Negotiating Materiality: International and Local Museum Practices at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and National Museum

In this paper, we examine the idiosyncratic ways in which the Vanuatu Cultural Centre has incorporated global museum technologies into highly localised systems of object management. The convergence of understandings of subject‐object relations, and indeed of materiality, highlights the effects of museum practices of objectification on local practice as well as the effects of local agenda on museum practice. In constructing a holistic analysis of the current work of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, we examine practices of display and exhibition in the context of the archive and storeroom, and grass‐roots research; moving away from the emphasis on visuality and exhibition found in many museum studies, to an approach that locates display as but one form of objectification within wider social practice. We challenge some analytic models that view Melanesia and Euro‐America as zones that organise subject‐object relations dichotomously, highlighting instead the mutual contingency of relationships between persons and things between cultural contexts and the effects of the international exchanges of museum practice on the development of these relations.     

视觉文化背景下博物馆展示价值定位——自然博物馆陈列的新体悟

博物馆展示艺术是一种诉诸视觉器官的文化形态。为观众提供可欣赏、受教育的展示精品,是博物馆追求的永恒主题。本文通过对博物馆展示主题、创意设计、科技维新及视觉艺术四方面进行思考,发掘博物馆自身所蕴藏的艺术价值和文化价值是当代视觉文化背景下展示艺术的价值定位。     

'On of the Princypalle Havenes of the See': The Port of Famagusta and the Ship Graffiti in the Church of St George of the Greeks, Cyprus

In its 1000-year history the port has been the source of triumph and tragedy for the city of Famagusta, being the conduit through which flowed both enormous wealth and destruction. Today the French medieval and Greek Orthodox churches, and the Venetian walls, though ruined, still carry physical traces of this turbulent society in the form of ship graffiti. Though such images are often classified as 'low-art', they are nevertheless imbued with a deep social significance, which the maritime historian can yet use to get a glimpse of an important, though virtually-forgotten, heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean.
© 2007 The Author     

Museums and the ‘Death of Experience’: singularity,interiority and the outside

This paper discusses a number of well-known critiques of the museum that seek to identify it as a problematic space for experience. The key argument put forward is that we can find within that analysis a critical geography around the museum that help us to understand the work that it does in relation to experience. Three spatial motifs are drawn from this analysis and discussed: the singular, the interior and the outside. The paper argues that museums since the nineteenth century have established a topos for experience based on a mimetic realism around the experience of both culture and history through the first two of these spatial expressions. Through them museums produces a fabulation of culture and history that supplements for the lack of topos for experience found within modern society as a whole. The latter spatiality – that of the outside – is found in the form of the absent–presence of the event in relation to the archiving principle of the museum, thereby continually unsettling the first two expressions and calling them into question. This dynamic reveals the museum as a space to critically think about what it does with experience and the importance of spatial analysis for that.     

‘My voice counts because I’m handsome.’ Democratising the museum: the power of museum participation

Abstract

Participation – where visitors are invited to leave a comment, co-create, or contribute to exhibitions – has been hailed as an opportunity to democratise the museum experience. New qualitative data from on-site and follow up interviews with museum visitors and practitioners at the experimental exhibition Power of 1 at the Museum of Australian Democracy has been used as a case study to determine if the rhetoric of the highly interactive, audience-centred approach of the participatory museum is meeting its aims. This paper argues that participation has the potential to democratise the museum experience for visitors, particularly when a more expansive definition is applied which acknowledges the benefits of participation beyond simply leaving a comment. Participation can provoke conversations and forge connections with real and imagined communities within the museum and beyond; however this potential is hampered by the often unacknowledged undemocratic practices within institutions by professionals who devalue visitor participation and power-sharing in order to uphold traditional museum practices.     

Museums as Leisure

Museums are shifting from a focus upon education alone towards an accommodation of leisure markets. The authors do not consider these concepts of education and leisure, often presented as oppositional, to be irreconcilable within museum practice. Nevertheless, it is apparent that museum practice is changing, in part as a response to the pressures and opportunities of becoming assimilated into leisure markets, predominantly, but not only, as touristic attractions and often as key resources in local economic development. Stakeholders such as users, citizens or governments appear to be unconcerned about these changes in emphasis, whilst some within professional museum practice (also stakeholders) do not wholeheartedly welcome the moves. The authors argue that, historically, museums have been attributed a role in 'entertaining' users and that, in part at least, this was accepted by practitioners where the primary orientation was acquisition and conservation within the project of modernity. In such circumstances, the consumption of museum services was seen as mainly for academic, or educational, utility. More recently, consumption of museums shows evidence of being at least equally associated with meaning as well as utility, i.e. that exhibitions contribute to the assembly of particular lifestyles associated with touristic behaviour.     

