Visitor Books Research Articles

Six Degrees from Walter Scott: Separation, Connection and the Abbotsford Visitor Books

Six Degrees from Walter Scott: Separation, Connection and the Abbotsford Visitor Books

Participatory media new and old: semiotics and affordances of museum media

ABSTRACTThe move from “old” to “new” media centrally involves a shift in participatory possibilities, through which individuals and communities differentially access and populate the public sphere, assume voice, and partake in open discussion and debate. This paper offers a rich ethnographic case study of new participatory media in the shape of commenting systems in museums. By portraying the similarities and the differences in communicative affordances between two museum media—traditional visitor books, on the one hand, and a digital and immersive interface, on the other hand—light is shed on how media invite and intervene in possibilities for public participation. Furthermore, with their emphasis on visual design and display, studying participatory public media in museums helps highlight the semiotic construction of the public sphere as such, and how the notion of the public and laypersons’ contributions are materially displayed. Analysis of communicative affordances reveals the politics of remediation, and supports recent hesitations with regard to the promise of newer and “smarter” media: digital media affords more interaction than their analogue predecessors, but participatory content-production via analogue media is found to be discursively richer on a number of grounds.

‘My Holocaust experience was great!’: Entitlements for participation in museum media

This interdisciplinary study brings together research on audiences’ participation in the media, and an up-close exploration of communicative entitlement of and for such participation. Viewing visitor books as situated, public media, the study asks two related questions: how museums and institutions that employ this medium frame participation of ‘ordinary’ people in the public sphere, and how, in return, visitors variously articulate their participation. The article first examines the context in which visitor books mediate participation, and how museums frame them so as to invite ‘authentic’ expressions by ‘ordinary’ visitors. The analysis depicts a taxonomy of participation, evincing five types of entitlements found in visitor book texts. These entitlements shed light on how participation in the public sphere is both understood and pursued (performed). The article responds to calls for empirically rich studies on mediation practices and processes. It adds to the literature on communicative entitlements by examining an under-researched hitherto public medium and by illuminating a shift from talk-in-interaction to the context of text-in-interaction.

At home away from home: visitor accommodation and place attachment

Second-home owners often establish deep connections with their dwellings, and the broader landscapes of which these dwellings are part. In this research, we consider whether, and to what extent, visitors to commercial tourist accommodation also experience feelings of place attachment and home. These issues were investigated via a case study approach, centred on a youth hostel located in a high-amenity coastal area of New Zealand. The hostel’s publicly available visitor books were analysed to draw out expressions of people–place relationships, as well as key demographic information. Five themes were identified in visitors’ written reflections: repeat visits; home experience; identity and feeling; escape; and social landscape. Like the second home, the hostel provided a set of experiences considered very distinct from the typically city-based primary home, centred on a sense of freedom, relaxation and proximity to nature. It was paradoxically regarded as a place to seek change as well as familiarity. We conclude that for first-time visitors home-like experiences appear to be stimulated by social encounters and the physical environment, while for returnees they are underscored by familiarity and endorsement of identity over time.

Ritual, remembrance and war: Social memory at Tyne Cot

One of the social memories of the Great War of 1914–1918 focused on soldiers killed in battle, with military cemeteries forming important sites for remembrance. This paper reports the results of an analysis of the visitor books at Tyne Cot Cemetery in Belgium, that was built by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to hold almost 12,000 graves, most of which contain unidentified remains. Tourist’s comments in the books evidenced a strong linguistic ritual, expressing sadness, gratitude, approval of the site and promises to remember and never forget the dead. Very little critique of war, or overt nationalistic sentiment was indicated. While some national preferences for ritualized phrases were shown, there was also an indication of a globally shared memory.

Accessing audiences: visiting visitor books

Museum visitor books, although held by almost all museums, are rarely used as a research source. This article explores their potential to provide insights and information about audience views, experiences and understandings. To do so, it focuses primarily on visitor books at the Documentation Centre of the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. The article highlights questions about using such books as a research source and to this end it contains discussion of forms of address, visitor conceptions of the nature and role of visitor books and of museums and exhibitions, styles of entries, and ways in which visitors talk about exhibition media and types of display, and make comparisons and links with their own experience. It also includes discussion of some themes more specific to history exhibitions, including different possible ‘temporal orientations’ exhibited by visitors; as well as some more specific to the exhibition of morally and politically difficult topics, and of Nazism in particular.

