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Sport, Media and Visual Culture • 143

Analysing the Sport Museum

The sport museum asks the visitor to understand sport in a particular way. To analyse
the sport museum and the way it constructs the social subjectivities of its visitors, it
is useful to consider the ways that the features discursively construct meanings. Rose
(2007) discussed the importance of technologies of display, interpretation and layout
in effecting meanings. These concepts provide a useful starting point for drawing out

the specific characteristics of sport museums.
Apparatus

Any analysis needs to consider the architecture of the museum. The design of the
building produces a specific impression of the place and its contents. For example,

a flat entrance to a plain, concrete building will create different expectations in the

minds of visitors that an entrance with iron gates, magnificent steps and neo-classical
columns. The impressions created by the building in which the museum is housed is
the first part of making the exhibition meaningful. Once inside the building, the inter-

nal layout of the exhibition is the next point of focus. It is important to identify the
thematic organisation of the exhibition to begin to illuminate its discursive framing of
sport. The analyst is interested in the ways the exhibits construct truth claims as well as
the things they leave out or avoid. What do the displays claim to be true about sport? If
they present a history of sport, what appears most important, and what is left out?

Technologies of Display

The choice between display cases or open displays creates a different relationship to
the objects that make up the exhibition. Display cases create a barrier between the
visitor and the exhibit, constructing a relationship of reverence towards the objects
on display. Exhibits in open display can appear more familiar and encourage the
visitor to take a closer look, or even touch. Sometimes museums create displays that
reconstruct events or scenes. For example, the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum has
a reconstruction of the men’s dressing room. These reconstructions can be signifi cant
to a discourse analysis because they are creating a representation of the world as if
it were true. It is important to ask which scenes are depicted in this way. In a simi-
lar vein, some objects are deemed so important to the knowledge presented by the
museum that even though they are not possessed by the museum, they are recreated
to fill a gap in knowledge. Lidchi (1997) argued that the connotations of different

display techniques created different reactions to the exhibits:

Putting material artefacts in glass cases therefore underlines the dislocation and
re-contextualisation that is at the root of collecting and exhibiting. So whereas