博物馆展示中的观众注意力引导——以“南越王墓出土文物陈列”为例

注意是人类进行信息加工的前提条件。博物馆观众的注意具有明显的选择性,大多数观众的参观是无意注意行为,博物馆应根据此特性进行管理,从展前的信息组织开始,合理规划展览的内容和形式;在展览预展期,应结合驻足人数、驻足时间以及参观效果访谈等因素进行观众注意力评量,并根据结果实时调整展览设计;开展后,应综合利用各种资源和手段,完善观众注意力引导,从而加强博物馆与观众之间的信息沟通与交流,实现博物馆的教育和传播功能。     

Mediating legacies of empire in the post-imperial museum

ABSTRACT

Throughout the Balkans, the history museum remains a crucial site where memories of an imperial past are molded, rationalized, and integrated into the wider arc of nationalist narratives about a country and its people. The legacy of the Ottoman Empire is particularly fraught in Greece, where this period is almost always classified as ‘post-Byzantine’ within the context of government institutions. In this paper, I set out to trace the legacy of the Ottoman Empire as it has been mediated in multiple museum sites throughout the country. I will primarily focus on two case studies: The National Historical Museum in Athens and the Museum of Ali Pasha and the Period of Revolution in Ioannina. Comparing these two sites and their practices of display bring into sharper focus the dynamics of how historical memory plays out in a central versus regional sphere of belonging and identity.     

Museums,memory and meaning‐creation: (re)constructing the Tajik nation

To overcome the traumas of the 1992–1997 civil war, the Tajik authorities have turned to history to anchor their post‐independence nation‐building project. This article explores the role of the National Museum of Tajikistan, examining how the museum discursively contributes to ‘nationalising’ history and cultural heritage for the benefit of the current Tajik nation‐building project. Three main discursive strategies for such (re)construction of Tajik national identity are identified: (1) the representation of the Tajiks as a transhistorical community; (2) implicit claims of the site‐specificity of the historical events depicted in the museum, by representing these as having taken place within the territory of present‐day Tajikistan, thereby linking the nation to this territory; and (3) meaning‐creation, endowing museum objects with meanings that fit into and reinforce the grand narrative promulgated by the museum. We conclude that the National Museum of Tajikistan demonstrates a rich and promising, although so far largely unexplored, repertoire of representing Tajik nationness as reflected in historical artefacts and objects of culture: the museum is indeed an active participant in shaping discursive strategies for (re)constructing the nation.     

我国博物馆旅游产品的开发现状及发展对策分析

从我国旅游业起步以来,博物馆一直作为一种重要的旅游资源,丰富着各地的旅游产品,随着我国旅游市场格局的变化,博物馆的数量虽然在急剧增加,但吸引观众的博物馆却很少。本文通过对我国博物馆旅游产品开发现状的分析,提出发展我国博物馆旅游产品的对策。     

略论我国博物馆的传播过程

进入21世纪,博物馆的发展面临着更大的机遇与挑战。多种传播手段的介入与更新变化,成为当今博物馆发展中不容忽视的问题。然而博物馆传播又有着自身的传播特点,从我国博物馆的传播过程及模式的研究可以看出,当代博物馆传播职能的重要性及紧迫性。运用好传播这一有力手段,增强博物馆的社会影响力,才能使其更好的服务大众。     

Cultivating Personalized Museum Tours Online and On-Site

Abstract

Web 2.0 — the perceived second generation of the World Wide Web that aims to improve collaboration, sharing of information and interoperability — enables increasing access to digital collections of museums. The expectation is that more and more people will spend time preparing their visit before actually visiting the museum and look for related information reflecting on what they have seen or missed after visiting the museum. It can also be expected that museum curators want to enhance visitors' museum experiences in the more personalized, intensive and engaging way promised by an improved Web. In other words, to keep their visitors, they should adopt an immersive museum environment that combines the museum Web site (online) with the physical museum space (on-site). In this context, the CHIP (Cultural Heritage Information Presentation) project offers tools to the users to be their own curators, e.g. browsing the online collections, planning a personalized museum tour suiting their art interests, getting some recommendations about interesting artworks to see, and quickly finding their ways in the museum. In this paper, we present the new additions to the CHIP tools, which target such functionality: a Web-based museum Tour Wizard based on the user's interests and the Mobile Guide that converts the tours to a mobile device (PDA) used in the physical museum space. To connect the user's various interactions with these tools online and on-site, we built a dynamic user model. Online, the user model stores the user's personal background, ratings of artworks and art concepts, recommended or created museum tours. On-site, it is a conversion of the online user model stored in RDF into XML format which the mobile guide can parse. When the user rates artworks inside the physical museum, the on-site user model is updated and when the tour is finished, it is synchronized with the online user model. In such a way, we support a 'virtuous circle' of the museum visit, which links the personalized museum experiences both online and on-site.     

