This second part of the literature review looks at scholarship from many different fields of application rather than through different approaches. Radical changes in
technologies and lifestyles during the second half of the 20th century led to a
blossoming of the areas of practice in which narrative was applied; the means of delivering narrative were reinvented with the development of computers, internet and non-print media; the means of reception transformed as audiences adapted their lifestyles to these new possibilities. The development of digital and web-based narrative practices in particular gave rise to new and complex non-linear narrative possibilities.
Dr Marshall McLuhan was instrumental in developing a theoretical framework within which to explore these transformations. His catch-cry ‘the medium is the message’ gave rise to the new discipline of media studies, which in turn stimulated new areas of discourse including many in narrative scholarship.
The idea in “the medium is the message” is that the medium itself
communicates messages that inform the content of the work and guide its interpretation. Studies of media therefore concentrate on the medium itself as a kind of language with its own conventions for generating meaning. McLuhan used linguistic theory, for example, to show that there is a language of print technology that makes the study of this medium different from the language of radio or live performance, and these differences are actualized through the rules and conventions of meaning that are built up around the medium (Gibson, 2008, pp 144-145).
A further feature of his theory was to identify ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media. Hot media were those that required little input from the audience to determine meaning because of
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their high degree of resolution; cool media transmitted ‘low definition’ data, requiring far more conscious participation by audiences to extract meaning.
Narrative theory had previously given little attention to mode of delivery. Linguistic- based approaches had distinguished utterances (spoken stories) from written language. But much of the literature naturalised the written word as the medium of delivery. McLuhan’s impact was to trigger an interrogation of what this meant to other media of delivery where it was not so easy to order the sequence of events, or for the reader to flick back a page to review, or where the full narrative might be delivered in a single session with lifelike evocation of associated emotions. He also allowed that audiences to a greater or lesser extent participated in meaning-making to a greater or lesser extent (depending on whether the medium was ‘hot’ or ‘cool’). Previous
approaches to narrative had adopted a perspective either that audiences were
receivers of narrative (as in a classical narrative approach) or that audiences were the active narrators (in psychological and constructivist models).
This chapter looks at scholarship that was more usefully contextualised within a media-specific context. For this reason, I nominate a set of criteria of narrative
exhibitions, and map scholarship from many areas of practice onto these criteria. The criteria are based on “affordances” - a term coined by the Multimedia, Education and Narrative Organisation (MENO) project10 - to describe possibilities that are opened up
as a process unfolds (or in this case, as a ‘medium’ expresses its ‘story’), “possibilities perceived from the point of view of the learner”11 (Laurillard et al., 2000).
10 For further information see
11 For example, the affordances for learning provided in a lecture delivered to a large group, is
contrasted with those provided by a tutorial:
In each case the features as perceived by an observer create the possibility for a certain kind of behaviour. We may like to think that a lecture affords learning, but the additional affordance of preparing to speak [by participants in the tutorial] creates the possibility that learners [in a tutorial] focus their attention and content processing in a way that is more productive for learning. Different learning media are likely to have different affordances for learning (Laurillard, 2000, p.3).
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Five features of narrative museum exhibitions are identified. The first is that a narrative exhibition is a fixed configuration of exhibition components through which a visitor is free to plot a variable path; the second is that objects are a core component that museums use to support their story-telling in exhibitions and stimulate narrative meaning-making among their audiences; the third that visitors participate with each other in socially-based meaning-making processes; the fourth that an interpretive framework supports linkage between the narrative exhibition and the different communities interfacing with it; and the fifth is that narrative exhibitions afford meaning-making by different interpretive communities who engage with exhibition components and the narrative, in different ways. The distinctive communities I select for this literature review are the exhibition development team, Māori, art, history and science audiences. I select these to reflect stakeholder interests in exhibition development specifically at Te Papa. These divisions are fairly arbitrary, depending on the data being sought by the methodology. The audience could equally have been divided in terms of gender, age or class had they been of relevance to the underlying thesis.
A particular challenge in this more specific section of the literature review is to reflect a range of practices from production-centred models of exhibition development, where the museum is seen as leading narrative formulation for transmission to a passive audience, to an audience-centred model that views audiences as active co-creators of narrative, and a third “transactional” model, which straddles both (Feinberg &
Leinhardt, 2002; Paris & Mercer, 2002; Stainton, 2002):
Transactions with objects might evoke tangential, unintended, or novel responses and might change the knowledge, beliefs or attitudes of the visitor. Learning about the object in a unidirectional manner from viewer to object is not as important as creating personally relevant transactions with objects that allow bi-directional influences (Paris & Mercer op. cit., p. 401)
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This transactional model resonates with Kristine Morrissey’s directive that we balance the presentation of museum content with the creation of opportunities for the visitor to respond to objects (2002, p.297).