Louise Ravelli

Making language accessible: Successful text writing for museum visitors

Abstract For todays museums and galleries, it is critical that the texts which visitors read are accessible to a diverse audience, and succeed in fulfilling the educational goals of these institutions. Contemporary museums have long since moved on from the state where objects were left to “speak for themselves”: where they were labelled in only a minimal way, and hence left uninterpreted and uncontextualised. Yet an awareness of the significance of language is, on its own, insufficient. Museums need linguistically-informed tools and guidelines, to assist them in their communication tasks. At the Australian Museum in Sydney, Australia, a museum of natural history, a text-production project has been underway since 1993. This project aims to identify the linguistic problems in exhibition texts, to train staff in better writing methods, and to produce linguistically-informed guidelines for text writing in museums. It is primarily informed by the theory of systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994). In this paper, we describe the background to this project, the nature of the linguistic intervention, and the results in terms of visitor comprehension.

Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts: two ends of a continuum

Doctoral degrees in the visual and performing arts are a fairly recent entrant in the research higher degree landscape in Australian universities. At the same time, a new kind of doctorate is evolving, a doctorate in which significant aspects of the claim for the doctoral characteristics of originality, mastery and contribution to the field are demonstrated through an original creative work. A substantial written contextualization is also generally required to clarify the basis of these claims. Managing the relationship between the written and creative components is a challenge for students and supervisors. The study reported on in this article examined the nature of the written component of doctoral degrees in the visual and performing arts submitted for examination in Australian universities, as well as the range of practices and trends in the kinds of texts that are presented in doctoral submissions in these areas of study. The study included a nation-wide survey of doctoral offerings in the visual and performing arts, the collection of a set of ‘high quality’ doctoral texts, and interviews with doctoral students and supervisors. This article reports on two doctoral projects that can be seen to represent opposite ends of a continuum in the set of doctoral works that were examined.

Extending the notion of ‘text’: the visual and performing arts doctoral thesis

Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts poses many challenges for the academy, not the least of which is accounting for the possible relations which can hold between the written and creative/performed components of a doctoral thesis in these fields. This article proposes that the interrelations between the two components in doctoral submissions of this kind can be theorized as being on a continuum of interrelations, with a number of key text types (or archetypes) being manifested. Through textual analysis of the written component only, the different possible relations can be distinguished through the ways in which the creative component is resemiotized in the written text, through both the verbal and visual semiosis of the written component. This enables us to identify a number of ways in which the ‘one’ project can be construed through its two different component parts, casting an important light on debates within the field in terms of the relations between creative practice and research.

Researching academic writing: What textography affords

Abstract This chapter discusses textography as a strategy for researching academic writing in higher education. Textography is an approach to the analysis of written texts which combines text analysis with ethnographic techniques, such as surveys, interviews and other data sources, in order to examine what texts are like, and why. It aims to provide a more contextualized basis for understanding students’ writing in the social, cultural and institutional settings in which it takes place than might be obtained by looking solely at students’ texts. Through discussion of the outcomes of a textography, which examined the written texts submitted by visual and performing arts doctoral students at a number of Australian universities, we reflect on what we learnt from the study that we could not have known by looking at the texts alone. If we had looked at the texts without the ethnographic data not only are there many things we would not have known, but many of the things we might have said would likely have been right off the mark. Equally, had we just had the ethnographic data without the text analysis, we would have missed the insights provided by the explicit text analysis. The textography enabled us to see the diversity of practices across fields of study and institutions as well as gain an understanding of why this might be the case, all of which is of benefit to student writers and their supervisors.

Modality in the digital age

Kress and Van Leeuwen’s book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006[1996]) provides a robust framework for describing modality in visual texts. However, in the digital age, familiar markers of modality are being creatively reconfigured. New technological affordances, including new modes of production, multiple platforms for distribution, and increased user control of modal variables, raise questions about the role of modality in contemporary communication practices and require the framework to be adapted and further developed. This article attempts to set the agenda for such adaptations and, more generally, for rethinking visual modality and its impact in the digital age.

Special Issue: Analysing Digitized Visual Culture

T h e D I G I T A l A G e As is well known, Communication and media studies have been challenged by the advent and consolidation of the digital age. The digital revolution with its continuing advances in technologies and innovations has greatly increased the resources and modes that are available for production, distribution and reception of communication in various forms. Whether it is the replacement of analog photography and photochemical films by arrays of photo sensors and computer software, their constant availability on phones and other mobile devices to document our daily life or the evolving new channels of communication on the internet, including the expansion of social media both for private and commercial use, we are surrounded by digitized media in which digitized photos and other (audio)visuals play a major role. In some communities, in fact, multimodal artefacts and performances composed of various representations have become the dominant way of 770584 VCJ Visual CommunicationWildfeuer et al.

Visual communication: mobilizing perspectives:

Since the launch of Visual Communication in 2002, much has changed in the lived experience of contemporary communication practices, as well as in the academic study of it. The founding editors of the journal – Carey Jewitt, Theo van Leeuwen, Ron Scollon and Teal Triggs – set themselves the ambitious task of creating a forum for introducing the visual as a (somewhat) new focus for research and critique. As they said at the time:

Towards a Social-Semiotic Topography of University Learning Spaces: Tools to Connect Use, Users and Meanings

This chapter addresses the complexity of university learning spaces by recasting them as communicative texts, that is, meaning-making environments that say something to and with students and teachers in their design and their social and cultural location . This enables a focus on the process of meaning-making between students and aspects of spatial design , in order to reveal communicative patterns which create social relations, facilitate activities, and which bring all the different elements together into a coherent whole. The approach developed here is a social-semiotic, multi-modal one, laying the foundations for a social semiotic topography of university learning space designs, which incorporates the use of physical, virtual and social learning affordances . It outlines the underlying parameters of such a topography and illustrates them in relation to one particular type of learning space, an ‘active learning space’. Ultimately, the aim is for such a topography to account for complex definitions of meaning across multiple configurations of learning situations, and to do so in a way which provides particular insights on learning spaces as communicative texts, insights which complement those which can be provided by other perspectives and which can be used to provide feedback into practice, in terms of both design and use of these spaces.

Bringing a museum of language to life: the use of multimodal resources for interactional engagement in the Museu da Língua Portuguesa, Brazil

The popular and highly successful Museu da Lingua Portuguesa1 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is renowned for its visitor engagement strategies. While this success is often attributed to high levels of technological interactivity enabled in the museum displays, we argue that the success of the museum also comes from a range of other multimodal resources. Using a social semiotic approach to spatial discourse analysis, we examine each of the three levels/floors of the museum, identifying the various meaning-making resources across the representational, organizational, and interactional metafunctions. These both differentiate the separate levels of the museum, and bring them together as a unified whole, creating a strong focus on cultural identity and on placing the visitor in the centre of meaning-making practices.

The Objects of Experience: Transforming Visitor-Object Encounters in Museums

This was a challenging book to review. It fundamentally argues that, in terms of recent museum scholarship with an emphasis on meaning and experience, the baby has somehow been thrown out with the ...