Dimitra Christidou
Senior Curator Learning at the National Museum of Norway
Dimitra holds a PhD in Museum Studies from University College London (UCL). Her academic background is in art history, history, sociology, museology, and learning. She has an interest in identity, language, gestures, and learning on the move. Through her research, Dimitra explores the multimodality of the museum experience and visitors' meaning-making in museums. Using mainly qualitative methods, which consist of interaction-based studies of children, adolescents and adults' participation in informal contexts such as museums and archives, Dimitra focuses on how visitors experience museums and their exhibitions.
Dimitra previously worked as senior researcher for the Horizon 2020 COMnPLAY SCIENCE at NTNU (2019-2021), and as postdoctoral fellow for the Cultural Heritage Mediascapes project at the University of Oslo, Department of Education, funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2016-2018). During her fellowship, Dimitra developed a novel methodological tool for exploring visitors' meaning-making coined Social Meaning Mapping. In early 2020, Dimitra held a senior research fellowship in museum studies at UCL Qatar, during which she conducted a study on visitors at the Msheireb Museums in Doha.
Dimitra holds a PhD in Museum Studies from University College London (UCL). Her academic background is in art history, history, sociology, museology, and learning. She has an interest in identity, language, gestures, and learning on the move. Through her research, Dimitra explores the multimodality of the museum experience and visitors' meaning-making in museums. Using mainly qualitative methods, which consist of interaction-based studies of children, adolescents and adults' participation in informal contexts such as museums and archives, Dimitra focuses on how visitors experience museums and their exhibitions.
Dimitra previously worked as senior researcher for the Horizon 2020 COMnPLAY SCIENCE at NTNU (2019-2021), and as postdoctoral fellow for the Cultural Heritage Mediascapes project at the University of Oslo, Department of Education, funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2016-2018). During her fellowship, Dimitra developed a novel methodological tool for exploring visitors' meaning-making coined Social Meaning Mapping. In early 2020, Dimitra held a senior research fellowship in museum studies at UCL Qatar, during which she conducted a study on visitors at the Msheireb Museums in Doha.
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This book should be seen both as a handbook for the method and as an inspiration. It contains a chapter describing the method, followed by six chapters describing how different museums and archives have used the method in connection to adult learning. The chapters reflect a wide range of approaches to learning and give examples of many engaging projects and programmes which demonstrate the ways in which the Heritage Learning Framework can be used and adapted. The last chapter is a concluding chapter, evaluating the efficiency of the method. With this book, we hope to inspire others to use the method, which we believe is a way of making cultural heritage institutions more relevant to individuals and to society by focusing on the effects and outcomes of learning.
Purpose
Governments and organizations worldwide are concerned over the declining number of young people choosing to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), especially after the age of 16. Research has foregrounded that students with positive attitudes toward science are more likely to find it relevant and aspire to a science career. This study aims to understand the factors shaping students’ attitudes as these are pivotal in promoting science learning.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses the framework of science capital to understand what shapes young people’s engagement with or resistance to science. The authors conducted four Computational Thinking making-based workshops with 106 children aged 15–16 years, of which 58 filled in a questionnaire and 22 were interviewed. Statistical and content analyses were performed respectively.
Findings
The results indicate that children who are more exposed to science-related activities and contexts are more likely to have higher self-efficacy, and that those with higher prior coding experience scored higher in their self-efficacy and science capital. Six themes emerged from the content analysis, highlighting the diverse factors shaping students’ attitudes, such as teaching methods, stereotypes and the degree of difficulty encountered while engaging with science in and out of school.
Originality/value
By combining qualitative and quantitative methods with the use of science capital, the authors found a number of aspects of the school experience that shape students’ attitudes to science learning in and out of school, as well as their science career aspirations.