关于物联网技术在博物馆观众服务领域应用的思考

随着物联网技术的快速发展与普及,其应用已逐渐渗入到社会的各个行业中,也为文博领域提供了有力的技术支持。目前物联网技术已经基本满足了提升博物馆服务观众的能力与效果,本工作以博物馆观众的需求为出发点,描述了物联网技术在博物馆观众服务领域的几种应用设想。     

1949—1966年陕西省博物馆的变革与发展

1949—1966年是陕西省博物馆的重要建设时期,其由民国时期的省立博物馆变为中华人民共和国西北区示范性博物馆,又随国家行政区划调整回归省级中心馆,期间经历了馆名更改、馆舍修整、藏品扩充以及与其他机构合并等一系列体制性变革,重新树立了博物馆人民观,打破了原有古物陈列观,采用大众化教育的陈列模式。调整后的陕西省博物馆融入社会主义博物馆体系,获得了新发展,成为中华人民共和国初期博物馆建设的一个历史缩影。     

Turkish nationalism and ethno‐symbolic analysis: the rules of exception

This article examines the applicability of the ethno‐symbolic approach to the study of patriotic Turkish nationalism. In this venue, first it addresses the issue of why many of the existing theoretical models are difficult to use for attending to the case of Turkish nationalism in a comparative framework. Capitalising on the ethno‐symbolic understanding of ideological and ethno‐cultural continuities in the formation of modern nationalisms, this study provides an analysis of points of contestation regarding the history of modern, patriotic Turkish nationalism. It then discusses the demographic and socio‐cultural background of the bonding of exiled masses of Ottoman Muslims with the native Muslims of Anatolia under the banner of a revived, independent Turkish nation. The debate offered here is based on a critical evaluation of the myths and symbols of Turkish national identity within the larger context and time frame of Ottoman/Turkish history.     

相关性 共鸣度 同理心——博物馆企及观众的关键所在

"保持与当代社会的相关性"理应成为博物馆的发展要义。展览、教育等惟有搭建在"相关性"的基础之上,吸引观众关注,才有可能进一步引发他们共鸣,促使其感动、铭记,并最终激励他们的同理心,改变其思维和行为。这是环环相扣、层层推进的一体化进程,以达求博物馆传播的良性循环,真正企及观众。对博物馆如何通过展览、教育以达求"相关性""共鸣度""同理心"等企及观众的核心要义进行探讨,将促使博物馆真正讲好当下的故事,同时走近观众,进驻他们的心灵。     

智慧博物馆的发展路径探析

智慧博物馆是传统实体博物馆发展到一定阶段所产生的一种新的博物馆高级形态,具有主体的人本性、资源的整合性和数据的再生产性等基本特征。与数字博物馆相比,智慧博物馆的"智慧化"主要体现在数据来源的多样性、数据传输的多向性和数据交换的普遍性上。建设智慧博物馆需要警惕走入载体离心化、技术泛滥化、内容娱乐化、数据固态化和建设盲目化的误区,抓住"数据"这一核心要素,围绕数据生成、数据加工、数据运用和数据共享诸环节,科学系统地推进展开。     

Patterns of the Future? British Mediterranean Strategy and the Choice Between Alexandria and Cyprus 1935–8

During the 1935–6 Abyssinian Crisis, the value of Malta as a British naval base came into question, as the island was vulnerable to Italian air attack. The British then examined the possibility of developing the Cypriot port of Famagusta as a naval base. However, by 1938 the project was rejected on the grounds of cost, while the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty gave London a more acceptable alternative, namely Alexandria, with its excellent port next to the Suez Canal. The examination of Cyprus’ possible role as a naval and air base and the evident strategic interrelation of the British positions in Egypt and in Cyprus in 1935–8 were indicative of future, post-war developments in British military thinking and strategic priorities.     

从精英掌控到大众文化空间——19世纪上半叶大英博物馆的建构与功能转换

19世纪上半叶,英帝国的强盛将大英博物馆推向新纪元,馆藏规模得到极大扩充,书籍、手稿、自然和人工制品的收藏增长迅速。这一时期,英国议会对大英博物馆更加重视也更加慷慨,愿意花费公共资金来扩充藏品。另一方面,严厉的参观规则得以变更,进入博物馆参观或学习的限制被放宽,繁杂的参观时间规定得以改进,阅览室的空间不断扩充。作为大众文化空间,博物馆为公众服务的宗旨和理念随着国家的重视和精英人物的努力逐渐由虚设变为现实,其由国家掌控的特性及作为国家文化工具的使命第一次得到明确的认可和界定。     

Evaluating the efficiency of museums using multiple outputs: evidence from a regional system of museums in Spain

Data Envelopment Analysis is used to evaluate museum efficiency. This approach enables us to create a relative efficiency measure for each museum, taking into account resources used by museums and the performance of their activities based on four well-defined tasks: conservation, research, communication and exhibition. Empirical analysis of data from a regional museum system in Spain is performed, considering a complex production function with several inputs and outputs. The main findings indicate that at least half the museums chosen operate efficiently, with the major cause for inefficiency being inadequate resource management. Only few museums evidenced significant inadequate scaling problems. Major progress, mainly due to improvements in internal efficiency, is evident in the museum system ratios when analysing productivity evolution using the Malmquist Index. By contrast, technological change has less impact, proving that cultural heritage is less receptive to new technologies as compared to other cultural industries.