10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15482
For semiotically complex topics of investigation, such as museums, the need arises for an integrated analytical approach that enables the researcher to study the relationship between its different components and their possible social significance. The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), on the National Mall in Washington (DC), next to the Washington Monument, which marks the culmination of decades of efforts and struggles to commemorate African American history, is a case in point. A major representational objective of the museum is to rescue generations of black people from anonymity by showing how ingenious and resilient the people who endured slavery were, and how optimism, hope and spirituality – the typical US values – define African American culture as well. In order to investigate the interplay and evaluate the synergy of the multi-layered communicative dimensions of the NMAAHC, which is the major objective of this observational study, an integrated methodological approach was required. The resources of multimodal discourse analysis were thus integrated with the fine-grained tools of the Appraisal Framework for the verbal components, and with insights from museum studies. The socio-cognitive implications of the data of these observational analyses were discussed in the light of the relatively recent and ongoing efforts to reconsider USA history through the lens of the African American experience.
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The Need for Integrated Methodology – The National Museum of African American History and Culture
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Raffaella Antinucci
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Università degli Studi di Napoli "Parthenope"
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The Need for Integrated Methodology – The National Museum of African American History and Culture
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Updating Discourse/s on Method/s                                            mediAzioni 34 (2022)
                                                                                  ISSN   1974-4382


     THE NEED FOR INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY – THE
    NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY
                     AND CULTURE
                         LUCIA ABBAMONTE, RAFFAELLA ANTINUCCI
        UNIVERSITÀ DELLA CAMPANIA “VANVITELLI”, UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI
                                    “PARTHENOPE”

lucia.abbamonte@unicampania.it, raffaella.antinucci@uniparthenope.it



Citation: Abbamonte, Lucia and Raffaella Antinucci (2022) “The need for integrated
methodology – The National Museum of African American History and Culture”, in Lucia
Abbamonte and Flavia Cavaliere (eds.) Updating Discourse/s on Method/s, mediAzioni 34:
A13-A35, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15482, ISSN 1974-4382.1



Abstract: For semiotically complex topics of investigation, such as museums, the need
arises for an integrated analytical approach that enables the researcher to study the
relationship between its different components and their possible social significance. The
National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), on the National
Mall in Washington (DC), next to the Washington Monument, which marks the
culmination of decades of efforts and struggles to commemorate African American
history, is a case in point. A major representational objective of the museum is to rescue
generations of black people from anonymity by showing how ingenious and resilient the
people who endured slavery were, and how optimism, hope and spirituality – the typical
US values – define African American culture as well. In order to investigate the interplay
and evaluate the synergy of the multi-layered communicative dimensions of the
NMAAHC, which is the major objective of this observational study, an integrated
methodological approach was required. The resources of multimodal discourse analysis
were thus integrated with the fine-grained tools of the Appraisal Framework for the
verbal components, and with insights from museum studies. The socio-cognitive
implications of the data of these observational analyses were discussed in the light of
the relatively recent and ongoing efforts to reconsider USA history through the lens of
the African American experience.

Keywords: integrated methodology; museum studies; multimodal racial literacies,
appraisal framework.




1
    The authors discussed and conceived this study together. In particular, Lucia Abbamonte is
responsible for Sections 1, 3, and Raffaella Antinucci for Sections 2, 4.
Copyright © 2022
The text in this work is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.                                            A13
A14                                                                      ABBAMONTE, ANTINUCCI


                                               What can be studied is always a relationship or an
                                                infinite regress of relationships. Never a “thing”
                                                                     (Gregory Bateson 1978: 249)

                           For me, it’s great when people feel themselves looking at themselves
                                                    (Steven Rodney McQueen, in Haynes 2020)



1. Introduction and aims

When the topic of the investigation is as semiotically complex as a museum, the
need arises for an integrated approach that enables the researcher to study the
relationship between its different components and their possible social
significance. Museums are no longer considered as places where objects or
artworks are collected and exhibited, but, increasingly, as loci of interaction
where knowledge is socially co-constructed – public engagement emerged as a
key notion in this paradigm shift (Anderson 2004). In Sabatini’s words,
“museums should be critically approached as knowledge sites where, besides
artifacts and artwork, verbal and visual language are on display, constructing
specific socio-cultural mind-frames and construing community involvement”
(Sabatini 2016:105).
     The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)
is a case in point. The winding path towards representation, acknowledgement
and visibility for African American people in the US reached both a literal and
an iconic landmark with the long-awaited construction of the NMAAHC on the
National Mall in Washington, DC, an outstanding site of memory and the first
“green building” on the Mall.
     The newest of the Smithsonian museums, the NMAAHC, which opened on
September 24, 2016, with a grand dedication ceremony opened by President
Obama, had been established by law in 2003, the culmination of decades of
efforts and struggles (since 1915) to commemorate African American history.
Among the salient moments of this long itinerary, on 4 March 1929, despite
significant racially charged opposition, President Calvin Coolidge signed a law
creating a commission for the museum. Later, the civil rights movement of the
1950s and 1960s, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968,
galvanized interest again. A decisive step came in 2005 when Lonnie G. Bunch
III was appointed Founding Director of the museum. The prestigious historian
and educator had neither resources nor funds to rely on, only his strong
commitment to build “a place that would make America better [… by] shaping
the perspective of a nation [whose] history is the Gordian knot of race relations”
(Smithsonian n.d.). Apparently, this was sufficient to kickstart the process and
to attract and gather the necessary funding. Congressional funding provided half
of the (under)estimated $500 million needed, and $315 million was raised by
private funding. Significant donors ranged from Robert F. Smith (CEO of Vista
Equity Partners) and Oprah Winfrey (the museum’s theatre was named after her)
to David Rubinstein, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the sports star

