This project examines whether recent changes to the relationships between museums and Aboriginal people are visible in the museum exhibits and narratives that shape public memory. It focuses on references to the fur trade found in the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s First Peoples Hall and Canada Hall and throughout the Manitoba Museum, using visitor studies, learning theory and an internal evaluation of the Canada Hall to determine how and what visitors learn in these settings. It considers whether display content and visual cues encourage visitors to understand the fur trade as an industry whose survival depended on the participation of Aboriginal people and whose impacts can be viewed from multiple perspectives.

This thesis examines how the concept and act of collection describes a relationship with the material world that clashes with Marxist traditions. Tracing how collected objects behave semiotically, this work defends the idea that one's relation to collected objects necessitates their complete possession in order to delimit the cycling of one's singularity, between "I" and the "Other;" and, at the level of community, the collected objects (e.g., in a museum) additionally show how we attempt to make an "oeuvre" of the world. This thesis demonstrates that the death of the collector exposes an irreconcilable disjunction between the object's meaning—which disappears with the arrival of the collector's death—and the object's shell, which is left as a witness or reminder of the incommensurability of human singularity and finitude. The museum is therefore understood as an attempt to overcome the limited realities of this objective shell, generating an infinite circulation of sense, or of a life that never quite ends. / Graduate

Utställningstexten är en del av utställningen och skall därför läsas som en sådan. Den är beroende av en kontext och sitt sammanhang. I dagens samhälle flödar texter och bilder som en del av en kommunikation mellan individer och grupper. Moderna Museet är en institution som har fått ett statligt uppdrag att kommunicera samtidskonst med allmänheten och det är bland annat genom utställningstexterna som denna kommunikation sker. Då en väggtext på ett museum av funktionella skäl bör vara kortfattad för att nå ut till sin publik så anser jag att Moderna Museets väggtexter är en komprimerad form av den viktigaste informationen. Den informationen besökaren bör ha eller få i samband med besöket. Jag har undersökt vad den viktigaste informationen är, vad det är försanning som de vill att allmänheten skall ta del av men även hur de väljer att framställa texten och med vilka ord detta sker. Helt enkelt Hur definieras det som är värt att veta? Jag utgick ifrån de statliga uppdraget och skapade en ordning och ett innehåll i vilket jag placerade och sorterade in texterna. Den information som museet anser att vi som besökare bör veta. Samtliga texter är fyllda av påståenden som fyller funktionen av att förmedla något. Jag har även gjort ett gestaltande arbete som fungerar som en påminnelse om vem som äger makten att tolka. Jag har placerat olika verk , som jag har skapat själv, lutade mot väggen och skrivit en väggtext bredvid. För att utgå från min undersökning finner ni därför bara en struktur i vilken verken ska tolkas utifrån. Att skriva ut det viktigaste men aktivt undvika att delge någon information är både ett sätt att förhålla sig humoristiskt till sanningen och poetiskt till sättet den kan förmedlas.

This thesis is about the life of David McCord and the contribution he made to Canadian public memory as founder of the McCord Museum of National History. In his McGilI-sponsored museum, founded in 1921, McCord sought to promote a myth of Canadian origins with narration provided by the objects of his personal collection. Integral to this history was the story of the McCord family, their arrival on this continent and their rise to social prominence. In McCord's version of Canadian history, family and personal myth were conflated with that of nation. Viewed through the prism of his collecting and museum work, McCord's life does not easily fit the Carlylean frame adopted by most biographers. In Canadian biographical writing by historians, the 'truth' about a person's life is revealed by following the modernist recipe of painstakingly recreating a detailed chronology of the individual's life. The approach followed here is an important departure from traditional political biography. Entry into McCord's life does not occur at his biological birth date, but at the moment of his own self-fashioned 'birthing', with the opening of the museum realized near the end of his life. In this biographical strategy, McCord's museum acts as a theatre of memory, where fragments of his life story are reassembled to create a narrative of national origins and of personal redemption. In his selection of objects and their display, and in the creation of an archive and the museum itself, McCord left a very elaborate and lasting record of his response to a set of changes associated with industrialization, a process which, in his lifetime, radically transformed the Montreal of his parents' generation. This thesis traces the connection between the creation of a public museum, founded to promote a collective vision of the Canadian past, and the private world of one collector whose collecting practice was defined as much by his own desire to remember and be remembered as it was by the kinds of objects he collected. What makes David McCord's life and collection so compelling is the opportunity it provides from understanding national history from the intimate perspective of one individual.

