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Paper short abstract

The talk examines how online reviews of memorial museums may function as mediated witnessing stories. It approaches visitor reviews as small socio-material stories that re-narrate museums’ canonic narrative, and illuminate the online-offline relations in terms of audiences’ narratives practices.

Paper long abstract

The talk examines online reviews as an online trans-formation of offline comments written in comment books/visitor books. It particularly looks at how online reviews on Google Maps Review address memorial or “dark” history museums – museums that convey a tragic historical narrative involving collective/mass violence. Under the premise that memorial museums mediate a canonic narrative, and that some of their visitors’ reviews remediate and renarrative it, the talk argues the following points: a. online reviews may be seen as small/partial stories that individual visitor author and share, and which variously echo the larger institutional narratives museums mediate; b. the relations between small review stories and larger canonic narratives can be conceptualized critically (power-relations and narrative entitlements) and dialogically (à la Bakhtin) through the notion of witnessing. That is, some of the reviews offer a mediated form of witnessing of the historical tragedy; and c. from an audience (audience studies) perspective, two divergent viewpoints are considered: that of the review-writers, who shares their post-visit stories as witnesses, and that of the pre-visit review-readers, who read online stories prior to travel. These divergent viewpoints are intertwined.

The talk conceptualizes some of the review stories as digitally mediated witnessing, examining their structure as hybrid socio-material texts that are shaped by the platform’s narrative affordances. Examples are from prominent taken from iconic memorial museums in Kigali (Rwanda), Hiroshima (Japan), Phnom Penh (Cambodia), and Yerevan (Armenia).