bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bibliography on Eastern European Life Writing
Authors: Kurvet-Käosaar Leena
Published: May 2015

The present bibliography is an attempt to bring together work on life writing from Eastern Europe. We welcome further references to national scholarship in the attempt to make more visible the Eastern European presence in life writing. The European Journal of Life Writing provides the ideal format for an open ended sharing of references to which all interested scholars in the field are invited to contribute.
O paradigma da inclusão como utopia na perspectiva freiriana
Authors: Marques Luciana Pacheco , Romualdo Anderson Dos Santos
Published: May 2015

Este trabalho constitui um recorte do pensamento de Paulo Freire e busca analisar a sua contribuição para com o processo de ruptura com as práticas excludentes rumo à inclusão. Seu conceito de utopia é a base da nossa reflexão, pois é a partir dele que defendemos a inclusão como um “inédito viável”. Seu pensamento é marcado pela luta contra qualquer discriminação, na busca incessante pela superação da relação opressor-oprimido. Acreditar na transformação do mundo pelos caminhos freirianos da comunhão, do diálogo, da conscientização é acreditar na capacidade de todos os seres humanos alimentarem juntos o ideal utópico da mudança, no qual a inclusão é, nos nossos dias, um dos maiores de todos os sonhos: uma realidade onde opressores e oprimidos se façam, de fato, livres dos elos aprisionantes do preconceito, da discriminação e da injustiça. Este é um dos mais ricos e importantes legados deixados por ele para a sociedade dos nossos dias: o respeito pelos seres humanos no que eles têm de mais valoroso, a sua humanidade.
A review of trend models applied to sea level data with reference to the “acceleration‐deceleration debate”
Authors: Visser Hans , Dangendorf Sönke , Petersen Arthur C.
Published: May 2015

Global sea levels have been rising through the past century and are projected to rise at an accelerated rate throughout the 21st century. This has motivated a number of authors to search for already existing accelerations in observations, which would be, if present, vital for coastal protection planning purposes. No scientific consensus has been reached yet as to how a possible acceleration could be separated from intrinsic climate variability in sea level records. This has led to an intensive debate on its existence and, if absent, also on the general validity of current future projections. Here we shed light on the controversial discussion from a methodological point of view. To do so, we provide a comprehensive review of trend methods used in the community so far. This resulted in an overview of 30 methods, each having its individual mathematical formulation, flexibilities, and characteristics. We illustrate that varying trend approaches may lead to contradictory acceleration‐deceleration inferences. As for statistics‐oriented trend methods, we argue that checks on model assumptions and model selection techniques yield a way out. However, since these selection methods all have implicit assumptions, we show that good modeling practices are of importance too. We conclude at this point that (i) several differently characterized methods should be applied and discussed simultaneously, (ii) uncertainties should be taken into account to prevent biased or wrong conclusions, and (iii) removing internally generated climate variability by incorporating atmospheric or oceanographic information helps to uncover externally forced climate change signals.
Formation of winter water on the Canadian Beaufort shelf: New insight from observations during 2009–2011
Authors: Jackson Jennifer M. , Melling Humfrey , Lukovich Jennifer V. , Fissel David , Barber David G.
Published: May 2015

The Arctic halocline forms a cold stratified barrier between the seasonally modified near‐surface layers and deeper Atlantic‐derived waters. Its low temperature is maintained by intrusions of cold water formed over Arctic shelves in winter. Surprisingly, cold salty (33) water capable of halocline ventilation (Beaufort Sea Winter Water: BSWW) has been observed in the Beaufort Sea during some winters despite the low salinity (20–25) of shelf waters there in summer. This study uses year‐round data from moored instruments on the Beaufort shelf and slope during 2009–2011 to investigate the mechanisms involved. Our analysis reveals that four air‐sea interaction processes contribute to the formation of BSWW—flushing of the low‐salinity surface water from the shelf via Ekman transport in late summer and early fall, compensatory upwelling of more saline halocline water onto the shelf, net seaward ice drift that promotes ice production by maintaining a flaw lead, and entrainment of dense upwelled water into the freezing surface layer on the inner shelf. This work moves beyond earlier studies in revealing that while weather conditions were more favorable to BSWW formation in the winter of 2010–2011 than in 2009–2010, the difference was more strongly influenced by Ekman transport (offshore at the surface, onshore at the seabed) than by differences in cumulative brine injection from ice growth. The strength of the Ekman circulation over the Canadian Beaufort shelf in winter and its interannual variation have significance for surface nutrient renewal and for the cross‐shelf transport of pollutants at the surface and the seabed.
Museum Theory: An Expanded Field
Authors: Message Kylie , Witcomb Andrea
Published: May 2015

