This volume explores the evolution of the language of museum communication from 1950 to the present day, focusing on its most salient tool, the press release. The analysis is based on a corpus of press releases issued by eight high-profile British and American museums, and has been carried out adopting corpus linguistics and genre analysis methodologies. After identifying the typical features of the museum press release, new media more recently adopted by museums, such as web presentations, blogs, e-news, and social media, are taken into consideration, exploring questions such as how has the language of museum communication changed in order to face the challenge posed by new technologies? Are museum press releases threatened by new approaches used in contemporary public relations? Are the typical press release features still detectable in new genres? Drawing on insights from linguistics, discourse analysis, and museum communication this book will be of great value to researchers and practitioners of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and museum communication scholars.
Answering key questions in the study of how museums communicate, Louise Ravelli provides a set of frameworks to investigate the complexities of communication in museums: * What is an appropriate level of complexity for a written label? * Why do some choice in language make a more direct relation to visitors? * Is there a correct way of presenting a particular view of content? * How do design practices contribute to the overall meanings being made? The frameworks enhance the way we critically analyze and understand museums text, both in the sense of conventional – written texts in museums – and in an expanded sense of the museum as a whole operating as a communicative text. Using a wide range of examples Ravelli argues that communication contributes fundamentally to what a museum is, who it relates to and what it stands for. Not only museum studies and communications studies students, but also professionals in the field will find Museum Texts an indispensable guide on communication frameworks.
As U.S. museums evolve from their role as elite institutions to organizations serving multiple stakeholders, they must adopt new communication practices to meet their social missions and organizational goals. Engaging Diverse Communities, the first book-length study of museum public relations for practitioners since 1983, details how institutions can use communication fundamentals to establish and maintain relationships with a wide range of cultural groups and constituencies. Melissa A. Johnson interviews communicators at cultural heritage museums to understand the challenges of representing communities based on racial and ethnic, generational, immigrant, and language identities. Exploring how communications professionals function as cultural intermediaries by negotiating competing and intersecting identities and mastering linguistic and visual code-switching, she presents an analysis of the communication tactics of more than two hundred art, history, African American, American Indian, and other diverse museums. Engaging Diverse Communities illuminates best public relations practices, especially in media relations, digital press relations, website content production, social media, and event planning. This essential text for museum professionals also addresses visual aesthetics, cultural expression, and counter-stereotypes, and offers guidance on how to communicate cultural attractiveness.
In any museum, gallery, or heritage site that wishes to engage with foreign-language visitors, translation is essential. Providing texts in foreign languages – whether for international visitors from different language cultures or for heritage speakers of local minority languages – is centrally important in enabling these visitors to make sense of what they see displayed. Yet despite this awareness, and a growing body of research in the field, there has hitherto been little available in the way of practical training in this area of translation. This book aims to help fill that need. Translating for Museums, Galleries and Heritage Sites focuses on the translation of interpretive and information texts, particularly in the museum context. After an initial introduction and an overview of key concepts in both museums and translation, it looks at three broad groupings of texts from the museum text system: fixed labels and wall panels, leaflets and other portable learning resources, and catalogues and guides, including a section on websites. It concludes with a call to place translation centre stage in museum, gallery, and heritage practice. The book will be of use as a coursebook for students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and for practitioners in the sector, and is designed to be suitable for both individual and class-based learning.
This volume brings together 30 museum experts (26 in English and 4 in French) to lift the lid on museum print and texts. Contributions were originally presented at the UNESCO World Book Capital of 2012, a timely and far-sighted conference held in Armenia. If text is essential to communication, how can museums be sure that what they offer will engage, interpret or even transform the visitor, the tourist or the scholar? This book offers a wealth of answers to this question and related concerns.
The Manual of Museum Management, Third Edition presents a comprehensive and detailed analysis of: the principles of museum organization, the ways in which people work together to accomplish museum objectives, and the ways in which museums, large and small, can function most effectively. This new edition offers updated information on the key aspects of museum practice that dominate today – everything from “flatter” organizational models, shared leadership, the efflorescence of digital practice and complexity in the field, museums and social justice, the hard work and positive rewards of community engagement and partnership, platform “balance” to alternative revenue models. All new contemporary “snapshots” provided by practitioners and drawn from museums and galleries around the world bring the principles to life and digitally-accessed links and resources (in the e-book) round out the relevance and usefulness of this third edition.
