I’ve had a lot to get my head around lately.
My PhD studies began in earnest at the beginning of this month, and I’ve since become an avid collector of museum and design related literature. That’s the easy part – now to get down to reading, digesting and making sense of it all such that it can help me inform my research question and methodology.
As an area of academic interest, museums sit at the juncture of several fields and schools of thought: pedagogy, sociology, psychology, semiotics, architecture and design research are just some of the areas I’ve had to start to get my teeth into. There is so much out there that sometimes you can find yourself butterflying from one thing to another very quickly: social semiotics in the morning; statistical analysis of visitor data in the afternoon.
But I’m seeing patterns of thinking emerge and I think I’m starting to get a bit of a handle of how all these fields tie together, what ideas have influenced what and where there might be gaps in the existing literature.
Over the next few weeks I will write a few blog posts as bite-size summaries of the main areas of academic enquiry that I’m reading about. I plan to do this for a couple of reasons: firstly, I hope that preparing fairly brief summaries the main areas I’m reading will help me sort out my thoughts as I go. Secondly, it will give me a way of documenting the trajectory of my thinking (knowing full well that it may well make cringeworthy reading 2 – 3 years down the track!).
It also goes without saying that I hope that these posts will be of interest to those of you who are interested in exhibits, design and the visitor experience (and if you’re not, why are you here??), but have neither the time nor the inclination to trawl the literature yourself.
I have created the Museology category for these posts, so they will be easily found (or avoided) depending on your inclination. I hope to post the first one in the next few days.