Language constraints in producing prefiguration posters for a scientific exhibition

Abstract

The museographic transposition of scientific knowledge leads notably to the preparation of exhibition posters. This is a delicate operation, on account of the constraints imposed by space, language, concepts and the text. These difficulties are even greater in the case of bovine reproduction biotechnologies, such as cloning, where knowledge is not yet stable. This paper deals with the choices made during the phase of museographic transposition. First of all, based on an epistemological approach, a historical analysis of knowledge-building underpins the choice of information to be presented. Language is then selected according to the linguistic analysis of a series of articles which popularize science. Finally, the posters are assessed by samples of potential visitors.

Museographic Transposition: The Development of a Museum Exhibit on Animal Adaptations to Darkness

“…Figure 1: The model of museographic transposition as conceptualised by Simonneaux & Jacobi (1997), Gouvêa de Sousa et al (2002), and in the present study. Table 1: Characteristics of an immersion exhibit and their respective subcategories.…”

“…The adaptive transformation of knowledge that takes place in a museum exhibition engineering context, museographic transposition, was first studied by Simonneaux and Jacobi (1997) who conceived of the process as the transposition of an object of knowledge contained in scientific literature and other sources to an object of knowledge contained in the exhibition (Figure 1 A). This conception was expanded by Gouvêa de Sousa et al (2002) to encompass three moments of transformation of knowledge: preparation, execution, and the visit to the exhibition.…”

“…Neither Gouvêa de Sousa et al (2002) nor Simonneaux and Jacobi (1997) conceive explicitly of an intermediate phase between that of the scientific source knowledge and that of the exhibition, although Gouvêa de Sousa et al (2002) imply the presence of such an intermediate stage by considering preparation and execution as two discrete moments. Indeed, in practice, exhibition engineering usually entails the formulation of a document or collection of documents, the curatorial brief (Nicks, 2002, p. 356), which spans the boundary between the context within which the scientific knowledge evolves and exists and the context within which a physical installation, namely the exhibition, is developed and implemented.…”

“…The model of museographic transposition offers a structure for the analysis of the development and implementation of content in an exhibition, but does not in itself provide a theoretical context for this analysis. Simonneaux & Jacobi (1997) used the model to carry out a linguistic analysis of the transposition of exhibition texts (Figure 1 A), while Gouvêa de Sousa et al (2002) used it to frame a semiotic exhibition analysis (Figure 1 B). In both cases, the scientific source knowledge comprised the baseline against which the transposed version of the content was compared; hence the starting point of the transposition framework was in both instances designated as the reference knowledge (Figure 1 A and B).…”

Análise sociológica da didática museal: os sujeitos pedagógicos e a dinâmica de constituição do discurso expositivo

“…Various aspects of educational research use the education developed in and by museums as the object of interest, focusing on the teaching and learning aspects carried out in those places (SIMONNEUX; JACOBI, 1997;ALLEN, 2002;ASH, 2002;BIZERRA, 2009;MORTENSEN, 2010).…”