No description available.

The problem of this thesis is to determine just what part the museum is playing in the cultural development of Texas. This study presents a detailed investigation of the exhibitions offered by four of Texas' major art museums for the period from 1940-1950. Each of the museums will be discussed separately and then compared so that an over-all picture can be achieved.

Tagging has proven attractive to art museums as a means of enhancing the indexing of online collections. This paper examines the state of the art in tagging within museums and introduces the steve.museum research project, and its study of tagging behaviour and the relationship of the resulting folksonomy to professionally created museum documentation. A variety of research questions are proposed and methods for answering them discussed. Experiments implemented in the steve.museum research collaboration are discussed, preliminary results suggested, and further work described.

No description available.

This thesis considers whether a Buddhist statue in a museum context can be both aesthetic and devotional. By reexamining the relationship between a devotional object, its surrounding space, and its viewer, this thesis will suggest how a museum gallery, though not a consecrated ritual space, can still potentially be a place for spiritual engagement akin to a religious sanctuary. Through a comparison of Gallery 16 of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco and Mengjia Longshan Temple, Taipei, Taiwan as a case study in terms of their spaces and the movement of people within the space in relation to the objects, this thesis will consider how Buddhist statues may continue to exist as spiritual objects and works of aesthetic appreciation without losing their past as devotional icons, and I will do this by applying Victor Turner’s concepts of liminality and the liminoid.

Displays of dinosaurs have become a staple of modern natural history museums, but these did not emerge until the turn of the twentieth century. Through the work of Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh in this field (despite their intense rivalry), paleontology grew as a discipline and, after losing federal funding, found a new home in museums and universities. Recognizing the potential of large dinosaurs for display and education, major natural history museums such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York under Henry Osborn began competing for their own specimens. Much work has been done on the efforts of these emerging large museums. Smaller museums such as the University of Wyoming Museum, however, have been much less studied. Through its proximity to immense, rich fossil fields, the university became directly connected to the major events shaping paleontology at the time. Yet differences in the pedagogy and intentions behind its formation—a sense of state pride rather than the concerns of wealthy, elite sponsors—served to set it apart from larger, more well-known institutions. / A Thesis submitted to the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester 2017. / July 17, 2017. / Includes bibliographical references. / Ronald E. Doel, Professor Directing Thesis; Michael Ruse, Committee Member; Kristina Buhrman, Committee Member; Sandra Varry, Committee Member.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University Page 23 is missing.

Thesis. 1976. M.Arch.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Rotch. / Bibliography: leaf 74. / M.Arch.

In the last decade, everyday life in the GDR has undergone a mnemonic reappraisal following the Fortschreibung der Gedenkstättenkonzeption des Bundes in 2008. No longer a source of unreflective nostalgia for reactionaries, it is now being represented as a more nuanced entity that reflects the complexities of socialist society. The black and white narratives that shaped cultural memory of the GDR during the first fifteen years after the Wende have largely been replaced by more complicated tones of grey. Films and museums depicting the quotidian in East Germany have advanced this transformation of the everyday, as they instigate vital public discourses on how to remember the GDR. By focussing on objects and narratives as transmitters of memory, this thesis brings together museums and films in order to investigate the process of cultural memory formation. This comparative approach, which brings together seven museum and eight film case studies from the last decade, thus demonstrates wider trends in the German memory landscape pertaining to the GDR. Although both nostalgic and hegemonic accounts persist, this thesis finds that memory of East Germany is undergoing a process of democratisation, pluralisation and 'normalisation', which I call post-ostalgia. This is particularly illustrated by a rise in biographical and regionalised remembering in films and museums, in which counter-mnemonic readings of East Germany come to the fore. More pluralistic and balanced representations of the quotidian in the GDR are also emerging through a renegotiation of memory icons and narratives. By contesting the idea of a distinct East German identity and challenging Cold War-rooted stereotypes about former GDR citizens, visual culture is dismantling the notion of the GDR as the 'other' Germany. Instead, as this thesis demonstrates, East Germany is in the process of being normalised in cultural memory by approximation to Western societal norms.