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Michael Jordan, Walmart, Boeing, the Alfred Street Baptist Church of Alexandria,
and Microsoft2. Given its educational and proactive corporate identity, the
NMAAHC has continued to attract numerous contributions, both from motivated
supporters (e.g. former NBA player Kevin Johnson) and its expanding
membership programme, as well as from institutions. Among others, 21st
Century Fox and the PwC Charitable Foundation in 2017 funded the Digital
Education Initiative, which will make the museum’s research-based curricula
available to educators worldwide3, an initiative that appears particularly timely
in our (post-)Covid era.
     The convergence of participation and efforts of Americans from all walks of
life to support the NMAAHC was focused on promoting change by remembering
and visualizing the (challenging) history and stories through artefacts,
instruction and arts. Seemingly, the success of the NMAAHC, which has
surpassed six million visits, has accelerated the movement in favour of
representing other minorities, with the approval in 2020 of the projects of the
National Museum of the American Latino and the National Museum of Women’s
History, both to be created on the National Mall. These are projects that are still
generating controversies, based on the (debatable) objection that they “would
further divide the country, and that the history of Latinos and women should be
part of existing Smithsonian museums” (Bahr 2020).
     A major representational objective of the NMAAHC is to rescue generations
of black people from anonymity by showing how ingenious and resilient the
people who endured slavery were and how optimism, hope and spirituality – the
typical US values – define African American culture as well. In the museum,
African Americans are represented as not only the victims of slavery but, most
importantly, as resourceful human beings, both through the exhibition of
artefacts (ca. 40,000) and various kinds of multimodal narratives as well as a
variety of interactive exhibitions displayed in a symbolically charged
architectural structure (nearly 400,000 square feet).
     Instead of sadness, the Tanzanian-born British architect David Adjaye, the
museum’s lead designer (of the Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup, selected in
2009), saw celebration. Adjaye wanted to represent the African-American story
as “an extraordinary journey of overcoming, and shaping, what America is” –
through the NMAAHC’s “spatial narrative” (Byrd 2016). In particular, the
museum’s façade, the “corona”, takes a three-tiered upward-thrusting inverted
pyramid shape, inspired by the Yoruban Caryatid4, which Rep. John Lewis, at


2
         See,        among           others,       https://nmaahc.si.edu/about/founding-donors;
https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/national-museum-african-american-history-and-culture-
receives-20-million-gift-robert-f-smit.
3
  Given its strong socio-educational orientation, the museum generally adopts an open access
policy. This is declared, for example, on its Open Access page: “Welcome to Smithsonian Open
Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images – right
now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 3 million
2D and 3D digital items from our collections – with many more to come. This includes images
and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives,
and the National Zoo”.
4
  Typically, a caryatid is a stone sculpture of a draped female figure, used as a pillar to support
the entablature of a Greek or Greek-style building. In Yoruba art, the caryatid may be a female
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A16                                                                     ABBAMONTE, ANTINUCCI


the Grand Opening, defined as “the story of our lives wrapped in a beautiful
golden crown of grace.”
     The all-encompassing vision was to mirror the rise of African Americans in
the US, which both the architectonical structure of the museum and the artefact
displays have synergically embodied (see section 3.1). The inaugural and
temporary exhibitions have engaged the visitors in this educational experience
and have contributed to lengthening the time visitors spend in the museum5.
     The museum’s attitude is in line with the relatively recent developments in
school curricula aimed at giving visibility to African and African American
history6, which it highlights. Indeed, the museum’s Education Department
provides cooperative workshops with teachers to develop students’ racial
literacies. Programmes relying on digital resources (such as “Let’s Talk!” or
“Morning at the Museum” for children with disabilities) facilitate the process, as
the museum aims to develop a technologically-enhanced learning environment.
     In the NMAAHC’s galleries, artefacts and iconic objects pertaining to sports,
music, visual arts, hair and style are variously displayed and enhanced through
advanced interactive 3D models of objects from the collection.
     A distinguishing feature of the NMAAHC is its multimodal interactivity with
both the museumgoers and the citizens. At a verbal level, apart from the texts
accompanying the artefacts, the books as artefacts (see 3.2.1.), and the
denomination of the galleries, which help create narrative constructions, the
museum’s multimedia (technology-enhanced resources) enable the visitors to
record their considerations. In dedicated reflection booths, visitors can express
the impact of their learning experience during their visit and tell their personal
memories of slavery or racial discrimination, and some of them do so by telling
their stories in a highly affectual language, which will be a major focus of this
investigation. In particular, through the Visitor Voices campaign, visitors are
empowered to verbalize their identity issues and see themselves as part of the
NMAAHC’s history in progress, which is amplified through (social) media and
YouTube.
     Investigating the interplay of the rich, multi-layered communicative
dimensions of the NMAAHC is the aim of this observational study, as well as
accounting for aspects of the museum’s societal/pedagogical aims, in the light of
the relatively recent and ongoing efforts (e.g. Black History Month in schools) to
reconsider US history through the lens of the African American experience. Such
interconnected topics are also an example of how necessary an integrated
analytical approach can be.



figure, kneeling or sitting on a mortar, holding a large bowl with a lid above her head with both
hands, or a traditional wooden column with a crown at its top.
5
   About the time spent in the museum, see the museum’s website and also:
https://www.npr.org/2016/11/03/500560162/new-smithsonian-african-american-history-
museum-overwhelmed-with-visitors.
6
  The museum also invites living heroes to tell their instructive and moving stories to the
audiences, e.g. the Tuskegee Airmen, who distinguished themselves during World War II in the
US Army Air Corps, but who faced racism as the nation’s first black aviators. African American
“sheroes” are also remembered, such as through the #HiddenHerstory social media campaign,
one of the many awareness-raising campaigns promoted by the museum.
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THE NEED FOR INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY                                                            A17


2. Integrated methodology

To investigate the synergy and meaning of the interactive multi-faceted
communicative layers of the NMAAHC, an integrated methodological approach
is required. Notions from both semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis
(MDA) need to be taken into account, as well as from verbal discourse analysis
studies, such as a resource from systemic functional linguistics (SFL), namely,
the appraisal framework. “Museum studies” and “museum discourse” are
increasingly common and concise denominations for this syncretic branch of
multimodal discourse studies. More specifically, we:
     - investigated how the distinctive architecture of the NMAAHC helps to
frame the institution and magnify its stated purposes, in the light of edusemiotics
and museum studies;
     - observed and commented on how the navigation path for visitors unfolds
in a multi-layered immersive semiotic environment, where the audio-visuals
surrounding the artefacts create a rich learning landscape in synergy with the
verbal texts and books (in light of edusemiotics, MDA and museum studies);
     - transcribed and analysed, utilising the Appraisal Framework, the texts of
seven “Visitor Voices” speeches out of the 12 included on the NMAAHC’s
dedicated webpage in 2017 to celebrate the museum’s first anniversary: the
speeches recounted the visitors’ personal experiences or stories and their
reflections on the exhibitions.

