Abstract
The diorama remains one of the most popular exhibit types in museums, and it has proven its educational potential time and time again. In spite of this, the specific mechanisms behind that educational potential remain unclear. In other words, museum practitioners and museum researchers know that dioramas work, we just don’t know how they work. In the following, we use visual perception theory as well as cognitive linguistics to explain the perceptual and meaning-making mechanisms that give dioramas their unique potential. Specifically, we construct a framework to understand how museum visitors can ‘translate’ the visual scene from what is essentially a collection of specimens in a box into a meaningful experience.
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May, M., Achiam, M. (2019). Educational Mechanisms of Dioramas. In: Scheersoi, A., Tunnicliffe, S. (eds) Natural History Dioramas – Traditional Exhibits for Current Educational Themes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00175-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00175-9_8
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