Trails of Walking - Ways of Talking: The Museum Experience Through Social Meaning Mapping (original) (raw)

International Conference on Emerging Technologies and the Digital Transformation of Museums and Heritage Sites RISE IMET 2021: Emerging Technologies and the Digital Transformation of Museums and Heritage Sites

Abstract

This paper discusses the digital method Social Meaning Mapping (SMM) and its affordances to capture aspects of the museum visit. SMM, embedded in the Visitracker tablet-app, enables the annotation of visitors’ movement and interactions in a particular gallery room post-visit. During a researcher-led session, visitors handle the tablet and annotate their experience on its screen while sharing their thoughts aloud. Both visitors’ annotations and their voices are being recorded through the app. Each SMM can be accessed through Visitracker’s portal as a video which re-creates visitors’ ‘trails of walking’ (what they mark) and their ‘ways of talking’ (what they say) in synchronization. In this paper, we draw upon data collected at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere in Vienna to argue that SMM created by visitors can complement tracking and timing (T&T) data collected by researchers, allowing for a more holistic understanding of the museum experience. The analysis shows that SMM captures visitors’ experiences in a multimodal way, both visual and verbal, enabling them to foreground aspects of their personal experience, spatial practices, co-experience and social realms of their visit.

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