The main question for my work field in museum education is: How can a white rabbit-dynamic be initiated for interpretation in art education for museums? In order for that to make sense and to structure my quest I will try to find answers to the following sub-questions: Why does the White Rabbit have the power to lure Alice form the real world to the Wonderland? What makes the interplay between Alice and the White Rabbit special? ( white rabbit-dynamic). How can the white rabbit-dynamic be conceived as a metaphor for interpretation in art education in museums? Which criteria can be derived from the white rabbit-dynamic that make engaging with art adventurous, playful and meaningful? The first part of the study deals with the original text of Lewis Carroll and the character of the White Rabbit. I explore the White Rabbit's power to bring Alice from the real world into the Wonderland. In the following I will elaborate how dealing with Lewis Carroll can disclose thoughts on interpretation by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Terry Barrett. Ultimately I will define a set of principles of how to trigger the white rabbit- dynamic in art museums. The aim is to identify a number of qualities and characteristics that initiate interpretation that is adventurous, playful and meaningful.
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In this paper we discuss the general approach and choices we made in developing a prototype of a social media monitor. The main goal of the museum monitor is to offer museum professionals and researchers better insight in the effects of their own social media usage and compare this with other actors in the cultural heritage sector. It gives researchers the opportunity to consider communication within the sector as whole. In the research project “Museum Compass” we have developed a prototype of a social media monitor, which contains data of current and historic online activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Flickr of all registered Dutch museums. We discuss – mostly in a practical sense – our approach for developing the monitor and give a few examples as a result of its usage.
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Deze publicatie is gebaseerd op de Reinwardt Memoria op 26 mei 2011 over critical heritage studies and museums.
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Science museums can be a rich learning context, where visitors engage with scientific practices with few formal requirements. However, science museums can be experienced as not welcoming to migrant families due to social, economic, and cultural barriers. In this study, we asked what language-related challenges migrant families experienced in Dutch science museums and what recommendations they had for linguistic inclusion. We interviewed twelve families of Turkish, Moroccan, or Syrian backgrounds after their visit to a Dutch science museum. We discovered that (1) first-generation families found the predominance of Dutch in the museum challenging, (2) the science language used in the museum brought on additional challenges, and (3) the families saw potential emotional benefits to the presence of their mother tongue in the museum, albeit expressing a need for Dutch to remain at the center of the linguistic landscape in the museum. These findings show that language plays a role in migrant families’ experiences in science museums. The findings invite science museums to engage in a dialogue with migrant communities about their needs when it comes to more inclusive museum experiences.
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Kunnen universele musea nog wel, vandaag de dag? Met hun autoritaire neutraliteit, modernistische inrichting, harde objectiviteit? Dat was de vraag die Indiase kunsthistorica Kavita Singh stelde tijdens de Reinwardt Memorial Lecture op 4 juni 2014. De gelegenheid was de viering van de 241ste geboortedag van de naamgever Caspar Reinwardt van de Academie. Van de lezing is een boekje gepubliceerd: Museums, Heritage, Culture. Into the Conflict Zone.
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The paper investigates the use of mobile tools by museums in order to provide mobile access to their permanent collections and special exhibitions. In fact, it deals with the wider topic of how museums tackle the complex issue of communicating with their present and potential audience using modern (i.e., mobile in this case) technologies. The paper presents and discusses the results of a survey that was proposed to Dutch and Flemish museums mainly dealing with modern and contemporary art or with science and technology. We tried to derive some trends and best practices in order to identify a good way to provide an engaging (mobile) experience to museum visitors. These results, although not always stirring in terms of answer percentages and of what most museums seem to be doing with new media, do show a clear interest towards mobile technologies and openness to innovation in the Dutch cultural sector.
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On 8 and 9 October 2020, the Reinwardt Academy hosted the digital conference Ethnology Lab on the Workings of Covid-19 on Museums. The programme was geared to address the challenges faced by museums and cultural heritage institutions in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. These included some of the transformative shifts observed recently in the collection dynamics of museal and archival institutions, changes in the conception of participatory and inclusiveness strategies, and the emergence of new possibilities for cultural programming and exhibiting against the backdrop of uncertainty. Future approaches to heritage-making can benefit by the ethnological and social anthropological reflections gathered by different stakeholders as they undergo the present pandemic. Based on actual observations in their respective organisations, participants weighed in the impact of museological and ethnological considerations. This resulted in a broad variety of reflections on cultural management, everyday life as a museum professional, the meaning of (re)presentation and the intricacies of being situated in a particular living and working environment. This publication offers a selection of these reflections, organised in four different themes: collecting during crises, practical challenges, academic reflections and policy reflections.
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Recently, museums have increasingly become parts of ecosystems of people and organizations in their functioning. As a consequence, museum experience designers are stimulated to think in a holistic way, about experiences of people that engage with networks including the museum, as well as about the role of individual museums within such ecosystems (Vermeeren et al in Museum experience design – crowds, ecosystems and novel technologies, 2018a). This raises the questions of: What are ways in which a museum experience relates to experiencing its embedding context? And, what does this imply for the process of designing the museum experiences? In two design case studies, four ideas for museum experiences have been developed based on different ways in which museums relate to their embedded network. The ideas illustrate how the focus of the design may be different depending on the role the museum plays in the overall experience, and how the design process is complicated by having to deal with a larger group of stakeholders when designing. Finally, all ideas came forth from taking a broader view of the potential museum target group than seeing them solely as visitors to the museum. This was seen as crucial for inspiring solutions to museum experiences beyond more traditional museum visiting experiences.
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In this article, we investigate how small museums running on volunteers deal with the challenge of innovation given that the future is becoming more digital. From the literature, little is known about the strategies and practices for designing innovative visitor experiences in small museums and about the skills needed for doing so. In particular, we were interested in understanding how professionals working in small museums design experiences that mainly appeal to and engage a younger public and how digital innovation can play a role in both attracting and keeping such audiences engaged with the museum. Our most important conclusion is that the question of “how to innovate” is misplaced and that small museums rather need to capitalize on the strong tie with the community they serve. Only in this way can they lower the threshold to access and connect to a broader public that is younger and more diverse.
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