Writing in Museums

Abstract

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.

Critical, Engaged and Change-oriented Scholarship in Environmental Communication. Six Methodological Dilemmas to Think With

“…Such methods can highlight how phenomena are discursively constructed in society and can assist in understanding which actions, identity constructions and power relations are facilitated and (re)produced by these texts (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). But, important communicative questions about how the text came into being (Noy, 2015) and how it is read and used by different actors are difficult to explore through documents. Another example is methods that highlight pre-and post-intervention attitudes and emotions (Jacobson et al, 2019).…”

Participatory Media and Discourse in Heritage Museums: Co-constructing the Public Sphere?

“…Can they tell us what to say?" Other parents encourage their children in a more general way, viewing writing positively as a literate activity to be pursued as part of the visit to the museum Communication, Culture & Critique 10 (2017) 280-301 © 2016 International Communication Association (Noy, 2015b). In a typical interaction, a family of four enters the CIF hall and the father immediately tells his young son: "You can write a note and put it on the wall, Max.…”

“…"; "this [book] is for writing, do you want to write here something?" Noy, 2015aNoy, , 2015b. In other words, at the CIF, the questions become a task to be addressed, and writing on the notes is a participatory action that visitors undertake jointly.…”

“…I focus on a corpus of written comments that visitors wrote in a heritage museum I have been studying since 2011. The study is part of a larger multisite research project, comparatively exploring participatory discourse and material settings for its production in museums and similar cultural institutions (Noy, 2009(Noy, , 2015a(Noy, , 2015b(Noy, , 2016.…”