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;

Zugl.: Leipzig, Hochsch. für Technik, Wirtschaft und Kultur, Diplomarbeit, 2005

Univ., Diplomarbeit, 2002--Frankfurt (Main)

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2006. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-06, page: 3014. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-43).