Writing in Museums

The study takes a situated and material approach to texts and writing practices and examines writing ethnographically as it transpires and displayed in museums. The ethnography highlights the richness and sociality embodied in writing practices as well as the ideological, communal, and ritualistic functions that writing and texts serve in cultural institutions. Specifically, I offer a comparative study of visitor books and similar writing platforms in two Jewish heritage museums in the United States. Extended ethnographic observations of visitors’ writing activities are augmented by analysis of visitors’ texts, which, following Bakhtin, are understood in terms of their addressivity structures or whom they are addressed to. The study shows how visitors’ texts amount to collective contributions that are part of museums’ heritage display, and that visitors become rhetors when their mode of heritage consumption is the production of texts.

Sleeping with the past? Heritage, recreation and transition in New Zealand tramping huts

AbstractNew Zealand tramping huts are a rudimentary but valued form of recreational accommodation. While huts fundamentally offer shelter, their aesthetics and history can also be valued. We review the origins of the huts system and draw on entries in visitor books to demonstrate divergent views regarding newer and more traditional huts. We conclude that while ‘new‐generation’ huts facilitate a broader spectrum of users, ‘heritage’ huts may need partnerships with user groups and corporate sponsorship to ensure their survival.

Visitor Books and Guest-generated Discourses of Hospitality: The Case of the Hanok

This study analyzes visitor book entries as cultural repositories of guest-generated hospitality discourses to understand how guests articulate/narrativize hospitality. Inquiry into visitor book entries offers insight into ways in which tourists render people and place intelligible. Utilizing textual analysis, this study examines discursive entries contained within visitor books displayed at a traditional South Korean hanok guesthouse/commercial home. The findings indicate that tourists' entries could be classified into three emergent categories: Structural Esthetics, Emotions/Affective State, and Inter-personal Engagement. Guests' entries indicated that there was an appreciation for the display of traditional architecture, which facilitated sentiments of relaxation, contentment, tranquility, and homeliness. The hanok is thus regarded as a therapeutic landscape in which positive emotions are nurtured. Guests' entries also showcased evidence of genuine and personalized exchanges with hosts. This study points to the need for further theorizations on the role of indigenous knowledge in informing the performance and reception of hospitality.

Voor iedere vriend van de wetenschap. Het publiek van het naturaliënkabinet van de Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen in de jaren 1772–1830

This article explores the visitors of the natural history cabinet of the Holland Society of Sciences over the period 1772–1830. Not much is known about this first public museum in the Netherlands. By studying new sources such as visitor books and re-examining foreign travel accounts, the world of these visitors can be reconstructed. In this paper the role of the elite is put alongside Bennett’s thesis about the increasing public role of museums in Western society in the nineteenth century.

Mobilizing Affect for Collective War Memory

Taking a cue from recent works that assert the importance of affect in politics and critical theory, this paper examines affective strategies employed at Yūshūkan, a war museum attached to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Although its revisionist historiography has been generally discredited by historians, over the last decade Yūshūkan has established itself as a key public site for neo-nationalist war memory in Japan. This paper argues that to understand Yūshūkan's appeal we need to address the affective economy it produces around the stories and images of the fallen soldiers. In particular, I analyse the image of kamikaze as a ‘sticky object of emotion’ and ‘somatic marker’ that is both emotionally charged and culturally mobilized. I examine several factors that contribute to its affective capacity: the culturally specific trope of the tragic hero and the aesthetics of self-sacrifice; an emphasis on their ‘ordinariness’ as fathers and sons; and the naturalized, almost moral expectation of the current generations' indebtedness and gratitude to the war dead. A close reading of the museum exhibits, catalogue, website and visitor books suggests that Yūshūkan's rhetorical force relies on the kamikaze icon's ability to arouse visceral and intense emotions. Produced at the intersection of affect and discourse, history and memory, kamikaze is a heavily loaded sign central to Yūshūkan's affective and sub-discursive mode of communication. By illustrating how Yūshūkan mobilizes subjects into its patriotic history and identity via emotional authenticity, I hope to add an alternative approach to the current scholarship that predominantly focuses on the discursive content of Yūshūkan's historiography or religious-spiritual function of mourning. More generally it is also hoped that this study will contribute to thinking through the role of affect in collective war memory by offering a culturally and historically specific case study.

