Writing in Museums

Written Communication Apr 2015

Chaim Noy University of South Florida

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.

Journal: Written Communication
Published: 2015-04-01
DOI: 10.1177/0741088315574703
Open Access: Closed
Topics: qualitative research multimodality multilingual writers

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (4)

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Cites in this index (3)

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Writing Material in Chemical Physics Research: The Laboratory Notebook as Locus…

Written Communication
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Ethnography as Method, Methodology, and “Deep Theorizing”

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Blair et al. (2000)

Reproducing civil rights tactics: The rhetorical performances of the civil righ…

Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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