Graphic Design in Museum Exhibitions offers an in-depth analysis of the multiple roles that exhibition graphics perform in contemporary museums and exhibitions. Drawing on a study of exhibitions that took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum of London and the Haus der Geschichte, Bonn, Piehl brings together approaches from museum studies, design practice and narrative theory to examine museum exhibitions as multimodal narratives in which graphics account for one set of narrative resources. The analysis underlines the importance of aspects such as accessibility and at the same time problematises conceptualisations that focus only on the effectiveness of graphics as display device, by drawing attention to the contributions that graphics make towards the content on display and to the ways in which it is experienced in the museum space. Graphic Design in Museum Exhibitions argues for a critical reading of and engagement with exhibition graphic design as part of wider debates around meaning-making in museum studies and exhibition-making practice. As such, the book should be essential reading for academics, researchers and students from the fields of museum and design studies. Practitioners such as exhibition designers, graphic designers, curators and other exhibition makers should also find much to interest them in the book.
Museums of Language and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage presents essays by practitioners based in language museums around the world. Describing their history, mission, and modes of display, contributors demonstrate the important role intangible heritage can and should play in the museum. Arguing that languages are among our most precious forms of cultural heritage, the book also demonstrates that they are at risk of neglect, and of endangerment from globalisation and linguistic imperialism. Including case studies from across Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, this book documents the vital work being done by museums to help preserve languages and make them objects of broad public interest. Divided into three sections, contributions to the book focus on one of three types of museums: museums of individual languages, museums of language groups – both geographic and structural – and museums of writing. The volume presents practical information alongside theoretical discussions and state-of-the-art commentaries concerning the representation of languages and their cultural nature. Museums of Language and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage is the first volume to address the subject of language museums and, as such, should be of interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of museum and cultural heritage studies, applied linguistics, anthropology, tourism, and public education.
Grounded in the strengths of its first edition, this book has been restructured to include new papers and recent articles, and presents front-running theory and practice as it addresses the relationships of museums and galleries to their audiences.
Interpersonal communication (IC) is a continuous game between the interacting interactants. It is a give and take - a continuous, dynamic flow that is linguistically realized as discourse as an on-going sequence of interactants' moves. Interpersonal communication is produced and interpreted by acting linguistically, and this makes it a fascinating research area. The handbook, Interpersonal Communication , examines how interactants manage to exchange facts, ideas, views, opinions, beliefs, emotion, etc. by using the linguistic systems and the resources they offer. In interpersonal communication, the fine-tuning of individuals' use of the linguistic resources is continuously probed. The language used in interpersonal communication enhances social relations between interactants and keeps the interaction on the normal track. When interaction gets off the track, linguistic miscommunication may also destroy social relationships. This volume is essentially concerned with this fine-tuning in discourse, and how it is achieved among various interactant groups. The volume departs from the following fundamental questions: How do interpersonal relations manifest themselves in language? What is the role of language in developing and maintaining relationships in interpersonal communication? What types of problems occur in interpersonal communication and what kind of strategies and means are used to solve them? How does linguistically realized interpersonal communication interact with other semiotic modes? Interpersonal communication is seen and researched from the perspective of what is being said or written, and how it is realized in various generic forms. The current research also gives attention to other semiotic modes which interact with the linguistic modes. It is not just the social roles of interactants in groups, the possible media available, the non-verbal behaviors, the varying contextual frames for communication, but primarily the actual linguistic manifestations that we need to focus upon when we want to have a full picture of what is going on in human interpersonal communication. It is this linguistic perspective that the volume aims to present to all researchers interested in IC. The volume offers an overview of the theories, methods, tools, and resources of linguistically-oriented approaches, e.g. from the fields of linguistics, social psychology, sociology, and semiotics, for the purpose of integration and further development of the interests in IC., Topics e.g.: Orientation to interaction as primarily linguistically realized processes Expertise on theorizing and analyzing cultural and situational contexts where linguistic processes are realized Expertise on handling language corpora Expertise on theorizing and analyzing interaction types as genres Orientation to an integrated view of linguistic and non-linguistic participant activities and of how interactants generate meanings and interact with space Expertise on researching the management of the linguistic flow in interaction and its successfulness.
