it relates to slavery. It draws upon participant observation of guided tours and narrative analysis of the stories told about the enslaved on the Houston farm to consider how ordinary objects are used to incorporate slavery into the overarching museum narrative. Finally, the paper concludes that such objects are effective in initiating the conversation about slavery but are not sufficiently charged to facilitate a more meaningful engagement with the issue.

The performative space for city identity narrative: A case study of Suzhou Museum

This article takes Suzhou Museum as a case to analyze various aspects of its narrative constitution, narrative time, and narrative voice. The analysis reveals that the new museum building tells a story of tradition and modernity, the local and the world, personalization, and customization. The museum’s exhibition with “Wu” leading the story of local tradition and historical culture provides resources for the city identity of Suzhou. Visitor’s narratives, aided by new media technologies, infiltrate, fuse, and reconstruct the museum narrative. This case study makes clear the following theoretical points. First, by dealing with the relation between narrative time and space, the museum as a medium displays its uniqueness in the city communication system. Second, through visitors’ appropriation, production, and reproduction, the museum as a built environment presents its openness, fluidity, and inconsistencies. Third, the constitutive power of new media technologies facilitates the intervention of visitors’ subjectivity in the museum narrative and makes the meaning construction of the narrative more interactive. And finally, the communicative practices activated by the narrative construction in the museum as a mediaspace in the city contribute to the liminal experiences that bear traces of both ideological regulation and the city’s identity, turning the proposition that “citizens create the city” into a real possibility.

Malaysia. Museums, history and culture in Malaysia By Abu Talib Ahmad Singapore: NUS Press, 2015. Pp. 328. Tables, Maps, Illustrations, Abbreviations, Glossary, Bibliography, Index.

Malaysia. Museums, history and culture in Malaysia By Abu Talib Ahmad Singapore: NUS Press, 2015. Pp. 328. Tables, Maps, Illustrations, Abbreviations, Glossary, Bibliography, Index. - Volume 48 Issue 1

Chubut, Argentina: a contested Welsh ‘first-place’

In an attempt to escape British hegemony, the Welsh established a Patagonian colony in 1865, in what is now the Chubut Province of Argentina. The historical struggles the immigrants faced upon settling the land are rooted in the landscape and commemorated in different versions of Patagonian regional history through provincial museum narratives that serve as a method of solidifying Welshness in Chubut. Contemporarily, the local tourism industry constructs the Welsh as the first settlers in the region, while minimally representing predecessor groups like the indigenous communities or Spanish colonials. Curiously, the representation of these other heritage communities throughout heritage displays actually serves to bolster the Welsh ‘first-place’ claims over the region. These tensions are seen throughout community-based museums in the region that assert a locally rooted hybrid identity by acknowledging local historical diversity, while simultaneously recalling and emphasising the [Welsh] homeland heritage. This paper explores how ‘first-places’ can be a source of symbolic conflict, while simultaneously serving as a dynamic, heritage construction mechanism. This research investigates how the Welsh diaspora negotiates its identity through the mobilisation of heritage, to make claims about the Chubut Province as a symbolic Welsh first-place, as well as broader Argentine heritage.

Framing Effects in Museum Narratives: Objectivity in Interpretation Revisited

AbstractMuseums establish specific contexts, framings, which distinguish them from viewing the world face-to-face. One striking aspect of exhibition in so-calledparticipatorymuseums is that it echoes and transforms the limits of its own frame as a public space. I argue that it is a mistake to think of the meaning of an exhibit aseitherdetermined by the individual viewer's narrativeoras determined by the conception as presented in the museum's ‘authoritative’ narrative. Instead I deploy the concept of amodel of comparisonto illuminate the philosophical significance of perspective in understanding the idea of objectivity in museum narratives.

“Fazer falar o silêncio da história”: a virada narrativa dos museus

Resumo A narração assume um estatuto múltiplo: torna-se uma estrutura empregada para oferecer contextualizações ou um estratagema para superar problemas de comunicação de museu, como por exemplo juntar fontes, temas e, sobretudo, temporalidades heterogêneas. Com a new museology, afirmou-se a ideia de que o museu não pode ser colocado em um empíreo, do qual garante uma visão universal. O museu narrativo nasceu da crise de modelos até então hegemônicos. Em segundo lugar, entraram em crise as modalidades autorreferenciais de comunicação. “Colocar a periferia no centro”, oferecer atenção a quem não teve reconhecimento pela história, que só sofreu a partir da tempestade do moderno, ou seja, fazer falarem sujeitos, territórios, culturas que viram negada a sua voz e a sua identidade. A mostra RISARCIMENTI [Storie di vita e di attesa], 2011, o Museu Etnomuseo Monti Lepini, o Museu do Brigantaggio di Itri e o Museu do Brigantaggio di Cellere falam desta perspectiva. Então, deve-nos convidar a assumir uma dimensão reflexiva, produzir obras não decisivas e monolíticas, mas parciais e também desmontáveis e criticáveis.

