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- Convenors:
-
Hanne Pico Larsen
(Tuck School of Business)
Sigurjon Hafsteinsson (University of Iceland)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
Unprompted visitor verbatim such as guestbook writing, online reviews, blog posts, and postcards are challenging for the ethnographer to use as sources. In this panel, we examine the methodological concerns regarding these often whimsical utterings and discuss how to include them in our research.
Long Abstract:
In the age of market-driven economies, guestbook entries have received increased attention from scholars and professionals as valuable documents for research on demographics, social and cultural trends, political and educational contexts, democratic participation, manifestations of experiences, opinions, values, interpretation, performances, bluffness, humor and affect, just to name a few. Such socially situated products and poly-voiced data create various methodological challenges for folklorists and scholars from other disciplines: How to address them as sources and how to work with this kind of material?
In our work with guestbook material from two museums (The Museum of Broken Relationships, Zagreb and the Phallological Museum, Reykjavik), we have encountered various challenges in using such fascinating guestbook material, which, in both cases has been made an integral part of the museum experience. The often freestyle, creative, graffiti-like, multilingual, emotional doodles and drawings are not only idiosyncratic, but the authors are mostly semi-anonymous and untraceable, making it impossible for us to ask follow-up questions probe deeper and twist the material to fit our research questions. The authors of visitor/guest verbatim set the tone and agenda for their own reflections, which are often written in the spur of the moment. However, an increase in the amount of such sources, both physical and online, makes it impossible for the researcher to ignore. We invite all papers discussing methodological concerns regarding visitor/guest verbatim, describing new methods of dealing with e.g. online reviews and handwritten guestbook scribbles.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
Guestbook entries are complicated inscriptions, which embody participatory practices pursued publicly by visitors onsite and online. The paper offers a hybrid approach, combining visitor-ethnography, media-ethnography, and writing-ethnography for arriving at a holistic yet nuanced understanding.
Paper Abstract:
This paper reflects on two decades of ethnographic studies of guestbook entries in museums and in online/digital platforms (Google Maps Review and TripAdvisor). For this purpose, I highlight the interrelations between material-cum-technological affordances for writing in museum guestbooks and the situated nature of inscribed texts. I suggest that this conceptualization may help promote the type of ethnography which is sensitive to both the environment and the writing practices: offline and online. Because visitors are those who produce guestbook entries, ethnography needs to be sensitive and informed conceptually regarding visiting practices (over and above writing guestbook entries), and approach the interaction with the guestbook as an integral part of the “ritual of the museums visit” (Noy, 2020, p. 10). Furthermore, if guestbooks are viewed as media, media ethnography needs to address practices and preferences of media use and media ideology (held both by the museums and by their users). This is beneficial for documenting cases where, for instance, visitors play different tole in producing entries, such as when one family/group member authors a text while another is actually inscribing. Lastly, exploring offline and online ethnographies of visitors’/users’ entries, I hope to advance a comparative dimension in observing similarities and differences between these studies of newer and older media (Alacovska, 2016).
Alacovska, A. (2016). Rethinking media genres in the history of user-generated content in 19th-century travel guidebooks. Media, Culture & Society, 39(5), 666-679.
Noy, C. (2020). Gestures of closure: A small stories approach to museumgoers' texts. Text & Talk, 40(6), 733-753.
Paper Short Abstract:
The museum guestbook at the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb (Croatia) is an integral part of the exhibition(s), and it constitutes performative spaces important for the sense of community formed in the museum's wake. The museum calls the guestbooks “books of confessions,” but their pages contain many other genres as well. How do we work with sources like these, and what can we learn from or about the anonymous writers.
Paper Abstract:
The project on the shared emotions of heartbreak in the museum space is a work in progress. Our focus is on the narrative/object tension and what we call narrative recrafting. "Narrative recrafting" refers to how people can actively reframe a significant object (or event) and hence take charge of the story in the face of a painful loss in their life (Larsen, Tillotson and Österlund-Pötzsch 2024). While preparing a manuscript on "Narrative recrafting" in The Museum of Broken Relationships we anticipated the usual reviewer response: What about the viewer experiences, the customer verbatim? Other scholars before us had already ruled out interviews after the visit to the museum, online reviews were also ruled out as a way to source consumer responses and we found ourselves left with the books of confessions. While rich and intriguing in content and format, the guestbook utterings also pose several challenges for the ethnographer, who is used to creating and controlling her own data collection. Setting out to categorize the entries in the guestbooks these challenges became clear. Whereas guestbooks are too valuable sources to ignore, their content can seem like gibberish at times: A drawing of a dog, the “I was here” in several languages, and anonymous declarations of love or dislike. In this paper, I will highlight and discuss some of these challenges and hopefully offer a few valuable solutions on how to work with guestbook materials in the museum space and beyond.
