Browsing by Subject "museum"

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    Memory, Conscience andthe Museum in South Africa: The Old Langa Pass Office and Court
    (2008) Ralphs, Gerard
    The old pass office and court in Langa was a site of apartheid brutality. In its day-to-day workings, the court found thousands of South Africans guilty of ‘crimes’ that were only crimes in the radically unjust society that the apartheid government cultivated. This paper explores how residents from Langa have remembered the site of the old pass office and court through the lens of oral history. In doing so, it asks how the site, now the Langa Museum, may become a space of memory, identity, and political conscience and consciousness in a post-apartheid context. What insight and wisdom lie embedded in Langa residents’ oral histories about the old pass office? And how can oral historians, Langa residents, museum and heritage practitioners, and visitors to Langa access and utilise the transformative narrative power of these site-stories in the shifting contexts of the site as an emergent social history museum? At what point does the old Langa pass office cease to be a dark space of apartheid, and begin to become a space of post-apartheid humanity and creativity? Indeed, can the Langa Museum become a ‘living’ social history museum? What would a transformation of this nature entail for oral history, Cape Town's memory communities, community-based heritage practice, citizenship, and identity in the South African postcolony?
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    A multimodal social semiotic analysis of a museum rock art display
    (Common Ground Publishing, 2009) Rall, Medeé
    This paper will report on research on different design aspects of museum displays in a permanent and a mobile museum context. This research has been undertaken in order to understand how different aspects of museum displays contribute to meaning making. It looks at the interrelationship between different design elements and how these influence meaning making. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996; 2001) theory of multimodal discourse and on recent research on communication in museums (Ravelli: 2006; Meng in O'Halloran: 2006), this study considers why it is apposite to consider museums as multimodal, co-deploying different modes to make meaning. The paper investigates the design elements employed in museum displays, which include: linguistic design (labels and captions); visual design (objects on display, photographs and drawings); audio design (video recordings) and spatial design (lay-out of the display). The paper discusses a multimodal analysis of the rock art and rock engraving displays, drawing on inter alia the work of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996; 2001), which is done with the intention of formulating a metalanguage. It is envisaged that this metalanguage will enable museum practitioners and educators to talk about and better understand meaning making in museum displays and contribute to current debates on communication and meaning making in museums.