This thesis explores the relationship between existing museum exhibition development strategies and the potential practices which arise from the virtualisation of the museum. It does so within the context of the new disciplines which are the phenomena of new media practices, the discourses surrounding exhibition development and broader changes to museum provenance, patrimony, collection and display. / Focusing on the establishment of an exhibition discourse within diversifying new media environments, the thesis proposes a theoretical framework of textual strategies and spatial sequences which emerge from the virtualisation of the museum. The research investigates the semiotic structures which enable museum display to be conceived of as a text and proposes methods of visual analysis which can be used to evaluate exhibition as a communication form. A series of spatial and temporal sequences of virtual display are derived from theoretical exploration and case-evaluation. These form the basis of the development of the notion of sites of virtual display. Situated within an interdisciplinary framework, the research aims to contribute to exhibition development praxis by identifying generic and specific factors which contextualise the development of virtual display. / The thesis tests the theoretical framework of textual strategies and spatial sequences through the development of an ontology of virtual display. The ontology is tested through education materials developed within a social constructivist pedagogical model. Using qualitative methods, the studies test the validity of the ontology as a model for situating reflective practices within museum exhibition design. The model is intended to inform the ways in which new media technologies are applied in the museum exhibition environment. / The research responds to the challenges posed by new media technologies in negotiating and appropriating techniques of communication and display in the museum exhibition environment. / Thesis (PhDArchitectureandDesign)--University of South Australia, 2004.

This dissertation is an investigation of visitor experiences in the Screen Gallery at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), in Melbourne. This thesis argues that visitors’ interaction with moving image art can yield expressions of agency which not only enrich the experience of visiting a new museum, but also find application beyond an institutionalised environment as a praxis for negotiating the conditions of everyday life. I term the articulation of this praxis a politics of movement. (For complete abstract open document).

In the way of museums, certain things have been collected and assembled for a display, a truth, in the form of a private room in which resides the dream world of the curator. Then, as the visual expression of this inner space deepens, they are carefully taken apart, always with respect for the original. Yet the work is not shaped by the hand of a conservator destined to abandon the imagination in favour of a trail of physical evidence. Nor does it reflect the conventional rationalist sensibilities of a museum worker who, by suppressing a poetic understanding of the world is confined by "cold language" (Frame 1992 p.45) and remains caught inextricably in the web of colonial thinking.Here the imagination is truth (Einzig 1996) and an understanding of the nature of this inner space the key to the locked door. The Anthropologist and the Archaeologist, indeed a whole host of disciplinary specialists may come knocking, but it is the artist that gains access to the curatorial spirit. Compelled as much by a love of the museum profession as a crisis of European consciousness (Spivak in Harasym 1990), objects are assembled for an inner journey to a place where shadow and sunlight chase each other across the landscape (McQueen 2000). This is the dialectic space of both curator and artist, of the rational and the irrational, of inside and outside, and of disciplinary devotion and betrayal.

Thesis (M.A.)--School of Education and Liberal Arts, John F. Kennedy University, 2006. / Title from PDF file, viewed Mar. 14, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-82).

Zugl.: Berlin, Humboldt-Universiẗat, Diss., 2006.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2001. / Adviser: Andrew McClellan. Submitted to the Dept. of Interdisciplinary Studies. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 492-531). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;