This chapter presents a theoretical framework and justification for the volume's broader aim of devising and showcasing critical perspectives on the museum (as an institution) and on museums (as a series of individual specificities and contingencies) from a range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. We approach this task from the proposition that museum theory cannot be divorced from museum practice, arguing that museums are best understood as sites of “conjuncture” where different disciplines, theoretical approaches, and practices meet. Our starting point is Nicholas Thomas's argument that museums can be understood as a method which is itself generative of theory rather than simply as a site on which to perform theoretical models of analysis. We build on this approach by analyzing the ways in which contributors to this volume have generated new forms of knowledge using museums to think with. Among these approaches are the moves beyond governmentality paradigms toward an understanding of the nondiscursive, affective functions of museums; and a recognition of the role of museums in the production of reflexive forms of knowledge and citizenship formation, as well their activist role in society. We argue, in the final instance, that the field of museums provides an expanded field of vision for those of us interested in following particular theoretical debates, but that it does so precisely because this field is constituted through a series of methodological practices that have and continue to be key to the ways in which disciplines are shaped, public space is understood and produced, subjectivities are shaped, and relations between peoples are enabled. If there was ever any doubt as to the contributions of museums to the formation of culture or their relevance to innovation in both theory and disciplinary practices, we hope our collection goes a long way to demonstrating the value of thinking otherwise.
Thinking (with) Museums: From Exhibitionary Complex to Governmental Assemblage
Authors: Bennett Tony
Published: May 2015

This chapter reviews the similarities and differences between two theoretical frameworks that I have proposed for thinking about the relationships between museums and society: first, one which interprets museums as parts of an “exhibitionary complex” and, second, their interpretation as parts of governmental assemblages. While these are both derived from the work of Foucault, they have different consequences, which I explore. I begin with the concept of the exhibitionary complex which, while it has proved quite influential since I first proposed it in the 1980s, has also had its critics. I review these criticisms and indicate what I think is still worth retaining from this earlier proposal. I then go on to review the lines of inquiry that are suggested by referring to museums as “governmental assemblages.” I illustrate both concepts and their consequence with selected examples from a range of the different kinds of museums to which I have applied them: nineteenth‐century art and natural history museums, and twentieth‐century anthropology museums, for example.
Museums, Human Rights, and Universalism Reconsidered
Authors: Barrett Jennifer
Published: May 2015

Human rights in the museum context draw on the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and on the more recent (1948) United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Central to these declarations is a notion of the universal, which is potentially in tension with critiques of universalism in the museum sector. The chapter examines how human rights are situated in the history of the public museum, particularly in the so‐called universal museum and the Declaration of Universal Museums from 2002. It traces the emergence of museums that address atrocities, such as holocaust museums (1980s) and museums as sites of conscience (1990s), before considering the more recent museums and alliances such as the Federation of International Human Rights Museums (FIHRM) which focus on human rights and engage in activism and advocacy on both local and international scales.

The chapter highlights tensions between notions of universalism and human rights discourses through vignettes of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg. In doing so, it addresses the crucial issue of how these tensions might contribute to change in museums in the twenty‐first century.
The Democratic Horizons of the Museum: Citizenship and Culture
Authors: Dahlgren and Joke Hermes Peter
Published: May 2015

Change is sweeping through the world of museums, technologically, financially, and ideologically, impacting on the sociocultural evolution of their roles and status. We seek to contribute to ongoing reflections by offering a conceptual framework that links museums with democratic theory, to citizenship and its practices – a domain that is also in notable transition. We connect concretely with the current research on museum communication based in Tartu, Estonia, which focuses on three key streams: public dialogue and debate, content, and processes.

We see theraison d’êtreof museums as situated in a force field between culture – including “popular” culture – and the ambitions, rights, and duties traditionally associated with the role of the citizen. These domains are increasingly overlapping with each other. Our analytical horizons consist of two complementary perspectives. First, the perspective of civic cultures underscores the cultural prerequisites for civic participation, underlining such dimensions as knowledge, spaces, practices, and identities. Second, cultural citizenship is a trajectory that elucidates the democratic character of popular culture – its accessibility, its inclusiveness, its offers of “community.” From these two vistas, museums become sites that can – via their cultural activities – serve to promote, or hinder, cultural citizenship.

