From Old South to New Media: Vernacular History, Narrative, and Conversation in the Memory Book Cyber-Museum

• In Event: Building Connections by Bridging Divisions: Language & Social Interaction Research into Internet-Mediated Communication

Abstract

Information technologies have become crucial aspects of what many museum studies scholars perceive as the decades-long transition of museums from repositories of objects to repositories of knowledge. For disenfranchised groups lacking access to history museums both as consumers and as source communities, interactive cybermuseums are becoming important alternative knowledge systems for the preservation of their heritage. Additionally, the gradual erasure of the digital divide enables online museums to offer sets of social spaces in which users can build community centers within which to engage in technologically mediated conversations as means of constructing cultural memory.

This paper utilizes personal interviews and discourse analysis to examine one such case, the Memory Book community, sponsored by the Smithsonian. The community is an online precursor to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is scheduled to open in 2015. As a cyber-museum that enables its members to contribute private family artifacts and narratives from the slavery and jim crow eras and engage in technologically mediated conversations with others about the objects, the site combines historical consciousness with social networking. Social networking technology allows for a more egalitarian relationship between producers and consumers, providing both with opportunities to influence and be heard. This is in stark contrast to the one-to-many communication style found in traditional websites and media forms. As a computer-mediated counter-public, the site engages history through the facilitation of online dialogue among the community members, thereby constituting the modern museum as both an information center and a subaltern public sphere.

Author

• Patricia G. Davis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill