A rhetoric of revival: Reimagining museum spaces through digital media.

摘要

Though this dissertation's ideas and theories are grounded in multiple disciplines, its primary focus is on voices. Voices that are heard, voices that are marginalized, and voices that are erased from narratives altogether. Though this focus has been examined in many facets and within many disciplines, examining marginalized voices through visual rhetorical spaces such as museums and art is an area that has not been widely examined in the field of rhetoric and composition. While other disciplines have examined these practices, rhetoric and composition is an important addition to these studies because composing and rhetoric are taking place in these spaces and, while doing so, are leaving out many marginalized voices. My specific topics for inquiry are: the rhetoric of the physical museum; representation of voices through online art spaces and their rhetorical differences to the physical museum; the current interactive and communal spaces to help recover voices through live online spaces; and the possibilities of these spaces for their future community-building and voice recovery. In my dissertation, I argue that, working in tandem, live museums and digital museum spaces have the ability to recover community voices that have been marginalized by the museum in the past by creating inclusive spaces for community voices and new public memories of the museum space.