Interpretation and the Role of the Viewer in Museums of Modern and Contemporary Art

Abstract What does the term “interpretation” mean when it's encountered in museums of modern and contemporary art — and is something missing? Studies conducted by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the University of Leicester in England reveal that visitors want more information about art. In this article, interviews with the directors of the Phillips and the Walker (as well as other museum professionals and academics) examine interpretative practices today and suggest plans for tomorrow. When preparing future interpretive materials, the author advocates that museums expose visitors to the idea that they make their own meaning when viewing art.     

Movement and Resistance: (Tattooed) Bodies and Performance

This essay is a genealogy of the performances of extensively tattooed individuals in tattoo contests held at tattoo conventions. It focuses on how the body in performance cites historical discourses and how that citation is necessary for both resistant and recuperative effects. I argue that the force of the normalizing discourse of class to contain and dictate the meaning of the (tattooed) body is challenged through actual and immanent movement. I conclude by emphasizing the resistant potential that is always immanent in the body by showing how the explicitly tattooed body's actions overflow and subsequently dismantle the logic of class normalization even as they resist and recuperate it.     

Visitor Meaning‐Making at Grand Canyon's Tusayan Museum and Ruin

Abstract Meaning‐making describes a process by which visitors transform museum experiences into new knowledge and memories. Meaning‐making is influenced by visitors' leisure motivations, prior knowledge, socio‐cultural context brought to the experience, personally‐guided interpretation, and events since the visit. In this study, visitors' long‐term recollections included contextual references to how and why they remembered what they experienced. Forty visitors were interviewed by telephone six months after attending a Native American interpretive program at Grand Canyon National Park's Tusayan Museum. Two patterns associated with a constructivist view of meaning‐making were discerned: a) visitors' integration of indoor and outdoor exhibits and b) visitors' comparisons of modern family and community with a more ancient culture. The presence of contextual indicators within visitor recall suggests that new knowledge may be constructed from factors carried forth from the meaning‐making process. Evidence within the data suggests that exhibits made more relevant to visitors' socio‐cultural identity may enhance on‐site experiences.     

Library Involvement in Faculty Publication Funds

A faculty publication fund is a fairly new concept in scholarly communication, and academic institutions are experimenting with different models for the administration of funds designed to assist faculty who face prohibitive journal publication charges. Findings are reported from a survey-based, qualitative study of small and medium-sized academic libraries involved with open access faculty publication funds. The survey results and a case study of one library's involvement in fund development are considered in light of the broader research questions: How are libraries engaging as facilitators of scholarly publishing, and what successes and challenges are they facing in this new role?     

Janine Niepce's coverage of French women's lives and struggle for equal rights.

This article analyzes Janine Niepce's photographic documentation of the lives of French women, situating it in historical, sociological, and biographical contexts. It argues that for over 50 years she was the only photo-journalist to devote sustained attention to French women and the French women's movement. Drawing on her writings, 3 interviews, close readings of her photographs, and study of her contact sheets, the article offers a summary of her work, an interpretation of its meaning, and an assessment of its contribution.     

Exploring visual perception and children's interpretations of picture books

Visual perception is an ability to process and organize visual information; it plays a role in identifying and classifying information. Many physiological and psychological factors can have an impact on the depth of visual perception in terms of categorization and interpretation of meaning. Picture books tell stories to children with a combination of texts and images. Children's interaction with picture books shows relationships with visual perception; visual perception has an impact on children's categorization and narratives and illustrations of picture books are works of art that can provide sources for children to appreciate art and enhance their visual perception. Three to five-year-old children are characterized by a reliance on their perception because they see what appears to them. At public libraries, schools, and homes children often read picture books for learning and recreation. Thirty-one three- to five-year-old children from one public library, one preschool, and home schools were recruited to interpret images of two picture books in short interviews. Factors that contributed to their interpretation were explored through surveys, content analysis, and case studies.     

Envisioning the Role of Facilitation in Public Deliberation

Research has neglected a critical factor in promoting successful citizen deliberation: the public forum facilitator. The facilitators create the discursive framework needed to make deliberation happen while setting the tone and the tenor for how and what participants discuss. This essay brings facilitators more clearly into the discussions about deliberative practice by offering an expanded and nuanced notion of facilitation in action. I modify D. Ryfe's continuum of involvement concept to outline three distinct types of facilitators: passive, moderate, and involved. Using this continuum, I investigate how the various moves, types of talk, and discursive strategies used by each of these facilitators differ during six National Issues Forums style deliberations. Results demonstrate that facilitators are not neutral, inactive participants in deliberative forums. The analysis indicates that the pedagogical choices made by facilitators about their involvement in forums affect deliberative talk and trajectories. Scholars evaluating deliberation should take into account facilitation and its different dimensions.     

Gay characters in conventional spaces: Will and Grace and the situation comedy genre

This paper explores how Will & Grace, which has been heralded in the popular press for its positive representations of gay men, situates the potentially controversial issue of homosexuality within safe and familiar popular culture conventions, particularly those of the situation comedy genre. This paper draws on feminist and queer theory to examine the liabilities of relying on these familiar situation comedy conventions, demonstrating how the program equates gayness with a lack of masculinity, relies on sexual tension and delayed consummation, infantilizes the program's most potentially subversive characters, and emphasisizes characters' interpersonal relationships rather than the characters' connection to the larger social world. Additionally it argues that by inviting mainstream audiences to read the program within familiar televisual frames, Will & Grace can be read as reinforcing heterosexism and, thus, can be seen as heteronormative.     

Symbolic convergence and special communication theories: Sensing and examining dis/enchantment with the theoretical robustness of critical auto ethnography

This study answers 4 research questions as it explicates the SCT's ability to explain how special communication theories come into being as the product of rhetorical visions that contain the norms, conventions, and customs for exemplar participation in a specific communication style. This study demonstrates that the concept of rhetorical vision yields insights into the creation, rise, and potential for demise of a style‐specific, special theory of communication named the critical autoethnography special theory (CAST). The study reports that the CAST itself is a symbolically created product of the critical autoethnographic rhetorical vision (CARV). The study's findings indicate that CARV's life‐cycle is congruent with those of other rhetorical visions and would predict that the CARV may well implode upon itself as it contains the seeds of its own destruction.     

科学史 ——深化和表达科技馆展览主题的重要途径

我国科技馆在展示内容上往往以传播科学原理及结论为主,而忽略科学方法、科学思想和科学精神的深层次内涵,从而容易使展览虽然充斥着展品和知识,却难以支撑和诠释展览主题。如何挖掘展品的深层次内涵以更好地表达主题,进而提升科技馆的展教功能并深化科学教育效果？笔者认为引入和展示科学史内容是一种有效途径。科学史内容将科学与人文联系起来,增强了科技馆展览的故事性、思想性和人文性,对深化展览主题和创新展示内容起到重要作用。     

New directions in science emerge from disconnection and discord

Science is built on scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, atypicality and diruption, we measure how research draws upon novel combinations of prior research and the degree it creates a new direction by eclipsing its intellectual forebears in subsequent work. Atypical papers are nearly two times more likely to disrupt science than conventional papers, but this is a slow process taking ten years or longer for disruption scores to converge. We provide the first computational model reformulating atypicality as the distance across latent knowledge spaces learned by neural networks. The evolution of this knowledge space characterizes how yesterday's novelty forms today's scientific conventions, which condition the noveltyof tomorrow's breakthroughs.     

Bringing the Author Back Into the Audience Research: A Hermeneutical Perspective on the Audience's Understanding of the Author

In the current media environment the texts available to media audiences are from very diverse sources. This paper deals with a theoretical question of how the audiences' understanding of author co-determines the reader's interpretation of the particular text. Drawing on the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, a concept of the imagined author is introduced: a result of the text-reader encounter, where the notion of the author suggested by the text is realized by the reader through their prior knowledge and expectations of an author. A multidimensional model of the author is therefore proposed to appreciate different characteristics and values potentially associated by audiences with varying forms of authorial presence. Distinguishing various dimensions of the author allows a matrix of authorial characteristics to be built that positions the author brought into the encounter by the text as a paratextual feature that co-determines the meaning of the text.     

How Families Use Questions at Dioramas: Ideas for Exhibit Design

This paper explores the role of questioning in scientific meaning‐making as families talk, look and gesture in front of realistic and artful dioramas at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The focus is on the ways questioning can either enable movement towards scientific understanding or hinder such progress. The socio‐cultural framework of this research emphasizes Vygotsky's interpretation of the zone of proximal development (zpd). Questions are viewed as tools for mediation in the zpd. This paper examines three families' dialogues, excerpted from a larger study of collaborative sense‐making among family groups in a natural history museum. It seeks to understand how collaborative dialogue meshes everyday understandings with canonical science, in this case through the use of questions.     

Perspectives on entertainment television's portrayal of a racial incident: An intensive analysis

Television entertainment plays an important role in the development of political orientations concerning authority, order, freedom and equality. This article shows that viewers have “limited autonomy” in constructing meaning from television entertainment. Q‐method was employed to determine viewer's subjective reactions to an episode of Law and Order that fictionalized a racial incident that took place in Brooklyn, New York in 1991. The analysis revealed that there were at least seven distinct readings of the program. While there was consensus about some aspects of the story, viewers obviously had some autonomy regarding interpretation. We argue for a synthesis of theories that emphasize “closed” and “open” meanings of television programs. Entertainment is politically relevant and the most useful way to examine its impact is through intensive methods.     

