The role of the museum is undergoing transformation along with wider societal changes. The last t... more The role of the museum is undergoing transformation along with wider societal changes. The last two decades have witnessed a rapid development of the museum industry in China in terms of both the number and scale of museums. Being cultural, historical, and educational institutions, increasing importance has been attached to museums; yet the study of the social roles of museums in China remains insufficient. We have little understanding of the role of museums as public educational and cultural institutions. This research aims to address this lacuna by asking what educational roles are played by the museum, and how the museum learning experience is constructed and contextualised. This study consists of participant observations and semi-structured interviews collected during a case study carried out at the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, with the aim of exploring the purposes, practices, and impacts of educational programmes organised at the museum. The educational programmes a...
This paper uses conversation analysis to explore the communicative functions of one emoji in a mo... more This paper uses conversation analysis to explore the communicative functions of one emoji in a mobile reading community in China. In contrast to semiotic approaches to emoji that focus on their cultural signification, or that treat them as reflections of users' inner intensions, we analyse emoji as communication phenomena by exploring their relation to other textual actions in the production of text-talk. The emoji analysed here functioned as a laughter token, and performed specific interactional work related to laughter. We conclude that conversation analysis offers an important corrective to abstracted semiotic analysis and a useful resource for exploring the demonstrable meaning of emoji for interlocutors. However, we also emphasise the importance of capturing the process of composing messages, the challenges of dealing with the variety of forms that emoji take and their relation to gestural and other actions in face to face communication.
The role of the museum is undergoing transformation along with wider societal changes. The last t... more The role of the museum is undergoing transformation along with wider societal changes. The last two decades have witnessed a rapid development of the museum industry in China in terms of both the number and scale of museums. Being cultural, historical, and educational institutions, increasing importance has been attached to museums; yet the study of the social roles of museums in China remains insufficient. We have little understanding of the role of museums as public educational and cultural institutions. This research aims to address this lacuna by asking what educational roles are played by the museum, and how the museum learning experience is constructed and contextualised. This study consists of participant observations and semi-structured interviews collected during a case study carried out at the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, with the aim of exploring the purposes, practices, and impacts of educational programmes organised at the museum. The educational programmes a...
This paper uses conversation analysis to explore the communicative functions of one emoji in a mo... more This paper uses conversation analysis to explore the communicative functions of one emoji in a mobile reading community in China. In contrast to semiotic approaches to emoji that focus on their cultural signification, or that treat them as reflections of users' inner intensions, we analyse emoji as communication phenomena by exploring their relation to other textual actions in the production of text-talk. The emoji analysed here functioned as a laughter token, and performed specific interactional work related to laughter. We conclude that conversation analysis offers an important corrective to abstracted semiotic analysis and a useful resource for exploring the demonstrable meaning of emoji for interlocutors. However, we also emphasise the importance of capturing the process of composing messages, the challenges of dealing with the variety of forms that emoji take and their relation to gestural and other actions in face to face communication.
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Papers by Qianyun Yu