The term ‘learning organisation’ is now a common feature of museum management discourse and, by implication, raises the issue of how a museum itself learns about approaches to ‘learning’. As ‘learning in museums’ becomes a major focus for many museums, clearly formulated and institutionally supported ideas about ‘learning’ should be an essential part of our role in interpreting natural and cult...

This article aims to study the educational phenomenon of museums from the sociological analysis of museum didactics. Based on Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse, and, in particular, on the author’s concepts of recontextualization and recontextualizing field, the study addresses the process of production of exhibition discourse of five science museums. The study assumed exhibition d...

The journal is edited by David Bearman, whose authorship may be presumed for all items not otherwise attributed. Submissions of press releases, publications, and software for review, articles, and letters to the editor are welcomed. Copy is preferred double-spaced. Longer articles will be requested in machine-readable form if accepted for publication. Deadlines for contributed articles and pres...

Documentation of art museum collections has been traditionally written by and for art historians. To make art museum collections broadly accessible, and to enable art museums to engage their communities, means of access need to reflect the perspectives of other groups and communities. Social Tagging (the collective assignment of keywords to resources) and its resulting Folksonomy (the assemblag...

In recent years, the notion "virtual museum" has been evoked so often in cybercultural discourse that it has lost all of its novelty value, if indeed, it had any left. The list of Web sites purportedly falling under this category is long, and growing. A recent search with Google for "virtual museum" brought up more than 141,000 hits. Such a "category" is understandably extremely vague, accommod...

This paper presents a machine learning approach to discourse planning in natural language generation. More specifically, we address the problem of learning the most natural ordering of facts in discourse plans for a specific domain. We discuss our methodology and how it was instantiated using two different machine learning algorithms. A quantitative evaluation performed in the domain of museum ...

The journal is edited by David Bearman, whose authorship may be presumed for all items not otherwise attributed. Submissions of press releases, publications, and software for review, articles, and letters to the editor are welcomed. Copy is preferred double-spaced. Longer articles will be requested in machine-readable form if accepted for publication. Deadlines for contributed articles and pres...