This book should be seen both as a handbook for the method and as an inspiration. It contains a chapter describing the method, followed by six chapters describing how different museums and archives have used the method in connection to adult learning. The chapters reflect a wide range of approaches to learning and give examples of many engaging projects and programmes which demonstrate the ways in which the Heritage Learning Framework can be used and adapted. The last chapter is a concluding chapter, evaluating the efficiency of the method. With this book, we hope to inspire others to use the method, which we believe is a way of making cultural heritage institutions more relevant to individuals and to society by focusing on the effects and outcomes of learning.
Purpose
Governments and organizations worldwide are concerned over the declining number of young people choosing to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), especially after the age of 16. Research has foregrounded that students with positive attitudes toward science are more likely to find it relevant and aspire to a science career. This study aims to understand the factors shaping students’ attitudes as these are pivotal in promoting science learning.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses the framework of science capital to understand what shapes young people’s engagement with or resistance to science. The authors conducted four Computational Thinking making-based workshops with 106 children aged 15–16 years, of which 58 filled in a questionnaire and 22 were interviewed. Statistical and content analyses were performed respectively.
Findings
The results indicate that children who are more exposed to science-related activities and contexts are more likely to have higher self-efficacy, and that those with higher prior coding experience scored higher in their self-efficacy and science capital. Six themes emerged from the content analysis, highlighting the diverse factors shaping students’ attitudes, such as teaching methods, stereotypes and the degree of difficulty encountered while engaging with science in and out of school.
Originality/value
By combining qualitative and quantitative methods with the use of science capital, the authors found a number of aspects of the school experience that shape students’ attitudes to science learning in and out of school, as well as their science career aspirations.
(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.
By drawing upon the current societal and economic changes and needs, this chapter invites readers to realise the potential of bridging different contexts of learning. Facilitated through the use of technology, it discusses the use of Web 2.0 in a digital history co-creation movement as a way to develop synergies across museums, libraries, archives, schools and the urban space as well as a means for growing these collaborations stronger.
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.
Background
Studies of visitors’ interactions in art museums often foreground their ocular-centric nature, using eye-tracking and other methods to capture and describe visitors’ acts of looking at artworks and reading texts (i.e. Walker et al. 2017; Filippini Fantoni et al. 2013). Recent approaches have argued for the inclusion of other senses and the body when visiting art museums, foregrounding the museum experience as an embodied experience (i.e. Christidou & Diamantopoulou 2016; Steier, Pierroux, & Krange, 2015). Despite this increased interest, there have been relatively few exhibitions in art museums that provide opportunities for visitors to touch original artworks instead of replicas mainly due to conservation concerns (Candlin 2004; Pye 2008). Evighetens Form (Eternity’s Form), a touring exhibition produced by the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway (2016 – 2019), presented works by Norwegian modernist artist Aase Texmon Rygh that were based on variations of the Möbius strip, a surface with only one side and only one boundary and has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. Five original sculptures from this series made of dolomite stone were on display inviting visitors to ‘follow the form with the hand (…) and thus understand the principle and experience the material’ (Nasjonalmuseet, 2016). In collaboration with curators from the museum, a study was designed to examine if and how touch mediated visitors’ interpretive processes in encounters with these artworks.
Methods
This paper presents observation methods and findings from an empirical study of both general public visits and a school excursion. For this study, the digital observation and survey tool Visitracker was used in the research design and data collection. Since little is known about haptic interactions with original sculptures, a tentative coding scheme with potential interactions was first developed. Visitracker was then used in the field to (1) refine the ‘touch codes’ through real-time observations of visitors’ interactions with the sculptures, (2) collect data regarding visitors’ movement and dwell time in the exhibition, and (3) collect their responses to a post-visit questionnaire. Additionally, we collected two hours of video recordings of visitors in groups to capture and analyze talk and interactions in situ.