First World War Cemeteries: Insights from Visitor Books

This study concerns some of the military cemeteries that were built in Belgium and France by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission following the First World War of 1914–18. The cemeteries articulate one of the main social memories of the war to remember the dead individually. The performance of tourists and pilgrims in their visits to the cemeteries can be seen as ritual behaviour which helps to perpetuate the memories. The visitor books in 39 cemeteries were examined in order to identify reasons for visitation and patterns across sites. Three clusters were formed using the percentage of visitor book entries in which visitors made reference to specific graves. Half of the cemeteries formed into a cluster which had high visitation but where less than five percent of visitor book entries referred to particular graves. Most of these cemeteries were located close to well-known sites, battlefields or national memorials. A small cluster of seven cemeteries showed relatively low visitation but up to sixty percent of visitors sought a particular grave. The data indicated that relationships between national identity and particular cemeteries were important.

Investigation and quantification of prevalent risk factors for the introduction of avian influenza in European poultry farms

The following review aims to gain more insight into farm management in European poultry farms, to identify prevalent risk factors for the introduction of avian influenza (AI) and to develop a procedure to assess a farms risk status. Data on farm management were gathered by using questionnaires and visitor books in 343 farms in Austria, Germany, and The Netherlands. In addition, the farmers documented private and production related visitors for 30 days in a logbook. To evaluate the results, an international expert panel defined and weighted the most important risk factors for AI introduction at farm level within a three-stage Delphi study. Based on this evaluation, all farms were assigned to three classes of risk. To communicate the results to the farmers as comprehensible as possible, a traffic-light scheme was used. The highest risk class represented poultry farms with a high potential for AIV introduction.

Sacred site experience: A Phenomenological Study

This paper attempts to broaden the subject of sacred site experience by presenting the findings of a study on the experiences of an exclusive male sacred shrine in Greece, Mount Athos, also known as the Holy Mountain. The study involved a phenomenological approach undertaken through initiating conversations with visitors, participant observation and reviewing narratives on visitor books kept in monasteries. From the analysis five core elements of authentic experience emerged, namely spiritual; cultural; environmental; secular; and educational. These elements were discussed in relation to the methodology adopted and the findings of past research.

Mediation Materialized: The Semiotics of a Visitor Book at an Israeli Commemoration Site

This article deals with visitor books as a dynamic medium of communication, and explores how material aspects of such a book—including its physical affordances and the spatial and institutional environment in which it is located—affect its capacity to create and mediate social meaning. In line with recent studies that set out to rematerialize communication and its devices, and, more specifically, to examine writing as an embodied communicative practice, it is argued that material considerations, while frequently overlooked, constitute preconditions of communication, and are organic to semiotic processes and formative in shaping them. The data analyzed are entries in, and observations on, a visitor book located in a war commemoration museum in West Jerusalem, Israel. It is demonstrated that, within the context of a national commemoration site, the visitor book proves to be a fascinating medium of inscriptive communication which is manipulated to serve as a cultural site of nationalist participation, commitment, and performance. The article draws on sensibilities from material and technological literature in order to shed light on the ways in which individuals interact with written environments and technologies.

PAGES AS STAGES: A Performance Approach to Visitor Books

This article offers a contribution to the fields of tourist performance and language. By exploring a visitor book located at a heritage site in Jerusalem, Israel, it argues that texts produced by tourists can assume the semiotic status of performances. Consequently, tourists’ texts should not be viewed merely as instances of “discourse” or “language”, but also as organic parts of the aesthetic and semiotic aspects of tourism. The article describes four dimensions that establish the visitor book as a particular “stage”, and the texts therein as the tourists’ situated performances. Taken together, these dimensions constitute a model for the analysis of linguistic performance and for the semiotic interrelationship between stage and performance in tourism.