Visiting the Mexican American Family: Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism

This essay argues that the film Tortilla Soup constructs a mediated culinary touristic experience for mainstream spectators who are invited to vicariously visit a Mexican American family. Analysis of the film's neocolonialist discourse demonstrates how the commercialization and appropriation of food culture mirror hegemonic tendencies to market and consume ethnicity. Tortilla Soup attempts to deconstruct homogenizing notions of Latinidad. Yet it straddles and ultimately collapses these divergent discourses through its treatment of food, sound, gender, and space. Ultimately, Tortilla Soup reaffirms hegemonic ideologies about Latinos/as that privilege whiteness and contain ethnic “otherness.”     

Does ‘Articulation’ matter in sponsorship? The type of articulation and the degree of congruence as determinants of corporate sponsorship effects

The congruence between an event and the sponsor's brand can be created by ‘articulating’ the basis and meaning of their relationship, and this created fit can increase the effectiveness of sponsorship. We considered a sample of 418 high school students in Incheon (Korea) in order to investigate how the type of articulation and the degree of congruence between an event and its sponsor influence the effects of sponsorship, and how the consumer's need for cognition moderates the effects of sponsorship. The results indicate that noncommercial articulation was likely to strengthen the effects of sponsorship, whereas commercial articulation was not likely to influence either the participants' responses to sponsorship or their attitudes toward the sponsor's brand. In addition, the effects of commercial articulation depended on the degree of congruence between the event and the sponsor; the consumer's need for cognition moderated the effects of sponsorship according to the type of articulation.     

Testing the rhetoric of China's soft power campaign: a case analysis of its strategic ambiguity in the Six Party Talks over North Korea's nuclear program

China's soft power campaign has spawned many scholarly studies on it, but few have examined its rhetorical aspect. Through keyword analysis, this research examines strategic ambiguity in China's public affairs rhetoric surrounding the Six Party Talks over North Korea's nuclear program. The two keywords, ‘the Six Party Talks’ and ‘da ju’ (big picture, overall view), are semantically open and central to China's rhetoric in defining ‘What is it?’ and ‘Why is it?’ with regard to the talks. Analysis shows that strategic ambiguity contributed to some of China's goals. However, it was not adjusted when it stopped working. Its effectiveness was undercut by certain inconsistent messages, and da ju failed to differentiate between domestic and international political context and was also culturally maladaptive. This research contributes to public diplomacy and public affairs rhetoric research.     

Redesigning library orientation for first-year medical students during the pandemic

Background:Prior to 2020, library orientation for first-year medical students at Weill Cornell Medicine took the form of an on-site treasure hunt competition. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the orientation for the MD class of 2024 was shifted to an all-virtual format. This shift mandated a full redesign of the library orientation.Case Presentation:The Samuel J. Wood Library sought to preserve the excitement and fun of the treasure hunt in the new virtual format. The competition was redesigned as a Zoom meeting using breakout rooms, with library faculty and staff serving as team facilitators. Tasks were rewritten, shifting the focus from the library''s physical spaces to its virtual services and online resources. The redesigned orientation was evaluated using two data sources: a postsession survey of student participants and a debriefing of the library employees who participated. Student evaluations were positive, while the faculty and staff provided numerous suggestions for improving future virtual orientations.Conclusions:A successful virtual library orientation requires careful preparation, including testing the competition tasks, full rehearsal with library facilitators, and a thoughtful approach to technology and logistics. We have chosen to share the materials we developed for other academic health sciences libraries that may wish to take a similar approach to their own virtual orientations.     

《中华人民共和国公共图书馆法》第二十九条解读

图书馆界对《中华人民共和国公共图书馆法》第二十九条第二款形成了两种不同解读。本文从法律文本和图书馆实践出发,通过文义解释、历史解释、目的解释、体系解释、社会学解释方法以及运用比例性原则,对该条文进行法理性解读,并分析在我国公共图书馆法治化过程中该如何对《中华人民共和国公共图书馆法》进行法律解释。     

Virtually the Same: Comparing the Effectiveness of Online Versus In-Person Library Tours

ABSTRACT

The use of virtual or Web-based tours is on the rise in academic libraries, but with the loss of face-to-face contact and direct experience with the library's physical spaces, questions abound about this format's efficacy. Do online tour experiences measure up to those of a guided, face-to-face tour? Do online tours help mold students' perceptions of the library, while imparting important practical knowledge about the library's resources and services? Librarians at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, recently confronted these questions, as they added an option for an online library tour to a large library tour program for freshman that had previously been offered strictly through guided, librarian-led tours. This paper presents the results of a preliminary study comparing the efficacy of learning and affective outcomes between face-to-face library tours and online library tours at Kent State University.