2.1. Edusemiotics and museum texts

From a semiotic perspective, “human survival is taken to depend upon a
continuous process of meaning-making” (Gough and Stables 2012: 369), which
requires adequate recognition in the teaching-learning process. In 2010, Marcel
Danesi coined the neologism “edusemiotics”. Through edusemiotics, which was
also inspired by the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce7, learning could be
liberated from the specific domain of education (Olteanu and Campbell 2017,
2018), and from the primacy of the book, in favour of “a more ecologically and
biologically minded approach to education that resists separating humans from
animals, culture from nature, recognizing that because learning is continuous,
occurring in every life form […], any Umwelt has educational potential”
(Olteanu 2016: 586).
    Concisely, we can say that the living/learning process can be seen as a
semiotic engagement, where edusemiotics raises awareness of the embodied
foundation of the continuity of human learning. Such notions seem appropriate
to convey the educational potential and realizations of the NMAAHC, which
explicitly provides such a comprehensive Umwelt (organizational/learning
landscape).


7
  As Peirce would say, people are also signs, signs among signs, and in “learning, in interpreting
signs, they grow and become […] more developed signs. It is the process of learning and evolving
that brings together ens reale (reality) and ens rationis (our knowledge of reality)” (Semetsky and
Campbell 2018: 124-125).
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A18                                                                    ABBAMONTE, ANTINUCCI


    From a contiguous perspective, museum scholars, by blending (socio-)linguistic
and architectonic terminology and notions, interpret the space of the museum as a
whole, operating it as a communicative text. They show how not only the exhibits
“make meaning” in a museum, but also the linguistic strategies of captions and
panels, the ways of communicating with the public, the architecture, the spatial
arrangement (etc.) contribute to reinforce ideas and mind-frames, which orient and
shape the visitor's perception. In their words:

      The organizational, interactional and representational frameworks can
      illuminate the meaning-making resources of museum-texts [… which are]
      connected with exhibits, exhibitions and institutions […]. Language is an
      important part of these meaning-making processes […]. Framing practices
      contribute important organizational meanings to the exhibition as a text
      […]. The pathways [of the exhibitions] are meaning-making sociocultural
      construct and bring information value to the organization of the space. […
      An] exhibition [can have] the prefix of a long entrance and the suffix of an
      additional gallery […]. The use of distinctive confronting architecture is a
      way of strongly framing the institution and contributing to its perceived
      salience. [… For example] the Musée Pompidou makes an extensive use of
      glass and open vistas to connect the inside with the outside (Ravelli 2006:
      124,126, passim; our italics).

    These kinds of interplay are defined by some museum scholars (McDonald
2007; Ravelli 2006; Witcomb 2003; Screven 1995) as adaptive interactivity, or
spatial and dialogic interactivity, that

      enables visitors to negotiate meanings, and not simply receive them
      ‘passively’. For our purposes, interactional meaning … is concerned with the
      ways in which interlocutors engage with each other in the communication
      process. Museums, through their communicative practices, take up a
      ‘speaking role’, and enable roles to be taken up by others, both visitors and
      relevant communities…. This includes the style and stance of
      communication and the affectual responses of visitors. (Ravelli and Heberle
      2016:8)8

    Accordingly, the observation and analysis of such spatial/virtual texts need
to move among the institutions as situated in their socio-historical contexts,
architectural coding, exhibitions, artefacts and museumgoers. Furthermore, in
many loci, the (virtual) users can both “look at” and “move through” the museum
texts, contributing to actualizing the symbolic/cultural values and shaping the
representational meanings of the exhibits, their (virtual) affordances and the
potential intertextual references.


8
  Ravelli and Heberle (2016) propose a useful review of the studies of spatial texts (museums)
from a number of perspectives, ranging from cultural studies, philosophy, phenomenology and
sociology to architecture. As multimodal, communicative resources, spatial texts have been
analysed by a number of scholars, whose “approaches are characterized by taking a social
semiotic approach to communication, exemplified in the work of Michael Halliday on language
[…] in his famous model of systemic-functional linguistics, adapted and extended to visual texts
by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, in their seminal Reading Images: the Grammar of Visual
Design (2006)” (Ravelli and Heberle 2016: 6; see §3 for a full bibliography).
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THE NEED FOR INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY                                                       A19


    Apparently, the self-perception of the visitors within and through the
museum structures and frameworks is a vital component of the meaning-making
process at stake.

2.2. Multimodal discourse analysis and intersemiosis

To what extent can non-verbal iconicity constitute a productive semantics? Since
the seminal intuitions of Kress and van Leeuwen (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen
2001, 2006; van Leeuwen 2013, 2008; Kress 2010), who outlined and applied
clear and detailed frameworks for “reading images”, the theoretical and applied
components of MDA have flourished (among others, see Hofinger and Ventola
2004; Jewitt, Bezemer and O’Halloran 2016; Bateman, Wildfeuer and Hippala
2017; Bateman 2014; Bateman and Wildfeuer 2014; Norris 2019)9. There is a
frequent emphasis on the socio-educational aspects (Bezemer, Jewitt,
Diamantopoulou, Kress and Mavers 2012), racial issues (Rogers 2020, 2016), or
gender (Page 2019).
    Interestingly, Liu and O’Halloran (2009) and O’Halloran (2011, 2008) have
indicated how the cohesion between the verbal and non-verbal elements of texts
– their intersemiotic texture (ITx) – is the distinguishing feature of multimodal
texts with the effect of integrating different modes rather than simply linking
them. In the same vein, Bateman (2014) has extensively accounted for the nature
and scope of such texture from many different perspectives, including
diachronically, taking Roland Barthes’s seminal ideas (1957; 1964) into due
consideration. Concisely, for the purpose of this study, the verbal text can either
paraphrase/elaborate/explain/expand or contrast/reduce the image, potentially
disambiguating and specifying its meaning. Bateman also considered the possible
developments of the Rhetoric Structure Theory (Bateman 2014: 213–220), which
focuses on communicative effectiveness, at a multimodal level.
    Such interpretive resources contribute to outlining aspects of the “navigation
paths” (Ravelli and Mcmurtrie 2016) that are made available to the
museumgoers by looking at/seeing/reading, listening to, moving through, and,
in turn, narrating.

