Revisionism and collective memory: The struggle for meaning in the Amistad affair

This essay problematizes “history” and “public memory” by examining their polysemic and polyvalent nature. Collective memories are selectively chosen and highlighted to fit the needs of a particular social group. Ownership of “history” then becomes a hegemonic device that controls our interpretation of the past and subsequent behavior in the future. In the case of the “Amistad Affair, “the ramifications of these choices reached from the early nineteenth century court of law to the Hollywood studio of the late twentieth century. Thus, it serves as a paradigm case of the struggle over who controls the narrative possibilities of history and memory.     

Why Were There No Great Chinese Paintings in American Museums before the Twentieth Century?

To understand the major shift in Americans' attitudes about Chinese art between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is essential to know not only what the American collectors thought, but also the social history of these collectors and their agents. Since the advent of the field of material culture studies, scholars have begun to look at museum objects, whether as art or not, from the perspective of different lives—that of their makers and users. It seems that the lack of “great” Chinese paintings in American museums before the twentieth century may be due to the fact that the nineteenth century American collectors and their Chinese agents differed from their twentieth century counterparts in what they regarded as “great,” what they thought was “Chinese,” and what they defined as “paintings.”     

Crowdsourcing—an Introduction: From Public Goods to Public Good

“Crowdsourcing” is a practice that combines the concepts of “the crowd” and “outsourcing.” Introducing two articles on crowdsourcing in this issue, Nancy Proctor argues that—although we associate crowdsourcing with Web 2.0 and the social media revolution—its origins stretch back to the nineteenth century. Crowdsourcing is examined for its usefulness in creating radical new relationships between museum constituents, users, and institutions—putting the “wisdom of the crowd” in dialogue rather than in competition with formal institutional knowledge.     

“民生档案”的话语分析

“民生档案”作为21世纪出现的新概念,是有具体指向的档案专业术语。文章立足于“民生档案”的话语角度,从“民生档案”的语境分析、“民生档案”的话语建构以及“民生档案”的话语演变三个方面进行了全景式的剖析,目的是建立对“民生档案”概念与社会发展关系的认识基础,同时也为重新认识“民生档案”与档案“泛化”这一现象提供新的视角。     

Give the Winds a Mighty Voice: Evangelical Culture as Radio Ecology

The Evangelical movement in the United States arose as an interpretive community in the late 19th century when the penny press permitted mass dissemination of shared media texts. Network radio in the early and mid-20th century then furnished an ecology for Evangelicals to share real-time media rituals and be socially integrated into a broadly coherent subculture. This study presents a new history of Evangelicalism organized around its media, following the movement through its three “waves.” In the present era, radio continues to sustain the subculture, even as Evangelicals have tactically “reread” their media texts in response to societal change.     

The Effect of Anticipated Future Interaction and Initial Impression Valence on Relational Communication in Computer-Mediated Interaction

This study applies the critical paradigm of “rhetorical enterprise” to the case of nineteenth‐century British reform efforts, particularly the organization and the “gospel” of the Birmingham Political Union, and concludes that cases of rhetorical enterprise challenge critics to account for the enterprising consistency of tactics and creed regardless of the relatively inconsistent factors of men andevents.     

Influences of the Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?

Robert C. Berring has called West Publishing Company's American Digest System “the key aspect of the new form of legal literature” that West and other publishers developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Berring argued that West's digests provided practicing lawyers not only the means for locating precedential cases, but a “paradigm for thinking about the law itself” that influenced American lawyers until the development of online legal research systems in the 1970s. This article discusses questions raised by Berring's scholarship, and examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal environment in which the West digests were created and became essential research tools for American lawyers.     

The path to the machine: affect studies,technology, and the question of ineffability

From the 1990s to the early twenty-first century, a range of writers in sociology, history, and cultural studies would increasingly see emotion as an important area of study. This “affective turn” has offered an important corrective to standard scientific conceptions of emotion, highlighting the mysteries of embodiment that are ignored by a narrowly empirical approach. While celebrating this development, this paper offers a series of cautions drawn from a comparative history of scholarly attention to emotion. Similarly to the early twenty-first century understanding of affect, the social sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century employed a neo-romantic conception of emotion. By the 1920s, this idea would be subsumed into a new scientific paradigm that saw the new recording technologies as perfect vehicles for taming the mysteries of emotion. I discuss strategies for avoiding this scientizing of emotion in our own period, which is similarly taken with a series of “new technologies.”     

Communication research and the idea of process

The term “process” admits of two definitions in the philosophy of science: one based on a 19th century mechanistic view, the other consistent with quantum relativistic notions. Scholars in speech communication have misused these essentially contradictory definitions. Methodological notions have often been based on a deterministic view of cause while, at the same time, definitions of communication have been based on Whitehead's view of reality as “becoming.” As a result, theory and research have been inconsistent. To implement the contemporary notion of “process,” ideas of methodological rigor based on causal determinism must be substituted by notions of carefulness based on acknowledgement of the observer's involvement in his own observations.     

The Freak Election Bet and the Performance of the Democratic Paradox

The article examines the ritual meaning of the “freak” bet of the late nineteenth century, primarily as this took place in the city of Philadelphia. I propose that an election ritual can be thought of as an embodiment of the so-called “democratic paradox” put forward by Chantal Mouffe. The tension of the ritual lies in the question of whether it is able to satisfy competing demands on the modern polity and the citizens who compose it. I argue that the freak bet was an attempt to “think through,” or publicly communicate, some of the paradoxes of modern liberty. It did not succeed in providing a definitive answer, since, as I suggest at the end, it is in the nature of liberal democracy that such an answer will not be forthcoming.     

以图画为本位的文学--图画书的演变史

中国原创图画书开始走向世界,但中国图画书的历史可能比西方更早。图画书本质上是一种出版现象,在中西方不同文化背景中有不同的呈现方式。中西方图画书同源于儿童读物的插图,随着出版科技的进步和读图时代的到来,从“出版热”逐渐形成“文学热”,从“文字的儿童读物”演化为“图画书的儿童文学”,在新世纪交流融合中发展为儿童文学的典型样式——绘本。中国原创图画书的复兴有其深刻的历史文化背景和深厚的民族文学传统,建设中国特色的图画书评价标准和理论体系应该提上议事日程。     

Sarah Roberts and the early history of the “separate but equal” doctrine: A study in rhetoric,law, and social change

This essay explores the early history of the “separate but equal”; doctrine in nineteenth century legal and political argumentation. By employing ironic and tragic frames, the authors challenge the traditional, linear approaches to legal historirizing. Moving beyond legal texts, the authors investigate how various communities in antebellum Boston negotiated conflicting views about how to best advance the cause of civil rights, both inside and outside the courtroom. These early debates created a complex rhetorical culture, and they provided jurists with several possible interpretations of the terms “separate”; and “equal.”; The authors conclude that these early debates, and Lemuel Shaw's subsequent decision in Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston (1849), provide readers with insightful illustrations of the irony and tragedy of the law.     

Fakes on Display: Special Exhibitions of Counterfeit Art

Since the mid‐twentieth century, special exhibitions of art forgeries have appeared in many museums in the United States and Europe. These exhibitions have displayed artworks of many kinds, and have been structured around a variety of objectives and methodologies to engage the public. Fundamentally, they inform that public about an uncomfortable reality: that artistic deception is more common than they may think. The collective phenomenon of these forums displaying faux art has reached a point at which it is a topic worthy of study. This article draws upon representative examples of exhibitions of fake art to present an overview of their “what,” “why,” and “how” in light of commonalities and differences among them. It furthermore traces a loose historical pattern in these exhibitions that shows change over time as well as continuity.     

