The researcher-curator: What poietic experience?

We aim to analyze the act of curation as a thought process and, even more so, as a tool for reflection for the (humanities and social sciences) researcher who engages in it: how can exhibiting one's research foster scientific discovery? What aspects of the process encourage thought experiments? The hybridization of theoretical and methodological tools from museography, semiotics, and information and communication sciences enables us to answer these questions by making the researcher's poietic process visible. Paradigmatic hybridization leads us to study the curatorial process by combining its three dimensions: technical, social, and semio-communicational. In other words, the exhibition is sometimes considered as an object (an artefact), sometimes as a practice (among the exhibitors), and sometimes as a process (of circulating meaning), enabling researchers to reflect on their poietic process. The originality here lies in the correspondence between the conception and the reception, with the researchers being both curators and observers of their practice. This practice essentially involves examining the epistemic status of the collected materials by using technical museographic tools (frames, display cases, labels, spaces, etc.), encouraging new ideas and associations by manipulating polysemic objects, and renewing the research object by alternating the different constraints inherent in the multimodal format (text, audio, image, etc.). Finally, we propose an approach based on the formulation of instructional exercises for other researchers who would like to experiment with the scientific poietics of exhibition design.