2.3. Appraisal framework

For the (narrative) verbal elements under investigation in this study, a selection
of the tools of the Appraisal Framework (AF) was utilized. Informed by SFL, the
AF proposes a multi-layered approach for “exploring, describing and explaining
the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual
personas and to manage interpersonal positionings and relationships” (White
2020). Martin made a remarkable contribution to its elaboration, and in his
words:

         Systemic Functional Linguistics […] is the theory. APPRAISAL is a description
         of resources for evaluation in English. […] From a relational perspective […],


9
    Norris (2019) in particular is an exhaustive guide through this rich domain.
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15482
A20                                                                     ABBAMONTE, ANTINUCCI


      words don’t have meaning; rather they do meaning – they mean in relation to
      the other words that might have been chosen. Similarly, groups and phrases
      mean in relation to other groups and phrases, […, etc., which] means
      describing how evaluative meanings are related to one another (2017: 22-23).

    Among the rich and fine-grained resources for evaluation in English illustrated
in the AF, the category of ATTITUDINAL positioning (subtypes: AFFECT, JUDGEMENT,
APPRECIATION) was utilized, given the pronounced affectual quality of the visitors’
verbal recordings (within the Visitor Voices initiative). Indeed, the AF is concerned
more specifically with the language of evaluation, attitude, emotion, and with how
speakers/writers respond emotionally to the people, events, issues, and artifacts
being evaluated. This makes the AF the ideal framework to investigate the stories
told by the NMAAHC visitors, who both recounted family stories of slavery and/or
personal stories of discrimination/violence, and expressed their emotional
reactions to artifacts and documented stories/events. In some detail, the
Attitudinal positioning emerges as a feature/property not only of individual words
(though individual words may be “attitudinal”), but also of entire utterances/texts.


3. Observational data

3.1. The enclosing organizational-interactional framework – the NMAAHC
architecture

The distinctive NMAAHC architecture strongly contributes to framing the
institution. Its location next to the Washington Monument, not far from the White
House, is intrinsically salient in the cityscape. As the visitors ascend to the upper
levels of the building, by circulating around the corona, they can capture views of
the Washington Monument and the largely neoclassical architectural monuments
nearby – the Mall, the Federal Triangle buildings and the Monument grounds – in
a complex dynamics of symbols. Moreover, the 3,600 bronze-coloured lattice
panels covering the building façade are a contemporary riff on the ornate ironwork
found in Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans, which was largely built by
slaves. These panels create a kind of osmotic continuity with the external
environment, allowing daylight in through dappled openings and generating an
ambient glow at night (Figure 1).




                            Figure 1. Dappled openings, spatial osmosis10

10
  From https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/building. Unless otherwise specified, the NMAAHC’s
website is the source for the images utilized in this paper according to the museum’s open access
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THE NEED FOR INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY                                                          A21


    Furthermore, the museum’s three-tiered façade, the corona, reaches upwards
in an expression of strength, faith, hope and resiliency (Figure 2). As the architect
David Adjaye explained, he was inspired by West African sculptures of female
figures surmounted by pyramid-shaped crowns, which evoked in him both the
head wraps worn by many African American women in the US and their hands
raised in praise or prayer: “I was fascinated with how these [shapes] were
connected […]. It was so uncanny to make connections between the Yoruba
caryatid and modern expressions in black America. They became clues to the
architecture of the building” (quoted in Byrd 2016). The interactional value of
such architectural clues, which also shape the skyline of the area, reach out not
only to the museumgoers but also to the onlookers.




                       Figure 2. Three-tiered corona – a framed skyline11

    In particular, to be able to look at the monument to the first president of the
United States from the confrontational architecture of the NMAAHC significantly
contributes to changing perspectives on the meaning and salience of the African
American role in US history (Figure 3). That is, if you look at the world famous
obelisk at eye level, through a bright glass opening, which is slightly tapering,
oblique and framed within lattice panels, it does not look so imposing after all –
maybe somehow more belonging to the beholder?




                     Figure 3. Framed view of the Washington Monument


policy (for more, see note 3) and, additionally, to copyright disclaimer section 107 of Copyright
Act of 1976, which permitted fair use for purposes like criticism, commentary, news reporting,
teaching, scholarship and research.
11
   At https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/building as are the following images.
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A22                                                                        ABBAMONTE, ANTINUCCI


    The main pathway for visitors consists in an upward movement, which
spatially conveys the idea of the rise of African Americans in the US. The visit
starts three levels underground (ca. 60% of the NMAAHC is underground), where
the chronological narrative begins with the advent of slavery in the dimly lit
History Galleries (Figure 4).




                          Figure 4. A map for all – a learning pathway12

     In the Slavery and Freedom gallery (C3 – three levels underground, Figure
5), the exhibits include two slave cabins, a 16.5-foot cotton tower, and artefacts
from a wrecked slave ship and from the civil war. The low ceilings and lack of
natural light contribute to represent the oppression of the slaves’ condition, thus
intensifying the emotional impact of these galleries, whose “suffixes”, upward
leading ramps, are spaces for reflection.




                            Figure 5. Slavery and Freedom, 1400-1877

    In the same vein, the C2 and C1 galleries feature segregation (Defending
Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876-1968) and change (‘A
Changing America: 1968 and Beyond’), respectively.