Data and Analysis
Observations of 136 visitors, alone or in groups, were logged during a period of two weeks. 31 visitors completed questionnaires during this same period. Among other findings regarding visitors’ movement and dwell time, the analysis of the video recordings and the interactions registered with Visitracker allowed us to identify specific ‘sensing patterns,’ including resting palm on surface; tracing form with palm; using palms; sensing edges and surfaces with fingertips; poking and pointing with index figure; and knocking with fist. Further, analysis of the video data show how both real and ‘vicarious’ touch introduced new gestures, bodily orientations, and haptic information as qualitatively new and different interpretive resources, fostering longer and deeper object-related inquiries than when viewing only, i.e. confirming or countering visual observations, discerning shape, texture, substance, and reflecting on the creation process.
Importance: The study contributes to ongoing research on how experiential knowledge, and specifically the sense of touch, is made relevant in processes of meaning-making in encounters with art. Haptic interactions in a gallery setting are fairly underexplored, and thus, their analysis contributes to the ongoing discussions in visitor studies. In terms of VSA learning competencies, the use of an advanced observation tool to develop and record types and patterns of touch and movement as visitors interacted with sculptures in an art museum contributes to “Knowledge of and Practices with Social Science Research and Evaluation Methods and Analysis.” Moreover, the overall discussion on the research design and the methods used in this study reflect and expand upon the “Principles and Practices of Visitor Studies”. Finally, the curators’ aims and perspectives shed light on the ‘Principles and Practices of Informal Learning Environments’.
References:
Candlin, F. (2004). “Don’t Touch! Hands Off! Art, Blindness and the Conservation of Expertise.” Body and Society 10: 71–90. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X04041761
Christidou, D., and S. Diamantopoulou. (2016). Seeing and Being Seen: The Multimodality of Museum Spectatorship. Museum & Society 14 (1): 12–32.
Nasjonalmuseet (National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design) (2016). Aase Texmon Rygh. Evighetens form. Retrieved on May 9, 2019: http://vandreutstillinger.nasjonalmuseet.no/produksjon/aase-texmon-rygh-evighetens-form. Translated from Norwegian to English by the authors.
Pye, E. (2008). The Power of Touch: Handling Objects in Museum and Heritage Contexts. Walnut Creek: University College London Institute of Archaeology Publications. Left Coast Press.
Steier, R., Pierroux, P., & Krange, I. (2015). Embodied interpretation: Gesture, social interaction, and meaning making in a national art museum. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 7, 28-42. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2015.05.002
Walker, F., Bucker, B., Anderson, NC., Schreij, D., Theeuwes, J. (2017) Looking at paintings in the Vincent Van Gogh Museum: Eye movement patterns of children and adults. PLoS ONE 12(6): e0178912. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178912
Filippini Fantoni, S., Jaebker, K., Bauer, D. and Stofer, K. (2013) Capturing Visitors’ Gazes: Three Eye Tracking Studies in Museums. In Museums and the Web 2013, N. Proctor & R. Cherry (eds). Silver Spring, MD: Museums and the Web. Published January 31, 2013. Retrieved May 9, 2019: https://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/capturing-visitors-gazes-three-eye-tracking-studies-in-museums/
Additional Resources: https://www.uv.uio.no/iped/english/research/projects/mediascapes/
Providing an approach to understanding visitor experiences, the paradigm of meaning-making foregrounds the visitor's active role in the shaping of the museum experience in the new mediascape. The role of the visitors ‘constructing meanings’, and becoming ‘performers’ rather than just ‘viewers’, has been further foregrounded by digital interactivity in museums. As social and digital media increasingly merge physical spaces into museum mediascapes, visitor studies also explore how media invite and facilitate new behaviours and opportunities for meaning making, such as posing and taking selfies with artworks. Interactivity and digitization undoubtedly have added to the complexity of researching visitors’ encounters; understanding the impact of the interactive media in this relationship as well as how visitors engage and make meaning. Additionally, digitization facilitates new techniques, methods and tools used to study visitors’ interactions with art.