Trauma and the Memory of Politics (review)

Reviewed by: Trauma and the Memory of Politics Kathryn Palmer Trauma and the Memory of Politics. By Jenny Edkins. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp ix + 265. $23.00. Just as Pericles commemorated the dead for the sake of the state's survival in his funeral oration, so too do modern states remember lost lives as a means of preserving power. To be sure, such memorialization is timeless, yet it is in Jenny Edkins's groundbreaking analysis that we gain, perhaps for the first time, an adequate awareness of the significance of this relationship between trauma, memory, and power. Edkins's illuminating study succeeds in demonstrating that while the memorialization process is a search for meaning, the state has a propensity to use this process as a method for establishing meaning. Edkins argues that trauma is not experienced at the moment of occurrence and preserved in memory, but is in fact experienced through memory and throughout time. Edkins's study reveals that while the creation of a memorial may be a state's attempt to fix memory in a certain way, memorialization is a discursive and contingent process and product. In turn, the public's interaction with memorials [End Page 516] and artifacts is capable of being personal, subjective, and contextual and may in this sense challenge the state's discursive authority over the nation's narrative history. In sum, this is a book about the dangers and inadequacies of the state's efforts to fix the nation's memories of traumatic events. It also explores the potential of proper memorialization that pays respect not only to the traumatic event, but to its evolving meaning throughout time. Edkins uses her first two chapters to establish key themes, such as the relationship between trauma, discourse, and memory. Trauma creates a difficulty in and need for remembering, and, Edkins observes, the "production of memory is a performative practice, and inevitably social" (54). The state's attempt to put memorialization in stasis actually represents a kind of forgetting, for by seeking to fix and define an experience, exclusions to what that experience can mean are created. After providing a theoretical framework for the traumatic and temporal components of trauma time and its relationship with memory in chapter 2, Edkins uses this analysis to raise various questions regarding memory production, which she examines in various contexts throughout the book. Chapter 3 centers on a discussion of two memorials that serve as examples of trauma time: the Cenotaph in London and the Vietnam Wall in Washington D.C. They are also exceptions to memorials that are coopted by the state precisely because they lack a narrative and "encircle," rather than define, trauma. More importantly, Edkins discusses the discursive nature of not only the commemorative product, but the process. What is particularly interesting is this discursive and creative process of how we decide how to commemorate (and of whom "we" consists). This chapter shows how both the process and product of commemoration can shed light on the experience of trauma, and vice versa. In the remainder of chapter 3, Edkins draws our attention to the oppositional relationship between personal mourning and the "creation of a nationalist myth of war" (93). A valuable example of this is her riveting discussion of 9/11 and President George W. Bush's early rush to commemorate it, which, she argues, "can be seen as an attempt, ill-judged and premature perhaps, to secure the authority of the state, reinforce the narrative of the nation and produce closure in the face of events that had thrown all three into question" (103). Edkins's fourth chapter examines circumstances in which trauma occurred at the hands of the state: namely, holocausts, genocides, and famines. This chapter builds on questions raised in chapter 3 and brings up other pertinent questions regarding our inclination and (in)ability to preserve reality; the preservation and reconstruction of Nazi concentration camps is a poignant example. From a review of comments in concentration camp visitor books to a compelling use of the film Memento to illustrate the problematic nature of [End Page 517] memory and "facts," chapter 4 chiefly explores the rift between history and memory and the...

Book Review: Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human LifeCatholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life, by MayWilliam E. (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Books, 2000) 272 pp., pb., $17.95.

Book Review: Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human LifeCatholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life, by MayWilliam E. (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Books, 2000) 272 pp., pb., $17.95.

Vlast′ i khudozhestvennaia inteiigentsiia. Dokumenty TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul′turnoi politike. 1917–1953 gg , and: Stalin: vlast′ i iskusstvo , and: Sum bur vmesto muzyki. Stalinskaia kul′turnaia revoliutsiia 1936–1938 (review)

Reviewed by: Vlast′ i khudozhestvennaia inteiigentsiia. Dokumenty TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul′turnoi politike. 1917–1953 gg, and: Stalin: vlast′ i iskusstvo, and: Sum bur vmesto muzyki. Stalinskaia kul′turnaia revoliutsiia 1936–1938 Jan Plamper Andrei N. Artizov and Oleg Nikolaevich Naumov, eds., Vlast′ i khudozhestvennaia inteiigentsiia. Dokumenty TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul′turnoi politike. 1917–1953 gg. (Series Rossiia. XX vek. Dokumenty). Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia” [fond Aleksandra N. Iakovleva], 1999. 872 pp. ISBN 5-85646-040-5. Evgenii Sergeevich Gromov, Stalin: vlast′ i iskusstvo. Moscow: Respublika, 1998. 495 pp. ISBN 5-250-02598-6. Leonid Valentinovich Maksimenkov, Sum bur vmesto muzyki. Stalinskaia kul′turnaia revoliutsiia 1936–1938. Moscow: Iuridicheskaia kniga, 1997. 320 pp. ISBN 5-88711-064-3. Although the genre types of these three works on Soviet high culture might seem disparate, their similarities are in the end much more striking.1 Evgenii Gromov's "popular-scientific" Stalin: vlast' i iskusstvo, Leonid Maksimenkov's monograph on the anti-formalist campaign of 1936–38, and the voluminous and heavily annotated document collection Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia all share some crucial common features. All three books juxtapose the cultural producers (writers, artists, composers, musicians, actors, and dancers) to "power," by which they mean either the state, the Bolshevik Party, or Stalin. They often do so in outright contradiction to the new sources that they adduce, where art and power emerge interwoven in myriad complex ways and directions. Furthermore, the underlying – linear – narrative in all three books is one of increasing repression of art by power. The history of Soviet culture is understood to progress along a via dolorosa, marked by canonical stations. These stations are weighted differently, but invariably include the Great Break and Stalin's assumption of dictatorial power, the 1932 dissolution of independent writers' organizations, the repression of Babel' and Bulgakov, Pilniak and Platonov, Mandel'shtam and Meierkhol'd, the 1937 scandal surrounding Sergei Eisenstein's [End Page 211] Pavlik Morozov film, Bezhin lug, the anti-formalism campaign introduced by the 1936 "Muddle instead of Music" ("Sumbur vmesto muzyki") article, the Great Terror, a relative hiatus during World War II, and, finally, the apogee of the Zhdanovshchina. Finally, the source base for the three works under review is by and large the same – documents from the central Moscow archives concerning the Party's relationship with prominent cultural producers and such central organizations as the Writers' Union.2 To be sure, the configuration of art and power as separate, reified entities, and the narrative structure of a march from art's relative freedom to its unfettered control by the state, are difficult to stomach for scholars brought up during the 1980s and 1990s on a steady diet of postmodern theory from Foucault to Spivak – not to mention all those working hard at the deconstruction of the liberal subject, the disaggregation of society into fields, postcolonial decentering, and the blurring of high and low cultures. Rather than reproach the authors and editors at hand for the kinds of books they did not produce, however, this review, I believe, should be a place to extract from the three books all that can successfully enter into Western academic conversations. And there is plenty to extract. The document collection Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, one of the many sborniki to have appeared in Russia since the opening of the archives, is as good a place as any to begin. The collection appeared in a series of the "Democracy Foundation," chaired by Aleksandr Iakovlev, and the editorial thrust is clearly to discredit the communist regime. Nearly 700 pages of documents cover the period 1917–53, arranged in chronological order, followed by an appendix listing all visitors from the arts to Stalin's office (taken from the same visitor books made familiar to scholars through the work of Oleg Khlevniuk),3 a second appendix listing prizes awarded to cultural figures, and 60 small-print pages of annotations to the documents. The book closes with an excellent name index. Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia is divided into seven chronological sections, the titles of which are quite telling: 1) In Search of a Bolshevik Course, 1917–1927; 2...

Understanding Visitor Comments: The Case of Flight Time Barbie

ABSTRACTMany museums use comment cards, visitor books, and bulletin boards to capture the reactions of visitors. Whether they are collected, counted, skimmed, read, or simply filed, the utility of these documents is rarely questioned. This paper suggests some pros and cons of comment systems and presents an analysis of the comments on an exhibition, Flight Time Barbie, at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. The responses to this exhibition included judgments about the subject matter of the exhibition, opinions about its presentation, and remarks regarding its appropriateness to the museum. The paper concludes by suggesting a practical approach to the analysis of visitor comments.