12
     From https://nmaahc.si.edu/visit/maps.
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THE NEED FOR INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY                                                        A23


     In light of the still-unsolved issues connected to race, such immersive trips
through history resonate13 and foreground the need for both a national
conversation and personal considerations. Indeed, while gradually progressing
upwards, the visitors arrive at the circular sun-flooded Contemplative Court,
where such a need for reconsideration appears to be spatially objectified. The
Court contains an oculus opening with a cylindrical cascade, falling into a
reflection pond that is lined on two sides with stone benches (Figure 6)14. In this
dedicated interactional space, they can reframe the meanings of what they have
been shown, possibly bringing ens reale and ens rationis together (i.e., the
recollection of painful family histories or experiences and the information and
critical analysis of the African-American experience provided by exhibitions),
before continuing their visit on the upper levels to admire the gradual, ingenious
progress of African Americans and their achievements.




           Figure 6. The concourse floor map and detail of the Contemplative Court

    After going past the Court, the visitors can reach the bright aboveground
halls with high ceilings and picture windows to explore the development of the
black community in the US. The achievements of both black leaders (in politics
and industry) and everyday citizens who have shaped American culture along
the way are celebrated there. The black experience is presented as a vital
component of every US citizen’s identity in areas such as sports, the army, music,
the theatre, movies, visual arts, hair, style, etc.
    Overall, the NMAAHC operates as a kind of synergic spatial text
encompassing both its distinctive building, which shapes the inside/outside
space relationship, and its contents, as well as the visitors. Its unique design plays
a major role in these dynamics, creating a kind of semiotic continuity between
the environment, the architectural dimensions and the contents.



13
   For example, Harriet “General” Tubman’s lace shawl, Emmett Till’s coffin, and a plane flown
by Tuskegee airmen are exhibited as highly symbolic landmarks in the long and challenging
historical itinerary.
14
   The mirroring effect of water is a recurring feature; the south entry is composed of a porch
with an upward tilted roof reflecting the moving water below. The porch functions as an
extension of the building into the landscape.
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A24                                                                       ABBAMONTE, ANTINUCCI


3.2. Immersive environment, flowing audio-visuals, integrated verbal texts

Symbolically, the Navigation Path for visitors unfolds along an upward-moving
dimension. Indeed, learning, liberated from the specific domain of education, is
the keyword and guiding principle in walking through this rich, multi-layered,
semiotic Umwelt. From the underground Slavery and Freedom gallery to the
aboveground Community and Culture galleries, the history of the African
American population is revealed through boards that invite reading and make the
meaning of the objects explicit, together with images (pictures, photos and maps,
also shown through sliding panels), videos, voices (spoken commentaries) and
music15. The richness of the resources displayed, including the 3D objects, and the
sense of the magnitude of the African American history the museum conveys
cannot – predictably – be rendered in a written essay. The need to ‘narrate’ and
investigate both verbal and non-verbal resources (e.g. boards, artefacts, music,
songs, dance, paintings, films) in the same textual space, using mostly words,
entails some inevitable losses (including the perception of the movement and
abundance of the frames, the rhythm, the concentration of information), as Page
(2010) made clear. Additionally, due to space limitations, it will not be possible
to present even a selection of examples from the exhibitions, which will be the
topic of another study (Abbamonte and Antinucci 2022).
    Here, attention will be given to such aspects of the NMAAHC’s multimodal
communication modes, where words and stories are often salient, and to the
affectual comments the exhibitions elicit.

3.2.1 Multimodal racial literacies

The teaching orientation of the NMAAHC (representing ‘a people’s journey, a
nation’s story’) is pervasive (Figure 7) in the many-sided efforts to tell a more
complete version of US history through many lenses. Along the navigation path,
gender and motherhood issues, the development of black enterprise, the stories
of all-black settlements, and black education, sports, voting rights, arts, style,
movie and theatre are all accounted for in relation to each other as the museum
text unfolds.




      Figure 7. Interactive research itineraries – teaching/learning/sharing racial literacies


15
  Overall, the average visiting time for the NMAAHC amounts to 4-5 hours (in-depth activities
excluded), and to illustrate its itineraries falls outside the scope of the present study. However,
a huge amount of exhibits and materials are freely available online; in the words of Lonnie G.
Bunch III (2021), “Browsing our #SmithsonianOpenAccess collections can brighten a gray day.
These high res images are available for you to use however you like, without asking permission”.
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THE NEED FOR INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY                                                              A25


    In many loci, black history is explained with explicit attention to narratives
(Figure 8), which invite other narratives, and the books displayed (e.g. Migration
Stories) appear ready to become workbooks for other stories.




                    Figure 8. Easy-to-browse books – stories to be continued

     Indeed, in celebration of Black History Month16, the museum invites the
public “to engage with digital resources to preserve, digitize and share African
American family history. Begin Your Family History Journey”. To that end, there
is a dedicated section in the L2 gallery. Additionally, the museum has promoted
the Oral History Initiative, which aims at collecting and interpreting the stories
of the elderly and significant members of communities, thus preserving
memories of past events from oblivion.

3.3. Visitor Voices

The organizational and representational frameworks of the NMAAHC could be
defined as “mediums of spatial storytelling” (Lu 2017: 442)17, but this does not
exhaust their interactional value since they are also spatial story listening
frameworks. Indeed, the NMAAHC’s Oral History initiative was very successful
in 2017, when around 40,000 visitors recorded short video speeches recounting
their personal reflections on the exhibitions in the available booths. Apparently,
many were inspired to stand up for positive values and felt the need to share
such an urge. Such ‘Visitor Voices’ recordings are available through the
museum’s YouTube channel18 so that a wider public can listen to these stories,
narratives, or (affectual) comments/reactions from the visitors. This interesting
cross-media campaign was promoted (in 2017) as described below:

      The Visitor Voices campaign highlights the Museum’s community of visitors
      and reflects their stories. Audiences are invited to share aspects of their visit – to
      empower them to see themselves as part of the museum’s history and community.

