Social Meaning Mapping as a means of exploring the visual in the museum (original) (raw)

Museums are visual storytellers. Through the curation of the collections and the interpretive resources, as well as through the space, design and architecture of the building (i.e. MacLeod et al. 2012), curators are crafting stories that are both conceptual and visual. Moreover, museums are visually dense settings, with McClellan arguing that (2003: 36) ‘encouraging visitors to look and see has long been recognized as the principal task of the mainstream art museum’. Following the ocular-centric nature of a museum visit, visitor studies have been exploring the ways in which visitors use the exhibitions and understand these narratives by identifying which artefacts they stopped in front of and measuring the duration of their pauses. In this paper, I will present Social Meaning Mapping (SMM), a novel qualitative tool that offers researchers a new way of mapping the visual experience of visitors. SMM, a digital tablet-based tool embedded in the Visitracker app, was designed as a post-visit research tool used during a researcher-led session in which visitors are prompted to recreate their visual trails through a museum room by drawing on the tablet’s digital surface using resources from a toolbox available in the app. By doing so, visual maps are created based on which we can identify the visual footprint of these visitors. Apart from recording the visual markings on the screen, visitors’ conversations are also recorded through the app. For this presentation, I will draw upon visual examples from data collected at the National Museum in Oslo, Norway and the Belvedere in Vienna, Austria. During the researcher-led session, we asked visitors to (i) identify with an x the artworks that they had seen before their visit to the museum both as an original and a reproduction, and (ii) identify with an exclamation mark the artwork that was their personal highlight. The maps drawn provide one way of measuring the visual in the museum, representing which artworks visitors looked at, which artworks they recognized based on previous experiences or knowledge, and which artworks made an impression on them. At the same time, in these maps, visitors link artefacts with their interpretation in a narrative that is both visual and verbal. What is shared is not merely a list of resources, objects or places, but a path, which places these objects in a spatial, temporal, and/or categorical context. Additionally, the maps created through SMM facilitate visitors’ discussions about their visual experience in the gallery rooms without needing to recall the artists and the paintings’ names. References: Macleod, S., Hanks, L., and Hale, J. (2012) Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions, Routledge: London. McClellan, A. (2003) ‘A Brief History of the Art Museum Public’ in Andrew McClellan (ed) Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, Blackwell: Oxford.