Integrating these two orientations, we look analytically at the three streams of museum communication identified by the Tartu group. Public discussion and debate involve civic participation beyond the confines of the museum's space, that is, in the larger society. Here museums have the potential, for example, to stimulate a reflexive interpretation of history and collective identities. Processes relate not least to actual communicative strategies; museums are moving away from the unidirectional “transfer” of knowledge and are encouraging the negotiation of meaning in regard to society, culture, heritage, and so forth. As museums shift toward contemporary cultural mainstreams, options for active communicative efforts emerge, for example, “remixes” of established works or perspective, multivalent messages, and dialogical interaction with visitors. From our outsider perspective, our contribution aims to be descriptive and analytical but also normative. We argue that museums have an important and growing role to play in the development of democracy and its civic cultures.
Museums, Ecology, Citizenship
Authors: Miller Toby
Published: May 2015

This chapter considers the responsibilities of institutions, citizens, workers, and consumers in response to the search by polluters for social licenses to operate via the subvention of museums. Boosterist museums bask in the glow of technological innovation, newness, and subvention, even as they lay claim to the long view of history, art, and objectivity. Arts activism points to a different way forward which involves environmental awareness and workers’ rights.
The Art of Anthropology: Questioning Contemporary Art in Ethnographic Display
Authors: Geismar Haidy
Published: May 2015

This chapter explores the relationship between contemporary art and anthropology from multiple perspectives. While much attention has been paid to the nuances of regional, national, and subdisciplinary schools of anthropology, the framework of contemporary art, a much larger field of practice, has been far less critically unpacked in ethnographic terms. By exploring the resonance of contemporary art narratives within new museum projects, the framework of institutional critique, and the provocation of theories of assemblage, I highlight the border zones and aesthetic frames that constitute contemporary art in the ethnographic museum and trace some of the effects of this relationship.
Change and Continuity: Art Museums and the Reproduction of Art‐Museumness
Authors: Ang Ien
Published: May 2015

Museum theorizing today generally emphasizes that there is no such thing asthemuseum as an invariant institutional form. Instead, a pluralist perspective is favored, stressing the diversity and particularity of actually existing museums. This chapter cautions against this rejection of generalization, arguing that, despite the enormous changes and diversification that museums – in particular, art museums – have undergone in the past few decades, the “art museum” remains a recognizable cultural institution with recognizably generic characteristics. These characteristics pertain to the fundamentalraison d'êtreof the art museum: its commitment to the collection and display of art. This founding commitment to “art‐museumness” – without which art museums would cease being art museums – sets limits to what actually existing art museums can do to change, despite continuing efforts for them to become more inclusive, accessible, or democratic. Focusing on two case studies involving the two main art museums in Sydney, Australia, the chapter shows that such efforts can be pursued only as long as they do not jeopardize the art‐museumness of the museum. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a self‐proclaimed desire to transcend elitism and diversify its audiences was found to be contradicted by the institution's need to maintain its curatorial authority in defending the boundaries of what is Art, a need which ultimately proved non‐negotiable. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, a daring initiative to take contemporary art out of the museum into the social world of business and community was limited by the museum's absolute belief in the value of artasArt. These two examples demonstrate that this belief in art is essential for the institutional self‐preservation of the art museum, and cannot, therefore, be questioned. This unwavering commitment to art is also, as this chapter shows, a source of tension in collaborations between academic museum theorists and museum professionals. While for the former the art museum's aesthetic disposition (Bourdieu) is an object of critique, for the latter it is an essential requirement.
Cool Art on Display: The Saatchi Phenomenon
Authors: McGuigan Jim
Published: May 2015

Publicly subsidized art galleries and museums, like other public sector organizations, have been subjected to immense pressure to operate more like private businesses in recent times. This is a particular feature of the transition from organized to neoliberal capitalism. This chapter looks at a specific development in the art world that takes the neoliberal usurpation of the public sector in the cultural field further and, in this case, literally replace it: the Saatchi phenomenon and the promotion (and sale) of cool art in general.