16
   Black History Month usually occurs in February in the US and Canada and in October in
Ireland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The initiative is now spreading to other
countries with the shared purpose to adopt a more comprehensive approach, to the effect that
black history is also American history and European history, and which needs to be narrated
from the perspective of black historians too.
17
   “Museums commonly adopt storytelling in their interpretive framework by use of audiovisual
techniques to convey the meanings contained within artefacts. In addition to audiovisual mediation
[…] museum architecture itself can also be regarded as a medium of spatial storytelling, specifically
of historical time, which is manifested spatially and cognitively for museum visitors”.
18
   Available at https://www.youtube.com/c/NMAAHC.
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A26                                                                         ABBAMONTE, ANTINUCCI


       Visitors are able to record their experience in our Reflections Booths located
       in our history galleries, or are invited to share via a social media staffer. So,
       to thank our incredible community of visitors, we are celebrating our
       anniversary month with a new series called #VisitorVoices. 30 days. 30
       voices. 30 stories. So make sure to subscribe and tune in daily, as our visitors
       voice and share their own stories and reflections on #APeoplesJourney. A
       Nation’s Story. Have you visited the museum? Tell us about your experience
       in the comment section! #VisitorVoices. (NMAAHC, 2017, our italics)

    Stories, anecdotes, accounts, histories and narratives are expressions of the
species-specific human faculty of making sense of the world, as both structural
and post-classical narratologies have variously explained (as concisely illustrated
in Author, 2019). Therefore, giving people the opportunity to voice their
considerations, reactions and memories in response to their visits – i.e. to interpret
signs, thus becoming more developed signs – enhances their opportunity to
develop and to promote change by bringing together ens reale and ens rationis.
    What follow are the transcribed texts of seven stories out of the 12 included
on the museum’s dedicated webpage in 2017 to celebrate the NMAAHC’s first
anniversary. The texts are annotated in terms of appraisal, as illustrated in the
legend (Table 1)19. Predictably, the syntax is non-standard, since the visitors are
just voicing, not writing, their stories or comments/reactions; hence, these
verbatim transcriptions retain the oral discourse forms20.

      Table 1. Legend
 APPRAISAL FRAMEWORK – ATTITUDINAL POSITIONING
      û Affect (positive+ negative--): positive and negative emotional responses and
 dispositions;
      û Judgement + --: human behaviours/actions are positively or negatively
 assessed by reference to some set of social norms:
      o Capacity, tenacity
      o ProprietyPr, veracityVr
      o Normality*
      û Appreciation + -- : assessments of objects, artefacts, processes and states of
 affairs/behaviours



19
   The description of the resources for evaluation in English in the AF is rich and multi-layered; a
look at the synoptic contents of the “framed version” is illustrative of this (see White 2020). It is
feasible to utilize more resources for textual analysis at the same time by highlighting the different
evaluative and discursive features cohesively interacting within the same text. Yet, for readability’s
sake, when annotating a text, it is expedient to select the more functional set of descriptors, which
in this case was Attitude and its sub-systems: Judgement, Appreciation and Affect (whose meanings
are only mentioned, very concisely, in the legend). Some overlapping, e.g. between positive Affect
and positive Appreciation, may occur. Furthermore, annotation is clearer when it is selective; in
other words, if every noticeable word is highlighted, the effect can be confusing.
20
   Concisely, these transcriptions were made verbatim, leaving out the full names and details of
the visitors and the phonetic transcriptions of their short pauses, intonation changes,
background/channel noises, etc. (the speeches are available at the links provided). Only longer
pauses resulting in anacoluthons are signalled with three dots. The texts reproduce the oral form
of the speeches. In short, “[t]he two basic transcription styles, naturalized transcription, in which
the text conforms to written discourse conventions, and denaturalized transcription, in which the
text retains links to oral discourse forms, have equal potential to serve as politicized tools of
linguistic representation” (Bucholz 2000: 1439).
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THE NEED FOR INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY                                                   A27


    Table 2. Visitors’ speeches
 Text    number, Integral transcription of the visitors’ speeches
 title and short
 comments

 1. This Is My My name is Joyce […], my story of slavery deals with my great-
 Story That I great-grandmother who was a slaveVr, and her mother had twins.
 Know of Slavery They were Mary and Martha. They were sold. My great-great-
                   grandmother was asked to sell her two twins. She had to choose
 SHORT COMMENT: one. She could keep one or sell the other.
 A     story    of She chose to keep Martha. She wanted to keep both+ but when she
 utmost            asked if she could keep both, she was hit-- and the master told her
 powerlessness.    he would sell both-- of them if she didn’t choose one. She chose
 Some              MarthaVr.
 inconsistencies   Martha was my great-great-grandmother and she had Maddie, who
 in the first part was my grandmother, and Maddie had Evie Pain, who was my
 of the narrative. mother. This is my story that I know of slaveryVr and I am so
                   grateful for this opportunity+.
                   [https://youtu.be/lBJNBAvD8IE]

 2. Modern-Day My name is Prince William [….] actually I am a sharecropper Vr.
 Sharecropper      My father, we were all sharecropper until 1992Vr. So, this museum
                   and the exhibits actually affects me first hand because we
 SHORT COMMENT: suffered-- through this until, until current day. We were raising
 First-hand story, tobacco down in Clay Hill, Virginia, which is located in Franklin
 lingering past,   County, Virginia. And we gone through these things that are
 engagement        being displayed here at the MuseumVr. My father told me stories
 with          the about where they had to go to church on Sundays and they also
 artifacts.        had to steal away--. And one thing they told me they had to use
                   was a black pot and the black pot was turned upside down in order to,
                   quote unquote, catch the voices -- from the church when they started
                   shouting and also to really praise God+. And if they didn’t use that
                   then the, the white people that were around, they will come to the
                   church and basically harass them--. And he said on many
                   occasion[s] that they had to jump out the windows-- when they came
                   by and, and harassing them on--, all Sundays when they were trying
                   to worship+, so all this is really first-handVr. You know it hits home
                   really when I, when I look at all these exhibits-- because you know
                   most people think that sharecropping ended in the early 1930sPr
                   or whatnot, but for our family here in the US it didn’t end until
                   1992--.
                   [https://youtu.be/qdJ_r3mEwoo]