For this panel session, I will discuss the ways in which visitor studies has informed museum and research practices in Norway. To address the problem of how museums may conceptualize and study visitors’ meaning making to inform curatorial practices and decisions (Scott, Dodd and Sandell, 2014), a research-practice partnership between the University of Oslo and the National Museum is currently exploring . Within this collaborative framework, new tools and methods have been developed to better understand audiences and their meaning making processes. Visitracker, a tablet-based tool and online portal, has been developed to analyze real-time observations of individual and group interactions in museums. Visitracker allows for identifying the multiplicity of modes of meaning-making, foregrounding not only the curatorial aspect, but also the content and the processes of interaction through sensorial and embodied means such as touch, posing, and pointing. By discussing the potential contribution of this tool, some of the results of the empirical research and the importance of this ongoing research-practice synergy, I hope to bring together various elements of the museum experience that are often discussed and explored segmentally and thus, advance our understanding of visitors’ meaning-making practices.
References
Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1996) Improving museum learning. East Midlands Museum Service.
Scott, C., Dodd, J. and Sandell, R. (2014) Cultural Value, User Value of Museums and Galleries: A critical view of the literature, RCMG, University of Leicester.
Bio
Dimitra Christidou, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oslo, and member of the project Cultural Heritage Mediascapes: Innovation in Knowledge and Mediation Practices. In collaboration with the National Museum, Dimitra leads the Visitor Research group, which explores the relationship between museum spaces, collections and visitors, and designs methods and tools to conduct visitor studies.
The analysis draws upon methodological developments within sociology and in particular Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy and frame analysis theory (1963; 1971), as well as Gunther Kress’s (2010) multimodal and social semiotic theory of representation and communication. It is through bridging together these two theories, ethnomethodology and multimodal social semiotics, that we engage in a much needed interdisciplinary conversation. The virtue of these perspectives is that, by contrast to structural and deterministic sociological approaches, they permit us to theorize the agency of visitors in museum visiting. The article proposes an appropriate interpretative and methodological framework which illuminates the social worlds of museums.
Both the theoretical framework and the methodological tools employed allow the traditional mind-body dualism to be overcome in order to explore the modes and performances of visitors’ encounters, as they arise in and through interaction with people and exhibits. It argues that visitors’ participation can be approached by taking into consideration the ways in which different modes of communication and representation are ‘orchestrated’ and ‘animated’ through the agentive action, ‘the performance’ and ‘choreography’ of the visitors within the social context of the visit. By drawing upon multimodality, we show how talk, gesture, gaze and elements of the
space and place blend together and contribute to the multimodality of participation, accounting for the ‘orchestration’ of multiple modes of participation.
Bodily movement is the key mode through which one immerses in a museum space, navigates the space available and encounters the objects on display. Despite the predominance of movement as the key mode in the shaping of this experience, museum research rarely positions the body as the focus of any analysis or exploration.
The paper, by adopting a multimodal social semiotic perspective, foregrounds the mode of movement which it considers the basis for all the other semiotic modes of meaning making.
The exhibition space becomes a stage onto which visitors perform a choreographic improvisation, as they encounter features of the exhibition space, artefacts in display cases and the bodies of other visitors engaging in a similar semiotic action. The concept of choreographic improvisation entails the notions of design, transformation and responsiveness to prompts that arise in the museum visiting experience.
Two short videos of museum visits by two pairs of visitors conducted as part of two different museological projects are used to illustrate the theoretical points made in relation to the performativity of the visitors’ bodies both as exhibited objects and agents of the transformation of museum artefacts. The dialectic relationship between bodies, spaces and artefacts in these videos is materialized through the visitors’ movement improvisation, which provides the means for the transformation of the objects and the space and the attribution to them meanings which are specific to each visitor. The choreographic improvisation of each visitor is argued to be a resource unique to each visitor in her/ his transformative engagement with the material world
and the shaping of meanings about it.