Focusing on the
Newspeak: British Art Now
exhibition, the chapter argues that since the mid‐1990s, Saatchi has performed the hybrid role of patron‐dealer for what has been labeled “Young British Art,” which is discussed in this chapter as an exemplary instance of cool capitalist culture. Cool capitalism is the incorporation of disaffection, and especially signs of disaffection, into capitalism itself. Although Saatchi's activity in this respect has been a private and profit‐making enterprise, he has been able, in effect, to usurp the public sector's role in the legitimization of new art. The chapter includes a coda on the
Rank
exhibition which toured the north of England in 2009 and which, it is argued, represented a marginalized counterpoint to cool art by recalling a near forgotten yet possibly never more relevant history.
Contentious Politics and Museums as Contact Zones
Authors: Message Kylie
Published: May 2015

Social movement theory has, in recent years, been criticized for its inability to develop theoretical frameworks and forms of analysis relevant to activists and the causes they represent. In contrast, the same period has seen an escalation of claims made about the instrumentality of museums to source communities and stakeholder groups as well as governments. Ideas of shared authority, empowerment through recognition, community collaboration, and political agency have transformed the field of museum studies. In this chapter, I draw on theorizing from the field of museum studies and on several case studies that explore the relationship between collective action and the Smithsonian Institution to highlight and address the lacunae evident in social movement theory, and propose analytical alternatives. In so doing, I revisit Clifford's argument that museums can function as contact zones.
The Displaced Local: Multiple Agency in the Building of Museums’ Ethnographic Collections
Authors: Morphy Howard
Published: May 2015

National museums have always been both global and local, collecting widely and holding locally. Ethnographic collections provide a prime example, bringing together in a single institution collections representing different cultures from around the world. The recent globalization of museum discourse and practice has resulted in an inversion of this situation. Indigenous communities, the local cultures of original production, are regaining a degree of agency over the collections of their material culture that have been distributed globally. This has often been framed as a countermovement to the colonial processes that were entangled in the building of the collections. Such a perspective, however, can mask the agency and motivations of the builders of collections in the past and fail to recognize the transformational role that museums have played in ideational change. The chapter will focus on the motivations of Yolngu, Aboriginal Australians from northern Australia, in collaborating with researchers and others in building collections since the late 1920s. This perspective from active engagement in the present provides a very different light on the past from that which subordinates the development of collections to the enterprise of a “colonial science.”
The World as Collected; or, Museum Collections as Situated Materialities
Authors: Svanberg Fredrik
Published: May 2015

The chapter develops a view of museum collections as “situated materialities,” that is, assemblages that are situated geographically, culturally, and by way of established systems of information and handling practices, or set up to speak in certain ways. Objects that enter collections lose their previous identity and are positioned to speak as examples of particular perspectives, through specific techniques that transform and objectify the collected object. However, collected objects keep their own agency at the same time, especially in the long term when old collection and information practices change and come to differ from current museum ideas and policies. There is, thus, a complex interplay and division of agency between people, such as curators and keepers, and collected objects in museums. The chapter aims to describe this interplay, suggesting that collections are not just managed by, but also manage, their collectors, and to set forth ways of resituating old collection systems.
Museum Encounters and Narrative Engagements
Authors: Schorch Philipp
Published: May 2015

This chapter engages with examples from the museum visitor studies literature that epitomize “the turn to understanding” by investigating the meaning‐making processes of museum visitors through an analytical focus on encounters and engagements. The concept of narrative is introduced as a human meaning‐making tool through which museum encounters can be understoodasinterpretive engagements. Drawing on a long‐term study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), which followed a narrative‐hermeneutic approach to meaning in both theoretical and methodological terms, the chapter offers empirical insights into the multiple layers of interpretive engagements and revealshowvisitors narrate their biographies into the museum experience, and the museum experience into their biographies. Both sides, then, become entangled through narrative engagements across cultural differences and thus make sense only in their dialectic relation throughout the museum experience's gestalt. The chapter concludes by pointing to the limitations of a narrative‐hermeneutic approach and how these might be overcome.
Theorizing Museum and Heritage Visiting
Authors: Smith Laurajane
Published: May 2015

This chapter examines the performative and embodied nature of the museum visit and, in doing so, mounts a challenge to the dominance of the idea that the museum visit is, or should be, about learning. Rather, the argument advanced is that visitors use museums in a wide range of ways and that the learning paradigm restricts the ability of researchers and museum professionals to recognize this diversity. Understanding the visit as an embodied performance reveals the means by which visitors emotionally engage with museum exhibitions and thus identifies the ways in which visitors undertake their own “heritage‐making” and the production and reinforcement of their own meanings and cultural and political values. Interviews with visitors to museums and other sites of heritage in England, Australia, and the United States are used to illustrate and support the argument.
The Museum in Hiding: Framing Conflict
Authors: Barikin Amelia , Green Charles
Published: May 2015

Taking the work of Lyndell Brown and Charles Green as a case study, and specifically their commissioned work for the Australian War Memorial in 2007, this chapter locates and accounts for the artists’ critical engagement with museological tropes of preservation, taxonomy, memorialization, and archival display. For over two decades, Brown and Green's paintings, installations, and photographs have been carefully interrupting and diverting flows between events, images, memories, and histories. Their works ask how the past figures in the present, and how it might be accessed and remembered. They are about the realization and reconstitution of events. As such, they constitute a deeply political project, and one with direct relevance to museum theory.

