Museums offer rich material environments for studying narration as jointly accomplished by institutions and audiences. Following the narrative and participatory turns museums have taken, the research explores the narrative actions audiences’ texts perform vis-à-vis museums’ narrations. It examines audience participation in two history museums, as elicited by response vehicles – onsite media that serve to invite and capture audience written responses. The research argues that museum response vehicles offer narrative affordances and entitlements, which shape how audiences negotiate participation as publicly documented and displayed. Comparative findings indicate that participation is shaped by response vehicles’ spatio-material affordances, including how brief textual segments function as audience-based contributions in and to the historical narration. A range of audience-generated narrative actions, entitlements, and speech acts are discerned and discussed, which typically conform with, but sometimes ‘override’, museums’ affordances. These narrative actions shed light on the mechanics, politics and policies of public narration and agency.

中文翻译：

---

叙事启示

博物馆为机构和观众共同完成的叙事研究提供了丰富的物质环境。继博物馆采取的叙事和参与转向之后，本研究探索了观众文本相对于博物馆叙事的叙事行为。它考察了观众在两个历史博物馆中的参与，这是由响应工具引起的——现场媒体用于邀请和捕捉观众的书面回应。该研究认为，博物馆响应工具提供了叙事可供性和权利，这决定了观众如何通过公开记录和展示来协商参与。比较结果表明参与是由响应车辆的空间材料可供性决定的，包括简短的文本片段如何作为基于观众的贡献在历史叙述中发挥作用。一系列观众产生的叙事行为、权利和言语行为被识别和讨论，这些行为通常符合，但有时“超越”博物馆的可供性。这些叙事行为揭示了公共叙事和代理的机制、政治和政策。