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Slentz_Dissertation Final.pdf (4.11 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Yes, You May Touch the Art: New Media Interfaces and Rhetorical Experience in the Digitally Interactive Museum

Slentz, Jessica E
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6407-2511
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1491621655068925

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, English.
New media technologies, particularly touchscreen interfaces, are playing a highly visible role in new exhibition practices within museums. Many museum studies scholars see the participatory experiences mediated by such technologies as potentially redefining relationships between the institution and the public by allowing museum visitors access to roles and discourses traditionally reserved for a cultural elite. In these pages, I employ rhetorician Gregory Clark’s (2010) theory of rhetorical experience to investigate the claim by museum studies scholars that a “paradigm shift” is being enacted by digital technologies within museums. I show that digitally mediated experiences, particularly those facilitated by touch, can induce actions on the part of the visitor that shift their engagement in the museum from the private, solitary practices of viewing and interpretation, to the documented, public roles of educator, curator, researcher, and critic. I also show that the rhetorical nature the experiences that invite visitors to participate in such activities can effect changes in attitude and identity on the part of the visitor from visitor-as-spectator to visitor-as-co-producer. This qualitative study takes place in two public institutions with recent installations of groundbreaking exhibition technologies, the Cleveland Museum of Art, in Cleveland, Ohio, and the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. I use ethnographic methods, including participant observations and interviews, to identify what I term the “habits of interaction” afforded by the touchscreen interfaces in these hybrid spaces of physical and digital activity. Interrogating the integral relationship between one’s ability to take up new interpretive positions through participation in digitally mediated experiences and one’s previously existing digital literacies, I closely examine the rhetorical experiences visitors engage in through interaction with touchscreen interfaces. Museum visitors interacting with these interfaces see themselves as actually “able to touch the art” and thus as active participants in the work of the museum. Such experiences can shift visitors’ interpretive positions by persuading them to take up the roles of instructor, researcher, critic, and curator, which are traditionally reserved for the institution itself.
T. Kenny Fountain (Advisor)
221 p.
Rhetoric
Rhetoric; Digital Rhetoric; New Media Studies; Museum Studies; Digital Literacies; Touch Technology

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Slentz, J. E. (2017). Yes, You May Touch the Art: New Media Interfaces and Rhetorical Experience in the Digitally Interactive Museum [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1491621655068925

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Slentz, Jessica. Yes, You May Touch the Art: New Media Interfaces and Rhetorical Experience in the Digitally Interactive Museum. 2017. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1491621655068925.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Slentz, Jessica. "Yes, You May Touch the Art: New Media Interfaces and Rhetorical Experience in the Digitally Interactive Museum." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1491621655068925

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1491621655068925
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© 2017, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.