The chapter consists of two sections in dialogue with each other. The first section, by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, is written from the artists’ first‐hand point of view. It addresses their experience of participating in the Australian War Artist scheme, and situates their works in relation to ideas of the “memory effect” and the “museum in hiding.” The second section, by Amelia Barikin, contextualizes this material by focusing on how contemporary artists working within museums have interrogated and theorized museum practices. Both sections engage with a recent art historical understanding that visual history – a history based on the particularity and contingency of images rather than stories – has altered the shape of narrative in contemporary communication networks (including those of museums). In exploiting this shift, Brown and Green's works forge an interzone in which the form of the atlas emerges as a catalyst for the production and consumption of situated visual knowledge. The term “atlas” implies a system of classifications within which the knowledge contained in an archive is presented. An atlas is both an album and an instructional aid. In layering these ideas onto the form of the museum, this chapter begins to theorize museum practice from the inside out – by positioning works of art as potential models for, rather than symptoms of, museological governance and display.
Governance: Guiding the Museum in Trust
Authors: Lord Barry , Gerson Rina
Published: May 2015

Those who are given the responsibility of governing our museum institutions hold the objects through which we communicate to each other over time and place in trust. The people of past generations and foreign countries must trust those who govern our museums to preserve the heritage held in them. Typically the literature on governance discusses boards and trustees, but around the world most museums are in fact run as line departments of city, local, and central government, which do not have trust boards. In addition to examining aspects of trust boards and how they work, therefore, this chapter also analyzes varied governance arrangements in several counties: including line departments, “arms‐length” institutions, and independent not‐for‐profit associations. Using a case study of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, Canada, the authors discuss new directions in museum governance toward what they call “civil society institutions.” The future of museum governance may be uncertain, they conclude, but it can certainly be bright, and challenging, if our institutions collectively have the courage to genuinely serve the societies in which they live.
Museum Measurement: Questions of Value
Authors: Scott Carol A.
Published: May 2015

For much of the last two decades, measuring the value of museums has been a contested field, with governments and the museum sector holding different and sometimes opposing views on what values and whose values should inform the development of performance indicators and measurement frameworks. This chapter looks at development in museum measurement in the United Kingdom and Australia with some brief, additional reference to the USA. It traces its development from the introduction of performance management in the 1980s through to the emergence of evidence‐based policy in the following decade, examining the issues that emerged during this period and considering more recent developments and the degree to which they offer some resolution. The chapter begins by locating museum measurement within the wider context of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development public sector reforms of the last three decades. In the first section, “Setting the agenda,” structures of accountability are discussed with reference to their implications for the museum sector. In the next section, “Questions of value,” the debates underlying the measurement of museum performance are explored. Finally, “National approaches to measuring value” examines current initiatives adopted by governments and the museum sector, principally in the UK, Australia, and the USA, to measure value. The chapter concludes by arguing that, although recent developments indicate some merging of positions in the creation of national frameworks aimed at capturing evidence of cultural and museum value, work remains to be done if the sector wants to see museums valued in ways that they consider appropriate.
Tate and BP – Oil and Gas as the New Tobacco?: Arts Sponsorship, Branding, and Marketing
Authors: Chong Derrick
Published: May 2015

Sponsorship, branding, and marketing have become an important aspect of museum practice, and of the study of museums, but the scholarship in this area is still developing. This chapter adopts a critical approach to the commercial relationships between arts institutions and multinational enterprises. The central case study is Tate's decision to celebrate two decades of BP corporate arts sponsorship in 2010 during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The role of institutional critique, namely activist artists, accentuates the theme of competing claims on the public art museum as a leading civic institution. In examining the complexities of this issue through a protest by artists and its aftermath, this chapter concludes that museum studies needs to move beyond the classic positions of either faith or antipathy toward the market and museums, and embark on a more balanced and situated research agenda in order to explore more thoroughly the complex commercial challenges facing the contemporary museum today.
The Future of Collecting in “Disciplinary” Museums: Interpretive, Thematic, Relational
Authors: Merriman Nick
Published: May 2015