Paper Short Abstract:
Online guest reviews and blogs offer a unique window to extraordinary guest experiences. Yet, their format is often generic and lacks contextual depth for a meaningful analysis. This paper demonstrates a novel approach to interpret unprompted flow of consciousness to reveal consumers embodied appreciation and affective engagement.
Paper Abstract:
In our longitudinal study of design-mediated morality at the Michelin-awarded restaurant noma (Copenhagen, Denmark), we draw on excessive amounts of unprompted guest reviews from Tripadvisor and online blogs. Despite the scope and detailed, photo-documented accounts of the menu, the collected material falls short of describing consumers’ feelings and complex reflections during the appreciation of the meal. We build on and extend the Composite Multi-dimensional Model of Audience Reception (Michelle 2009; Granelli & Zenor 2016) to unpack and analyze consumers’ sense-making processes of aesthetic experiences and subsequent moral positioning towards quirky dishes based on moss, blubber and reindeer penis. The model allows us to identify a diversity of engagement forms among audiences, ranging from transparent, referential, mediated and discursive modes, which predicts the range of evaluative judgements of the reviewer.
Paper Short Abstract:
The paper focuses on the tradition of family guestbooks in Estonia. It studies them as a genre of vernacular or everyday literacy and delves into the ways people use pages of these books to emphasise their presence and connection to a particular place.
Paper Abstract:
A guestbook is an institutional way to say: “I was here!” (compared to the scribbles on the wall as a non-institutional one). However, as the guestbooks are used in different settings, this statement can convey different kinds of connection to the place where one happens to be; some settings (for example, art galleries) allow one to stay quite anonymous while others (for example, home of a relative) emphasise specific personal affinities.
The focus of my studies is on the guestbooks used in private homes – books where friends and relatives leave a variety of texts concerning their visit or their connections with the host at that particular moment or in the past. These books are a kind of co-authored ouevre, created by the social circle of one person or household in the course of time. And as this circle is fairly stable, it means the same person may pop up on different pages and stress: “I was here again!”
Often, family guestbooks are used as an auxiliary source to study family or local history. However, they also deserve to be studied in themselves – as a particular genre of vernacular or everyday literacy, as spaces which allow people to be creative, to experiment with a variety of modes and positions from which to write. In my paper I bring some Estonian examples from different eras to show the multitude of ways people use to emphasise their presence and connection to a particular place.
Paper Short Abstract:
Discussion about methodological challenges in unwriting the space of emotions when it comes to the creation of textual and visual representations of male reproductive organs, penises, by museum visitors in the guestbooks of the Icelandic Phallological Museum.
Paper Abstract:
Guestbooks have long been used as a form of registration for the names and nationalities of people who use payment services of various kinds. In recent years, such sources have been discussed in various academic ways and have been shown to be useful for describing people's views and attitudes, the spirit of the times and emotions. Guestbooks have been used by museums around the world and they have used them to gain insight into the reactions and experiences of visitors during their visit or to explore what opinions visitors have about what the museum has to offer. In this talk, academic writing about guestbooks will be discussed and put in the context of the guestbooks of the Icelandic Phallological Museum. Special attention will be paid to methodological challenges in unwriting the space of emotions when it comes to the creation of textual and visual representations of male reproductive organs, penises, by museum visitors in the guestbooks. Outside the walls of the museum, such writing and visual practices are generally stigmatized and met with outrage, humiliation and shame. The paper is based on discourse analysis of the visitor's register of the Icelandic Phallological Museum in the period 2008-2024.
Paper Short Abstract:
Much of the literature on postcards focused on the recto side – the image side. Yet, the verso side is perhaps more inviting for ethnographic scrutiny. By turning the postcard back and forth, we shall follow the secret world of postal practices, offering imagined scenarios and adding fiction to facts.
Paper Abstract:
My paper reflects on my ongoing study of postcards following the donation of the David Pearlman Holy Land postcard collection to the Folklore Research Center at the Hebrew University a few years ago. This massive 200 thousand-postcard collection offers an opportunity to study what I call ‘kaleidoscopic heritage’ (Schrire 2022): the existence of many similar images and short texts. The magnitude of this collection calls for a big data study that exposes the many facts that these cards hold, and indeed, we are in the process of digitizing the collection. However, postcards are entangled objects closely woven with everyday practices (Rogan 2005). These become evident when one uses imagination to scrutinize the lives of those involved in sending and receiving these cards: a Christmas postmark from Bethlehem, a blotch, spelling mistakes, return to senders, and changes in the pen used. Since we do not know the people who sent the cards in most cases, this paper will trace plausible scenarios, invite collective daydreaming, and invent stories of broken hearts, failed communications, and other everyday tales of postcarders – anonymous heroes of a recent past. These imaginations can unwrite grand histories that - in the case of the Holy Land - are often told about national and religious identities, wars, ecstatic experiences, and death.