Document,documentation, and the Document Academy: introduction

A series of efforts starting in the late nineteenth century to manage the increase in documents came to be knows as “documentation.” Leaders included Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. The concern was with access to evidence and the meaning of “document” was broadened to include any sign preserved to represent phenomena. Legal deposit, when extended to new modern media, required new techniques and led to a new program in documentation at the University of Tromsø, Norway, in 1996. Niels Lund, Michael Buckland, and others collaborated in forming the Document Academy and organized a series of conferences.     

Defining Journalists in Late-Nineteenth Century Britain

This article uses journalists’ memoirs, professional publications, and handbooks to show how British journalists projected images of themselves in the late nineteenth century. In a period of professional and social insecurity, journalists employed such self-presentations as a way of legitimizing their “title to be heard” in the public sphere. Rather than demand that journalism be converted into a closed profession comparable to law or medicine, journalists presented theirs as an “open profession” in which ability and hard work automatically led to success. Although such self-projections legitimized the status of elite journalists, they hampered attempts to improve journalists’ working conditions.     

新世纪20年:我国图书馆口述史理论与实践的发展趋势

进入21世纪以来,我国图书馆口述史在理论与实践方面均取得发展。记忆的回归、生长的有机体、多元文化服务的理论;积极保存、科学处理、活用益人的实践理念;预防法律争端、权利保护优先的法律伦理原则等促成了图书馆口述史的发展。但在理论与实践相结合、研究成果数量、资源公开等方面还存在问题。未来的图书馆口述资料建设应从理论联系实际、多机构联合构建馆藏网络体系、线上线下服务多措并举、建立图书馆口述史智库体系等方面努力。     

How to Forecast the Future of Museums

Abstract This article proposes new methods of strategic planning for the twenty‐first century. Potential futures can be imagined (and diagrammed) as radiating out from the present in a “cone of plausibility” that puts extreme possibilities on either side of the expected future: how the future would look if business proceeds as usual.     

Academic Journal Publishing

This paper summarizes the presentations made at the “Academic Journal Publishing” session of the 2007 NASIG conference. The session was conducted by four publishers from a variety of academic publishing companies who made presentations (specifically tailored to a librarian audience) which provided a broad stroke overview of their industry and how they go about the process of publishing and distributing academic journals in the 21st century. Through each of their presentations they spoke to the questions of “what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.” Topics covered included the launch and acquisition of journals, the peer review process, the tools and services supplied to authors and editors, the production processes employed, special legal and copyright issues, marketing and distribution strategies, and usage.     

Aerospace Museums: A Question of Balance

Abstract While rooted in a tradition stretching back to the late eighteenth century, aerospace museums have enjoyed a period of extraordinary growth over the past three decades. Throughout this period, they have struggled to achieve a balance between their role as “shrines” that celebrate, memorialize and inspire, and “schools” that can help visitors to better understand the complex nature of technological change and its impact on the world. A survey of exhibitions that have sought to portray the history of flight as something more than a story of unalloyed progress, or that depart from traditional master narratives focusing solely on achievement and valor, provides both examples of success and cautionary lessons. If museums of flight are to present a useful and historically accurate portrait of the aerospace enterprise, they must continue the struggle to achieve a balance between these sometimes competing goals.     

CULTURE and culture at the Royal Ontario Museum: Anthropology Meets Marketing,Part 1

The museum in the contemporary era imports from the nineteenth century a venerable idea: that the first responsibility of a public art museum is to enlighten and improve its visitors, morally, socially, and politically. Yet visitors often seem to have arrived from another planet, bringing with them their own cultural meanings and agendas. A series of two articles presents ethnographic data, anthropological analysis, and a marketing perspective to suggest why the visitors' points of view may seem vertiginously strange to museum personnel. This article, Part One, characterizes the conflict between host and guest as the outcome of two competing models of culture: “preferment” and “transformation.” In a subsequent issue of Curator, Part Two will examine the influence of consumer culture on these models, and offer strategies for rapprochement.