Browsing by Subject "relevance"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Being Neighborly: How One Museum Looks Beyond its Walls to Build Community
    (2020-06) Butler, Brenda F
    It is common for museums to be geographically located in urban neighborhoods with neighbors who do not visit. Museums make efforts to engage with their communities through programming to establish relationships with neighbors; this study highlights one museum, The American Swedish Institute (ASI), located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This case study seeks to discover whether ASI is building cross-cultural relationships in their neighborhood; and finding what impacts are made on the neighborhood. This study may be useful to arts or cultural organizations seeking to build on their relevance to their neighbor communities and wanting to better engage with neighbors.
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    Gender/Genre: Gender difference in disciplinary communication
    (2015-05) Larson, Brian
    Within the professions, writers are expected to express themselves in certain ways, often within genres that are bound by conventions, including linguistic register. The student entering a profession learns those genres as if they are mandatory and static, and conforming or failing to conform to conventions is believed to have ties to career consequences. However, new members of a profession come to it with other habitual language practices affected—according to previous research—by the writer’s gender. Rhetorical genre theory and disciplinary, professional, and technical communication theory do not offer a full account for the ways in which these old habits and new conventions must interact, and previous research in gender and language does not fully account for how gendered persons write when confronted with high-stakes convention- bound writing tasks. I used tools from statistics and natural language processing (NLP) to assess stylistic features that previous research has associated with gender differences in written language: I applied those tools to texts created by law students near the end of their first year of study in the genre of a court memorandum, and I found there was no pattern of difference between male and female writers in these texts. I propose a “cognitive pragmatic rhetorical” (CPR) theory, grounded in work of Straßheim (2010), who attempted to bridge the relevance philosophy of Alfred Schutz (Schutz, 1964, 1966, 1973) and the Relevance Theory of Sperber and Wilson (1995); I have extended Straßheim’s work with insights from rhetoric and cognitive science. CPR theory explains that these apprentice members of a professional community will expend great effort to conform to its conventions and genres because of the students’ goals and the practical effects that depend on conformity. Consequently, we expect them to abandon gendered linguistic habits, at least while they are engaged in early training. This dissertation demonstrates a methodologically rigorous gender-difference study; offers evidence for an “anti-essentialist” view of gender differences in communication; and gives insight into the process by which apprentice members of a profession may adjust their communicative processes in response to their training. It demonstrates the utility of CPR theory and NLP tools in scholarly inquiries in rhetoric and disciplinary, professional, and technical communication.
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    Museums that make noise. Looking into the future of the Schubert Club Museum
    (2019-12) D'Ambrosio, Viola
    Changing demographics are reshaping the role of museums within communities across the United States and how they define relevance. Although museums are currently seeking ways to create meaningful experiences for museum-goers, the concept of relevance has rarely been defined in connection with museology. This research theorizes that to become relevant, museums may look at new contemporary articulations to match new participatory practices. Specifically, audience engagement models in music museums are investigated because those institutions have not garnished enough attention to generate a corpus of research. This study highlights the Schubert Club Museum, which is a small musical instrument museum in St. Paul, Minnesota. The goal is to showcase the potential of this museum to reinterpret its role within the community and reinvent how its exhibits are conceived. This study provides recommendations that can be adopted in other musical instrument museums.