It would appear that active collecting has almost disappeared in many “disciplinary” museums in the UK except the very large national institutions. This chapter considers the future of collecting in regional museums, such as the Manchester Museum, which have traditional discipline‐based collections from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Reasoning that museumsshouldstill collect, but do it better, the author presents new paradigms and approaches that his staff have been experimenting with at Manchester as a way of refreshing and revising the objectives and frameworks for institutional collecting. These ideas – collecting scientifically rather than comprehensively, qualitatively rather than quantitatively, collecting in a manner that is interpretive, thematic, and relational – are then applied in a case study of a current pilot project on “Trees” at the museum, which shows how collecting can be repositioned at the heart of the museum again but made sustainable and relevant by being linked closely to its audience and mission. Although this new collecting could be seen as a low priority at a time of severe constraints in terms of funding and personnel, he asserts that in hard times one has to return to fundamental values. There is no better time for museums to re‐assert the vital importance of collecting.
From Caring to Creating: Curators Change Their Spots
Authors: Arnold Ken
Published: May 2015

Curatorial practice is one of the most discussed but least analyzed subfields of museum practice. In this chapter, the author offers a broad survey of a multi‐faceted topic based in part on a literature review, a specially convened seminar, and also his own experience making exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection in London. After reviewing a range of developments driving a change in the way curators work – expansion of the museum profession, new museum spaces and places, and different ways of thinking about collections and exhibitions, research and scholarship, media and audience – he argues that new forms, models, and approaches are appearing: broadly speaking a shift from caring to creating. In this “new curatorship” we see curators as political activists, artistic directors, and public investigators. However, sometimes the skills involved are the same as they have always been, for example the kind of “thinking out loud” found in the exhibition experiments of the new interdisciplinary cultural centers of which the Wellcome Collection is an example. In this particular form of new curatorship, the chapter concludes, a premium is placed on the idea of seeking and marshalling visual and material ideas in order finally, with an inspired flourish of showmanship, to just stand back and point.
Planning for Success: Project Management for Museum Exhibitions
Authors: Dean David K.
Published: May 2015

Preparing exhibitions is a complex and demanding task that involves many subjects, disciplines, and terminologies. Although there are as many approaches to this as there are museums, exhibition planning is often serendipitous, disorganized, and reactive. If approached without clear focus, the outcomes are invariably less successful and often unsatisfying for both the staff and the audience. Recognizing the need for an effective model of exhibition development, this chapter offers a style of project management for museum exhibitions that provides structure and clarity through stated objectives, teamwork, and planning. Drawing on many years of developing successful displays in a university museum in the USA, especially in science and natural history, the author illustrates the efficacy of this model of exhibition production as a planned, phased process: moving through concept, development, production, functional, and assessment stages. He concludes that a strong methodology and supportable strategies for conceiving, planning, producing, and presenting exhibitions are required to advance desirable institutional outcomes.
Rewards and Frustrations: Repatriation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ancestral Remains by the National Museum of Australia
Authors: Pickering Michael
Published: May 2015

Repatriation of human remains is one of the most difficult and challenging areas of museum practice today, and the literature on the subject has much to say about the philosophical, legal, and ethical dimensions but is not so helpful on the process itself. In Australia repatriation is now formally supported by Australian governments, government departments, and major museums, as well as by the public in general. Over the past 25 years, the repatriation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander remains, from both overseas and domestic holdings, has increased dramatically. However, many of the debates and issues involved in this growth in commitment to repatriation of remains have never made it to the public domain. While the successes are proudly broadcast through media, the bumps in the road behind successful repatriations are put behind us. Nonetheless, it is important to learn from the frustrations and rewards involved in repatriation and to use these to develop better philosophies, policies, and processes. This chapter describes repatriation as it is practiced by the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. It then diverges into a more personal description and opinion of some of the issues the author has encountered over the years in working on this important and often contentious topic, which, it is argued, should be regarded as an integral aspect of museum practice.
Reviewing the Digital Heritage Landscape: The Intersection of Digital Media and Museum Practice
Authors: Wellington Shannon , Oliver Gillian
Published: May 2015

