Wissenskommunikation multimodal: Wie Museumsbesucher sich über eine Museumsvitrine verständigen

Abstract

In the present paper I will study conversations in front of museum showcases as a specific form of knowledge communication. After presenting my understanding of the concepts
“knowledge communication” and “knowledge”, which are informed by conversation analysis, I will explore two characteristic aspects of the ‘showcase conversations’ by means of a number of detailed analyses of short extracts of these conversations. First, I will show how knowledge is interactively produced and made publicly visible, and second, how people use the complex multimodal environment of the showcase as a basis for their knowledge construction, and how they manage to ‘tie together’ different semiotic “modes” which are visible and readable in display cases. The analyses of this paper are based on a corpus collected in a paleontological museum. The conversations have been recorded in a kind of ‘field experiment’: Probands have been asked to watch a showcase together and to summarize its content. While doing so they were filmed.