Cette thèse analyse le profil culturel des visiteurs des musées d’art moderne et contemporain en Belgique dans le but de mieux comprendre ce que représente, pour eux, l’expérience muséale. Il s’agit de dépasser une certaine approche courante en sociologie qui limite l’étude des relations publics-musées à la mise à jour du rôle des déterminants socioéconomiques sur la fréquentation. Mon approche part d’un postulat de base selon lequel il faut inscrire la visite muséale dans un rapport plus large à la culture pour appréhender le sens et les usages des musées d’art moderne et contemporain. La récolte des données a eu lieu au cours de deux phases principales : une première quantitative suivie par une seconde qualitative. Le design est séquentiel (en deux étapes successives) et non équivalent puisque la première étape quantitative a plus de poids (terminologie basée sur Leech et Onwuegbuzie). Pour la première phase, a été réalisée une enquête par questionnaires auprès des visiteurs de six musées en Belgique âgés de 15 ans et plus. Au total, 1900 questionnaires ont été récoltés et encodés. A partir de ces données, une analyse en correspondances multiples a été effectuée pour évaluer de quelle manière les différentes dimensions des profils culturels (goûts pour la musique, l’art et la lecture, participation culturelle, loisirs ordinaires, créativité) s’agencent les unes aux autres. Cette méthode a été choisie pour ses qualités inductives et relationnelles. Cette analyse montre que les profils culturels peuvent être perçus comme le résultat de bricolages entre répertoires culturels. Ceux-ci doivent être compris comme des principes qui classifient les goûts et les pratiques et leur donnent sens. Parmi ces répertoires, la distinction culture haute versus culture basse à la Bourdieu conserve une place primordiale mais cohabite avec d’autres, tels que les distinctions omnivores versus univores (Peterson), voraces versus inactifs (Sullivan & Katz-Gerro), culture jeune versus culture classique, goût pour la transgression versus conservatisme. Cette thèse appuie en conséquence l’idée selon laquelle il n’y a eu ni de transformation unidirectionnel des snobs vers les omnivores (thèse de l’omnivorité), ni un effondrement des hiérarchies culturelles (massification et postmodernisme). L’utilisation de ces répertoires est principalement influencée par l’âge, l’éducation (sous diverses formes) et le statut socioprofessionnel (qui met l’accent sur les différences en termes de cultures professionnelles). Les profils culturels s’ancrent dès lors toujours dans des structures sociales, contrairement à ce que pensent certaines théories individualistes plus extrêmes (Bauman), et continuent d’être structurés par des mécanismes de distinction, puisque les répertoires sont socialement valorisés. Une classification hiérarchique ascendante a suivi l’analyse en correspondances multiples pour mettre à jour une typologie qui reflète les principales configurations des profils culturels. Six classes ont été identifiées : les cultivés classiques, les cultivés en retrait, les cultivés progressistes, les hédonistes, les éloignés culturels et les amoureux de l’art. Pour conduire la deuxième phase qualitative, trois personnes par classe ont été interviewées pour approfondir les donnés quantitatives sur leur rapport à la culture, à l’art et au musée. Au regard de cette analyse de discours, il apparaît que les six classes ainsi constituées partagent en leur sein des grilles de lecture similaires du rôle de l’art et de la culture au sein de la société moderne mais aussi du musée et agissent, ce faisant, en « communautés interprétatives » (Fish; Hooper-Greenhill). Comprendre la diversité des profils culturels des visiteurs (tout en prenant en compte l’origine sociale) permet, dès lors, de concevoir la multiplicité des rapports au musée./ What do we know about art museums’ visitors? This question can appear very trivial. Visitors of art museums seem to belong to educated elite. At least, this is the image that cultural participation surveys rightly spread. Nevertheless, this perspective focuses mainly on the characteristics of the population who do not visit museums, rather than on the characteristics of the museums' visitors. These surveys help indeed to define the sociodemographic particularities of visitors, with regards to the general population but do not investigate a possible diversity within the visitor population. They show that cultural democratization did not really happen but can we really conclude that the audience constitutes a homogeneous mass of snobs defined by a precise relation to the culture? This presentation aims to go beyond this traditional approach in sociology that focuses on sociodemographic criteria and to show how diverse can be the audience. It intends to illustrate that visitors have heterogeneous cultural profiles (described by their tastes, cultural and creative activities, and more ordinary leisure), even if they tend to be similar from a socioeconomic viewpoint, and to evaluate which impact these cultural profiles have on the way of visiting a museum. With the use of a multiple correspondence analysis and an ascending hierarchical classification, six different classes were distinguished among the visitors of six museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium (N: 1900) according to their cultural profiles. Each cultural profile is considered as a bricolage of different cultural repertoires: low versus high culture (Bourdieu), univores versus omnivores (Peterson), voraces versus non-voraces (Sullivan & Katz-Gerro), classical versus young culture and traditional versus modern values. Instead of observing an unidirectional change from snobs to omnivores, my results suggests indeed that several repertoires interact with one another to structure cultural profiles and to give meaning to them. Finally, with selected interviews among the different six classes, it will be demonstrated that people with an analogous cultural profile tend to share similar interpretations of museums and act as "interpretative communities" (Fish; Hooper-Greenhill). Therefore, the meaning of a museum visit for visitors requires taking into account their cultural profiles.