Abstract

Museum scholars and professionals agree that audiences’ texts are under-researched and are often approached anecdotally. This state limits the ability to advance effective theorizing of, and interventions in, audience participation and engagement with museums. The article addresses this lacuna by promoting a contextual media-centered conceptualization of both audiences’ texts and the media that elicit and mediate them. The article responds to the mediatic turn in museum studies and to the recent call for on-the-ground research of media-related museum practice. Taking comment books as a case study, the concept of response vehicles (RVs) is offered, defined as onsite institutional media, serving to elicit, record, and display audiences’ texts. The study employs data-rich qualitative methods to depict the participatory affordances of two RVs in two history museums, and to analyze the texts they elicit and display. Four reading strategies (“keys”), tailored specifically to evaluate audiences texts as forms of participation, are demonstrated.

摘要

博物馆学者和专业人士都同意，对观众的文字的研究不够深入，而且经常被传闻。这种状态限制了对观众参与和博物馆参与进行有效理论化和干预的能力。本文通过促进以上下文为中心的以媒体为中心的受众文本和引出并进行调解的媒体的概念化解决了这一空白。本文回应了博物馆研究的媒体化趋势，并回应了最近对媒体相关博物馆实践进行实地研究的呼吁。以评论书为例，提供了响应工具（RVs）的概念，定义为现场机构媒体，用于引诱，记录和显示观众的文本。该研究采用了丰富的数据定性方法来描述两个历史博物馆中两个房车的参与能力，并分析它们引起和展示的文字。展示了四种阅读策略（“键”），这些策略是专门为评估受众文本作为参与形式而量身定制的。