This chapter reviews the digital heritage landscape by re‐enforcing the view of digital heritage as being embedded within a broad sociocultural context, firmly tied to the notion of practice and theory. It provides a framework to help museum practitioners, students, and scholars understand the concept of digital heritage and its impact on the museum environment. An awareness of the inherent benefits and opportunities afforded through the intersections of “digital” and “heritage” will provide a solid foundation to the critical adoption, implementation, and evaluation of the multitude of digital media currently available for application in memory institutions.n>
The Museum as TV Producer: Televisual Form in Curating, Commissioning, and Public Programming
Authors: Connolly Maeve
Published: May 2015

This chapter examines a selection of TV‐themed exhibitions and artworks realized since the 1970s, focusing on curatorial, commissioning, and programming initiatives at institutions such as the Long Beach Museum of Art (LBMA), Long Beach, California; Kunstverein München, Germany; Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Since the 1970s, television has attracted the attention of art institutions that seek to engage with changing practices of media production and consumption, and to reinvent the art museum in the guise of TV producer. If cable television initially served as an important focus for these curatorial and commissioning initiatives, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, it was gradually supplanted by newer technologies, with several art institutions embracing webcasts and other modes of “Internet TV” by the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even though TV has largely been displaced by social media as an emblem of popular culture, it continues to function as an important reference point for artists, curators, and art intuitions seeking to negotiate and articulate new relationships with audiences and new conceptions of publicness.
SimKnowledge: What Museums Can Learn from Video Games
Authors: Giddings Seth
Published: May 2015

New media technologies – from photography and film to virtual reality and websites, interactive exhibits, and spectacular imagery – have prompted anxieties about the status of knowledge and education in museums since the late nineteenth century. Computer and video games appear to be only the latest entrant to the museum that promises new forms of engagement for (particularly young) visitors but at the expense of a grip on knowledge and meaning. This chapter argues that video games are useful to science museums and centers in a number of ways, but most significantly through their popularization of computer simulation and modeling. Drawing on debates around the nature of knowledge in digital visual culture more generally, the chapter explores the implications for this simulation for museums and asks new questions about the nature of knowledge in a digital popular culture. What questions do the speculative, emergent, and inherently playful operations of computer simulation ask of scientific knowledge today?
The Life of Things
Authors: Gaskell Ivan
Published: May 2015

Citing things from Native American, Native Hawaiian, Christian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic communities, this chapter asks what it might be for things to have life. Although they exclude human‐made and many naturally occurring things, even hegemonic Western notions of life in biological terms are unsettled. The distinction between what is natural and what is artificial has only local efficacy, and even then it is equivocal. The chapter discusses what the places in museums might be of things with life, in some sense, including the sacred. Focusing on the power of touch, it argues that exhibition mediation, whether in museums or elsewhere, can do much to inhibit or to encourage specific forms of attention – devotional, aesthetic, historical – selectively, though mediation can never entirely expunge a sense of life where it exists. Further, museum mediation does not only take place in exhibition galleries. It occurs just as importantly in storage areas, laboratories, study rooms, and, in some instances, in rooms set aside for devotion. For things to have life, then, implies variable worlds in which that quality – life – itself varies.
Aesthetics and Atmosphere in Museums: A Critical Marketing Perspective
Authors: Biehl‐Missal Brigitte , vom Lehn Dirk
Published: May 2015

Adopting a critical marketing studies perspective, this chapter considers the aesthetic interchange between museums and department stores. We present marketing approaches to the design of retail spaces, which museums of all kinds have adapted. Drawing on Gernot Böhme's aesthetic theory and the notion of atmosphere, and with reference to marketing research and the context of the “experience economy” and the “aesthetic economy,” we show how spatial arrangements, lighting, commodity, and window display are created to influence visitors and consumers. Examples include the Louis Vuitton flagship store in Paris, the BMW Museum in Munich, and the Libeskind Building of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. We consider critical marketing perspectives and consumer resistance to these experiential strategies but also acknowledge their potential to generate a deeper embodied understanding of historic and cultural contexts in museums. We emphasize that people negotiate and co‐create these atmospheres in response to the aesthetic influence of space, objects, and other visitors.
From Object to Environment: The Recent History of Exhibitions in Germany and Austria
Authors: Habsburg‐Lothringen Bettina , Miscovich Mark
Published: May 2015

More and more, museums and exhibitions are drawing on the immersive strategies refined and professionalized by theme parks and shopping centers over the last decades – visualization and materialization, the creation of three‐dimensional environments, the blurring of lines between reality and fiction, the leveling of time and landscapes, personalization and personification, and the atmospheric use of light, tone, color, smells, and architectural features – as ways of attracting a larger audience. There are two reasons for this. First, museums and exhibitions have begun to address new, more abstract themes and areas of the sciences, the present and future which are not represented by classical museum objects. Second, the aesthetic and medium of the museum exhibition has been redefined and inspired by artists, filmmakers, cartoonists, designers, and choreographers using new media, and by the incorporation of related professions into the field of exhibition design. Drawing on examples from the German‐speaking world, this chapter will investigate what these developments mean for the traditional museum medium (objects, texts, architecture) and how they can be assessed in a museum historical context.
Museums as Spaces of the Present: The Case for Social Scenography
Authors: Hächler Beat , Hoskin] [Translated by Niall
Published: May 2015

“Social scenography” is a working concept. It has evolved in recent years as a result of Hächler's reflection on his own exhibition practice. Through this concept, Hächler tries to address explicitly the performative aspect of exhibitions and the actions and effects they trigger, instead of thinking of scenography as the design of visible physical spaces. In this sense, “social scenography” represents a change of emphasis, an attempt to fathom the social aspect of the scenographic more profoundly, and thereby to extend the focus onto all actors within the scenographic space, but especially visitors. How can scenographic means be used to enhance the social, interactive, communicative dimension? What makes an exhibition into a social, performative space? What is the role of the visitor in the production of the exhibition as social space? This chapter takes an empirical approach. It sets out to use a case study of the Stapferhaus Lenzburg and Hächler's own experiences of exhibitions from the period 1994–2011 to derive methodological insights which could be grouped under the term “social scenography.” The arena in which this learning experience took place was the Stapferhaus Lenzburg, an exhibition provider active in Switzerland and abroad, which also goes by the name Haus der Gegenwart, a “museum of the present,” unique in that it is organized along interdisciplinary lines. To this day it is consistently dedicated to staging contemporary topics from the real world, without being able to fall back on either a collection of its own or permanent exhibition spaces.
Embodiment and Place Experience in Heritage Technology Design
Authors: Ciolfi Luigina
Published: May 2015

This chapter explores issues of embodiment and place as important aspects of human interaction at heritage sites and of the design of technology to support and augment it. It outlines how a parallel interest both in human‐centered computing and in heritage studies on aspects of physical experience and place experience by participants has recently emerged, and shows how these concerns have been addressed in examples of technology design for heritage sites that provide visitors with embodied and emplaced interaction experiences. Finally, it provides insights from two research case studies, both focusing on open air heritage: open air sites are less studied than enclosed museums, but they are important settings in which to understand embodied and emplaced experience of heritage and of technology, because of their immersive nature. In conclusion, Ciolfi reflects on important issues in considering place and embodiment as key components of the human experience of heritage technologies that can help other technology designers and museum and heritage professionals.
Diffused Museums: Networked, Augmented, and Self‐Organized Collections
Authors: Bell and John , Ippolito Jon
Published: May 2015

This chapter examines the implications of changing social attitudes toward media access, art, and intellectual property on the museum as an institution. As popular media industries have learned (with much distress), the large‐scale deployment of new network, storage, and output technologies since the early 1990s has led to a sea change in the way that people consume media. Museums have been partially insulated from these changes by their emphasis on unique artifacts as well as conventions and demographics that favor slower technological adoption, but as those demographics shift away from old media perspectives they will be forced to address society's new ways of accessing information and experiencing art. This chapter looks at three potential directions for museums to take in an attempt to keep up with these changes – networked museums, hybridized digital/physical spaces, and self‐organizing collections – and reconsiders the definitions of museums, collections, exclusivity, and curation under these new modes of operation.
Mobile in Museums: From Interpretation to Conversation
Authors: Proctor Nancy
Published: May 2015

This chapter retraces the history and kinds of mobile technologies used in museums, and explores some of the new mobile experiences and applications now possible using the latest generation of mobile and related technologies such as location‐aware systems, computer vision, and augmented reality. In the process, it examines models for understanding the role of the museum in a multiplatform environment and suggests that the museum's relationship to global audiences should evolve to reflect the distributed network structure of the Internet itself. Drawing on Judith Mastai's feminist critique of museum visitor services models, as well as the work of artist Halsey Burgund, Proctor proposes the use of crowdsourcing in mobile applications as one route to greater relevance and sustainability for both mobile applications and the museum's mission.