 3.    Descended I am Minetta […] and this is my aunt Juanita […]. Our family has
 from Slavery      ties back to slavery daysVr. Our matriarch Ellen Fisher was a slave
                   back in… I believe she was born in 1840. She was owned by the
 SHORT COMMENT: O’K […] family, James O’K, and she was beaten and blinded in
 Sharing a story one eye-- and bore several children of the O’K’s, which we have
 of         mixed done DNA testing to prove that. She bore him three sonsVr,
 ancestry from a Daniel, Will and Doc O’K. We are descendants of Daniel O’KVr, and
 slave and a slave how we share our story about slavery is+…we have our family
 owner,            reunionsPr and they have been held ever since 1930*. And we pass



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A28                                                                  ABBAMONTE, ANTINUCCI


 ownership     of along the family tradition of spreading our oral history*, telling the
 one’s own story. history of Ellen Fisher and all of our ancestors.
                  [https://youtu.be/wrn2CA1_1nE]

 4. Shackles of I am Diamond […] I am 21 years old. I think the part of the exhibit
 Children         so far that’s resonated most with me was not just seeing the
                  shackles of the enslaved individuals but seeing the shackles of the
 SHORT COMMENT: children-- and the pendants-- that were worn as a form of
 The saliency of empowerment by the slave owners that look just like the shackles-
 the real object, -. It is like a trophy-- almost, I think just seeing them up close and
 embodied         personal… you hear about it all the time but all these artefacts and
 cognition.       things in here are real. Very real. And seeing them you know, in
                  perspective to my body, those shackles how tight they are, how
                  heavy they are-- it just, it touches you in a place that has been
                  untapped, and I think it’s good that this museum is here because it
                  will continue to educate not only black but white people as well + and
                  hopefully help unify us+ in a fight that is still ongoing much more
                  bigger than any of us could ever imagine.
                  [https://youtu.be/tFHQwFBNEzY]

 5. Unimaginable Patrice: Hi my name is Patrice […] and this is my daughter Leila.
 To Me             Steve: And I am Steve [Patrice’s husband].
                   Steve: What part of this museum resonates the most with us?
 SHORT COMMENT: Patrice: I just passed through the part where they were talking
 Emotional         about the mothers giving birth to their children and half of them
 identification    not even survived the first year--, and being a new mom I, it just
 with the process. touched my heart… to have to leave her to go and nurse another
                   child. It is just unimaginable to me--.
                   [https://youtu.be/3xZk7sr1HCY]

 6. I Never Knew The Emmett Till exhibition really hit me hard--. I had to do a lot
 About Emmett of things to stop me from crying--, but I never knew… I never knew
 Till             about Emmett Till til I came here today--. No one ever talked about
                  it--. That wasn’t something they willingly brought up in history class--
 SHORT COMMENT: and to come here and realizeVr that this young boy my age got shot
 The shock of over something so stupid--, was brutally murdered--. It is just
 learning,        something that hurts my heart--, and to know that we are going
 empathy.         back into the same direction after we fought so hard to get out of
 Proposals:     a that-- also really hurts--. So I would just like to ask anyone who
 successful       sees this, to try your best to be a better person, to be a prouder person,
 learning         to be proud of you+ and where you came from but don’t look down
 itinerary.       on others--, because of where they came from. To be positive and
 From negative to always lend a helping hand to take care of others+. Be a servant! It
 positive         doesn’t mean, you know, be weak. It means to be strong and loving
 appreciation and and caring and kind+. That’s something that we should do. That’s
 affect.          something that we should start as a nation, as a world, as a country,
                  as a planet!+ Love each other!--
                  [https://youtu.be/xwfbWBYc4ao]

 7. 30 Days of It’s so overwhelming at first -- to see the history that had not been
 Reflections      told -- seeing the shackles of the children -- it’s just unimaginable
                  to me -- it really hit me hard. I had to do a lot of things to stop me
 SHORT COMMENT: from crying -- triggers your mind, it triggers your heart. Triggers
 An        edited past memories of your ancestors dating back so many years. The

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THE NEED FOR INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY                                                    A29


 collage of the       effects of slavery are still being felt today -- the marches and the
 comments of 30       protests and the struggles -- I have seen freedom, I have
 (small groups of)    experienced segregation -- and freedom to me is the right to choose
 visitors, where      who you want to love -- liberation -- peace -- and being black you
 the         more     can be beautiful as well – hmm, what else? – UNITY [in chorus] --
 significant          so many stories to tell -- who we are as a people -- follow your
 phrases       are    heart -- know your culture -- never let us forget history, because
 selected.    The     history is the true teacher.
 double hyphens       [https://youtu.be/XcyXIQTlTxk]
 mark          the
 transitions from
 one speaker to
 another.


3.4. Discussion

The issues raised in these short speeches range from the personal to the societal
dimension. The relation between ‘stories’ and ‘history’ is the key notion. In Text
1, a testimony is offered, in a factual style, of a tragic family memory of slavery:
an enslaved mother obliged to choose which of her new-born twins was to be
sold to other slave owners. This handed-down memory has the value of history
for the speaker, Joyce, who states ‘This Is My Story That I Know of Slavery and
I am so grateful for this opportunity’, thus closing her testimony with a positive
appreciation of the museum setting she is in, and of the potential of storytelling.
By the same token, in Text 2, the titular modern-day sharecropper voices his
recollection of his father’s narratives. He (the sharecropper) experienced such
artefacts as tokens of a lingering past, which is perceived by him as present
reality at an affectual level: ‘the exhibits actually affects me first hand because
we suffered through this until […] current day […] Sharecropping […] it didn’t
end until 1992’. Thus, the artefacts evoked both reported family stories and vivid
personal memories of working conditions that are negatively evaluated.
     In Text 3, Minetta, a descendant of a slave and a slave owner, tells her family
story of mixed ancestry; her attitudinal positioning to the situation is not entirely
negative. She recounts the painful story of her matriarch, but, at the same time,
she claims the right to deal with her story in the way she and her relatives think
proper: ‘and how we share our story about slavery is […] And we pass along the
family tradition of spreading our oral history’. A resilient attitude emerges, and,
seemingly, the dominant notion is that visitors claim ownership of their family
stories and, to some extent, believe them to be truer than history. Such an
attitude is in line with the Family History Journey of the museum that constantly
attempts to expand the scope for changing the social awareness and cognition of
racial issues.
     Other levels of engagement are the reaction to objects and empathy with (a
series of) stories. In Text 4, the salience of the shackles for children deeply
affected the visitor, who physically felt and then voiced their constraining power
and the oppression of the shackle-shaped pendants that were probably worn as
a form of self-empowerment by the slave owners. In a highly emotional language
she explains how ‘seeing the shackles of the children […in perspective to my
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A30                                                                   ABBAMONTE, ANTINUCCI