The afterlives of communist things: Archiving feeling in post-communist Romania

This article explores the afterlives of communist everyday material culture by pitting grassroots heritage practices against officially sanctioned museum narratives in post-communist Romania. More specifically, it engages with the divergent affective attachments imposed on and contained by communist things. I focus on three different instances of engagement with everyday material culture from communism: the Sighet Memorial Museum, the online musealization of communist memorabilia in two blogs and the investigation of the social afterlives of bygone communist brands in the documentary Metrobranding (2010). My interest lies with disentangling the protocols of affective attachment to and detachment from the communist past as revealed by the shifting framing of communist things as either junk or redeemed biographical objects. These competing emotional regimes around communist materiality are, I argue, symptomatic of broader changes in mnemonic practices and provide valuable insights into the generationality of post-communist remembrances.

Enhancing augmented reality with cognitive and knowledge perspectives: a case study in museum exhibitions

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we present our results related to the definition of a methodology that combines augmented reality (AR) with semantic techniques for the creation of digital stories associated with museum exhibitions. In contrast to traditional AR approaches, we augment real-world elements by supplementing contents of a museum exhibition with additional inputs that provide new and different meanings. In this way we augment a cultural resource with respect to both its presentation and meaning. The methodology is framed in the cultural re-mediation theory and is grounded on a set of ontologies aimed at modelling a cultural resource and correlating it with external multimedia objects and resources. To provide an easy tool for the creation of museum narratives, the methodology makes use of a set of recognised practices widely adopted by museum curators that have been formalised through inference rules. The defined methodology has been experimented in a scenario related to Flemish paintings to validate the augmentation of cultural objects with two different approaches, the first basing on similarities and the second on dissimilarities.

A Forgotten Legacy: The Romanov Patronage of Finland’s Early Art Collections

The earliest art collections of Finland’s National Gallery came into being when, as the Grand Duchy of Finland, it was an autonomous part of imperial Russia (1809–1917). The prevailing view of Finnish museum studies, however, sees the Finnish Art Society, the precursor of the Finnish National Gallery, as being modelled on exclusively European cultural institutions. The history of the Society and its collections have thus been seen as resistant to any alien eastern influences, and as an attempt to differentiate Finnish culture from Russian art collecting practices. Drawing on the theoretical shift in cultural studies from the conception of stable, clearly demarcated cultural identities of nation states toward less rigidly defined identities, the aim of this essay is to reconstruct the hidden Russian presence in Finnish museum historiography. Based on original unpublished sources, my study shows that the earliest support of Finland’s cultural infrastructure was given by the Romanov patrons Nicholas I, Alexander II, and Alexander III. By exposing the absence and physical erasure of “imperial identity” in the official Finnish museum narrative, I reveal how museums can at once elevate particular discourses and practices while marginalizing other historical processes in a nation’s cultural past.

The Invaluable Institutional History: Ghana’s National Museum from a Obroni Perspective

Understanding an institution’s historical conception and its subsequent role on collecting practices and museum narrative is essential when entering into an international internship. Understanding the history of a collection, the initial conception of an actual permanent exhibition and the limitations of available resources can lead to a deeper appreciation and cultural exchange by explaining otherwise confusing or odd differences. Of course not every cultural difference can be explained by an institutional history. But larger questions of interpretation can be explored through the lens of understanding the international partner’s history.

The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin

This article considers the representation of the shtetl in two museum narratives devoted to Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The first, the state-funded 1939 exhibit “The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR” was organized by the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad and remained on display to the Soviet public until the Nazi invasion in June 1941. The second is the privately funded Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Though conceived under radically different ideological and political circumstances, each exhibition conveys a significant message about the place of Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively, and each positions the shtetl as a formative arena for Jewish civic identity vis-à-vis the Russian homeland. Across the chasm of over seventy years, these two museum projects raise strikingly similar questions about how and why cultural institutions are mobilized to define the relationship of Ashkenazi Jews and the state. In both cases, the shtetl plays a significant role in narrating this unequal relationship.

The Kaleidoscope of Culture: expanding the museum experience and the museum narrative by inviting visitors into the curatorial process

Traditional art museum exhibitions are planned according to art-historical elements. At Trapholt – a museum of modern Danish art, design and applied art in Denmark, we are interested in exploring what happens when ordinary visitors are invited to curate personal exhibitions in the museum space. This paper analyses the project The Kaleidoscope of Culture, where people with no art historical background were invited to curate exhibitions based on the Trapholt collection of art and their own cultural backgrounds and experiences. The main argument is that, by allowing these personal voices in the museum space, new museum narratives are established. But to make the museum a truly transformative space the art- historical knowledge and methods must also be activate.

A smart methodology to improve the story-building process

Museum narratives are created from a conceptualization of events that can be structurally organized and referred to as the story. Therefore, the main process of developing a museum narrative is one of story-building. This paper presents a methodology to enrich the creation of stories for digital storytelling. The methodology is at the basis of a smart authoring system that supports authors of digital storytelling in the identification of contents from external repositories and their automatic mapping on different narrative structures, according to syntactic and semantic rules and well- defined narrative structures. Furthermore, the methodology leverages on semantic models and technologies such as ontologies, clustering and text analysis, and supports the development of a smart environment for creation of stories starting from a set of pictures. We have validated our methodology for a specific narrative structure, i.e. the Dramatic Arc, for the creation of an educational storytelling related to the museum exhibition about Second World War.