By considering videotaped aspects of in situ interactions from three museums in London, UK, this paper details the ways in which visitors monitor and negotiate co-presence and the means they use to successfully keep the private sphere of their encounter away from the public eye. Particular attention is paid to gestures and body movement in order to highlight how visitors organise, conduct and carry out their encounters with the exhibits as well as their fellow visitors.
References
Borden, I. (2001). Another pavement, another beach: Skateboarding and the performative critique of architecture. In: Borden, I., Kerr, J. & Rendell, J. (Eds.). The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space (pp. 178 – 199). MIT Press, Massachusetts; London.
Christidou, D. (2013). Bringing Meaning into Making: How Do Visitors Tag an Exhibit as Social when Visiting a Museum. The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 6: 1, 73 - 85.
Christidou, D. (2012). Does ‘pointing at’ in museum exhibitions make a point? A study of visitors’ performances in three museums for the use of reference as a means for initiating and prompting meaning-making. Unpublished PhD thesis. University College of London, Institute of Archaeology. London, UK.
Diamantopoulou, S. and Christidou, D. (in review). The Choreography of the Museum Experience: Visitors’ designs for learning.
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. The Free Press, New York.
vom Lehn, D. (2013). Withdrawing from Exhibits: The Interactional Organisation of museum visits. In: Haddington, P., Mondada, L. and Nevile, M. (Eds.), Interaction and Mobility: Language and the Body in Motion (pp. 65-90). Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin: Boston.
vom Lehn, D. (2002). Exhibiting Interaction: Conduct and Participation in Museums and Galleries. Unpublished PhD thesis. King’s College, University of London, London.
The aim of this presentation is twofold: to provide a mapping of the cross-institutional collaborations
between SFI schools and museums in Sweden and to introduce the first findings of the ongoing project
titled Intercultural Dialogue in Swedish museums. Crossinstitutional synergies between cultural
institutions and SFI schools have been a long tradition in Sweden as the regulation of the curriculum
for Swedish for immigrants (SFI) stresses the need for students to develop and hone, in addition to
linguistic communication tools, their "intercultural skills by reflecting upon their own cultural
experiences and compare them with their experience of leading a social and working life in Sweden".
Museums in Sweden have been actively engaged in facilitating immigrants’ cultural and linguistic
integration by running activities addressing this particular group’s needs. They see the use of the
exhibitions as a resource for learning about the country’s history and language but also as a prompt
facilitating intercultural dialogue. For this presentation, we will provide a summary of the SFI
programmes and activities run by museums in Sweden in order to reflect upon what has already taken
place in the country while postulating the function of museums as a community resource. Following
this summary, the Intercultural Dialogue in Swedish museums project will be introduced. As it is an
ongoing project, the first results will be presented. This project seeks to identify detailed and in depth
insights of the practices used by the museums by interviewing the museum practitioners from nine
museums responsible for designing and running these programmes. The project is a systematic
qualitative attempt to provide detailed and in depth insights of the practices gained through the
implementation of these SFI museum programmes.
Reference, especially in the form of pointing gestures, is a ubiquitous performance in visually complex environments such as museums. Additionally, under the specific conventions of the museum visit and those imposed by each institution individually, pointing gestures, as well as their alternatives, is one of the most frequently recurring performances embedded in visitors’ shared meaning-making processes. Reference is considered a tool for social action facilitating the establishment of joint attention, a pivotal aspect of visitors’ shared meaning-making, as it allows an object, or an aspect of it, to stand out and eases the identification of the exhibits, one of the most important stages of visitors’ meaning-making.
Previous research has mainly explored the museum experience through visitors’ conversations, setting aside the variety of modes through which meanings are made such as visitors’ gaze, gestures, postures, museum resources and so forth. My research, bolstered by relevant studies in the last two decades and resonant with their valuable insights and findings, explored the sociocultural means used and enacted during visitors’ joint encounters with seven exhibits across three museums in London, UK, by capturing and analysing their verbal and non-verbal interaction at the face of the exhibits. Visitors’ social interaction has been audio and video-taped.
In this paper, I will argue that the interaction emerging in the museum is a multimodal process, especially in such visually stimulating context, and will present fragments of visitors’ joint encounters across those three museums with different types of exhibits and different types of ‘user language’, that is, the interpretive text and resources designed by the museum and framing the exhibits. The focus of the analysis will be on visitors’ referential practices (verbal and non-verbal) and their social affordances for shaping the ongoing museum experience and meaning-making while identifying the relationships between the institutional modes of meaning with the modes of making performed by visitors themselves. Issues of representing multimodality in transcripts will also be mentioned, triggering further discussion and debate on the relevant methodology.
"
Tracking visitors’ movement in museums has been a well-established research method. In this seminar, Dr Christidou introduces a digital research tool called Social Meaning Mapping (SMM) designed to be used by museum visitors in groups during a post-visit researcher-led session.
SMM is embedded in an app, called Visitracker, which allows researchers to collect data in museums through surveys and tracking of visitors’ movement and interactions. For SMM, visitors are invited to recount their movement in a museum room verbally and visually by marking it on a digital floorplan projected on the tablet, using a toolbox.
Dr Christidou will draw upon several examples of such multimodal maps from the ‘Belvedere Visitracker’ study (University of Oslo and the University of Vienna in collaboration with the Belvedere Gallery). She will discuss how these digital maps mediate both visitors’ spatial and temporal representations of their experience and researchers’ collection and visualisation of data, as well as how the multimodal analysis of such maps offers new insights into visitors’ experience, enriching existing research methodologies.
Dr Dimitra Christidou (University of Oslo), draws from the recent developments in her project titled ‘Mapping Meaning Making in Museums’ to present the development of Visitracker, a digital tool for recording visitors’ interactions while in the museum.
Visual data automatically generated by Visitracker will form the basis of a discussion on the challenges of analysing and representing multimodal data. The session will also reflect on the interdisciplinary collaboration entailed in the design of the app, involving university researchers, programmers at EngageLab at the University of Oslo and members of staff from the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design.
Informed by an understanding of communication as multimodal, Dr Christidou invites a critical engagement with the gains and losses from the implementation of digital technologies in conceptualising and conducting research in the cultural and educational sectors.
Learning and Archaeological department of Jamtli Open Air museum, Östersund, Sweden
Towards this direction, I conducted qualitative research and collected data by implementing audio and video-based research. Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis provided the key concepts of the analysis which revealed three major patterns, all highlighting the multimodal, performative, social and sequential character of the meaning-making process.
By treating the museum experience as a multimodal process, my research suggests to consider meaning-making as a process through which visitors socially make meaning about themselves, others, the exhibits as well as the institution in which their interaction occurs, as well as the product of this process. Additionally, the analysis brought to the fore particular context-specific performances that suggest the influence and interconnection of the institutional, physical, personal and social contexts of the museum experience on visitors' encounters, leading to the appropriation of their performances in one of the case studies; that of the Courtauld Gallery.
"
Museum Communication: Learning, Interaction and Experience, by Jane Korsbæk Nielsen.
University of St Andrews, UK. 2014.
345 pp.
Primary Advisor: Dr Ulrike Weiss.
• the roles undertaken by volunteers,
• the demographic profile of volunteers,
• support for volunteers,
• the policies and practices in volunteer management, and
• the impact of volunteering on volunteers’ well-being.
The preparation of this report was co-financed through a grant from Nordplus Adult. It is a result of a survey being conducted by NCK in collaboration with Jamtli (SE), MiST(NO), Maihaugen (NO), Gotland’s Museum (SE), and Ringkøbing-Skjern Museum (DK).
This report was written by Dimitra Christidou and Anna Hansen on behalf of NCK.
The contents of this report reflect the views of the authors who are responsible for the facts and the accuracy of the data presented herein.