body] and the pendants […] like a trophy’ is different from ‘hear[ing] about it
all the time’, and much more negatively affecting: ‘it touches you in a place that
has been untapped’. Yet, the final emphasis is on education, positive change,
union.
     In text (5), the dire destiny of the children born in slavery and their mothers
creates an intense emotional engagement that makes such learning embodied.
The attitudinal positioning is negative.
     Interestingly, in Text 6, the discovery of the gruesome death of Emmett Till
‘really hit hard’ for the visitor, who suffered a kind of cognitive and emotional
shock, since she also realized the unjust erasure of that death in history classes,
‘That wasn’t something they willingly brought up in history class […] that hurts
my heart’. Her attitudinal positioning to the present state of affairs is also
negative, ‘to know that we are going back into the same direction after we fought
so hard to get out of that also really hurts’.
     Yet, her following reaction was positive in that she attributed an educational
potential to that story, ‘I would just like to ask anyone who sees this, to try your
best to be a better person […] To be positive and always lend a helping hand to
take care of others’.
     As Stenglin (2004) pointed out, space in museums can be organised along
the dimensions of Binding and Bonding to create solidarity on an interpersonal
level. Apparently, given the success of the Visitor Voices campaign, the
enveloping spatial arrangement of the history galleries, with their reflection
booths, made visitors feel welcome, engaged, and willing to record their
experiences or stories, thus helping them to reveal/denounce racial issues and
affirm positive values, consistent with the museum’s pedagogical aims.


4. Concluding remarks

Through the visitors’ voices, artefacts and objects, such as the children’s shackles,
the black pot used to muffle black people’s religious songs or Emmett Till’s
casket, resonate and develop new meanings. The navigation paths, outlined by
the synergic organizational, interactional and representational frameworks of the
museum, evidently shaped effective multimodal learning itineraries for them.
Indeed, the NMAAHC’s visitors have ample access to the unvarnished truth of
the nation’s racial past, which is made clear and enhanced by the resources of
the museum’s sophisticated polymedia environment, and are encouraged to
become also producers of stories and meanings, i.e. prosumers, in the museum’s
continued spatial and dialogic interactivity that re-semiotizes artefacts into
pedagogic tools.
     In museum studies, the relevance of new media and the interaction of
different semiotic resources in meaning-making are not easily overvalued.
Indeed, besides a variety of initiatives21, a distinguishing feature of the museum


21
  Concerts, the “Hip-Hop and Rap” Kickstarter campaign (in which people were invited to create
rap lyrics echoing a traditional rap cypher), dance performances, book publishing and
presentations, etc.
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THE NEED FOR INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY                                                        A31


is its ‘digital-first museum state-of-the-art technology’, which gives visitors
hands-on      connections     with     both    historical  and     contemporary
events/performances .  22

     Let us briefly mention the estimated five million users accessing the
NMAAHC’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat channels
each month, where, through hashtag narratives and visual media,
marginalized voices can be endorsed in the digital semiosphere23. The new
information and facts about their ancestors the prosumers learn while visiting
the Family History Center (also accessible online) are often shared through
letters, social media and/or personal videos in the technologically enhanced
Umwelt of the NMAAHC. Such forms of adaptive interactivity have evidently
found their more intense expression in the Visitor Voices initiative, where the
style and stance of communication and the affectual responses of visitors are
effectively conveyed.
     Furthermore, the museum’s educational resources reach out to online
audiences and classes around the world to help students develop both tools to
understand the contemporary world in the light of its historical antecedents and
their sense of civic participation24. The NMAAHC regularly promotes initiatives
to enhance the value of Black History Month, which can be traced back to Negro
History Week, launched in February 1926 by Carter G. Woodson, in the attempt
to introduce an unbiased portrayal of African Americans into the national record.
Yet, a yearly emphasis lasting for one month cannot be enough to change
perspectives on the events. Instead, the NMAAHC works as a museum text
throughout the year to make the role of African Americans visible in US national
history at a multimodal/multimedia level and to develop racial literacies through
the medium of English – once the language of the slave owners and slaves, now
the language of new, conscious literacies. In Amanda Gorman’s words, “We have
seen the ways in which language has been violated and used to dehumanize.
How can I reclaim English so we can see it as a source of hope, purification and
consciousness?”25




22
   For example, in collaboration with the National Museum of the American Indian and the
National Museum of American History, the NMAAHC’s “Webby Award-winning website gave
more than 3.4 million users access to the Museum’s collection of more than 10,000 digitized
objects and collection stories. More than 60,000 users downloaded the Museum’s ‘Mobile Stories’
app, named one of the Best Apps for Teaching & Learning by the American Association of School
Librarians” (NMAAHC 2018).
23
   Such as #APeoplesJourney (stories of African Americans from the past and present) or
#ANationsStory (where the African American experience is situated into American history and
culture). See also “Explore NMAAHC Collections in 3D” at https://youtu.be/UoWpZOQxfBk.
24
   See https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/nmaahc-digital-resources-guide.
25
   M. Obama, “Unity With Purpose”. Amanda Gorman and Michelle Obama Discuss Art, Identity
and Optimism, at https://time.com/5933596/amanda-gorman-michelle-obama-interview/. Feb
4, 2021.
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A32                                                            ABBAMONTE, ANTINUCCI


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THE NEED FOR INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY                                         A33


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