I’m now back from my whirlwind tour of the US, sorting through hundreds of photos taken in around 30 museums in Raleigh, Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York. I visited an average of two museums a day so now have considerable first-hand experience in museum fatigue!
Over the coming weeks I’ll post about some of the general observations I made over the course of these visits, as well as some reviews of selected sites and exhibitions. In the meantime, the following is a list of the museums and heritage sites I visited in Philadelphia and New York (the Washington ones are here) – drop me a line if you have any questions about any of these sites in particular:
I can’t believe I’m now halfway through my USA museums odyssey.
Last week was mostly taken up by the VSA conference – I haven’t had a chance to really digest my key ‘take-homes’ yet, but as a way to organise my thoughts I’ve had a go at storifying it. Hopefully that will give a flavour of the conference and what was discussed.
After the conference I flew up to Washington DC to see as many museums and sites as I could. So far I’ve:
visited the American History Museum and participated in a civil rights ‘sit in’ as part of a museum program
And all that in the space of four days! Tomorrow I plan to finish of my DC adventures with a trip to the Newseum and a quick visit to the American Art Museum before heading up to Philadelphia to visit even more museums.
I’d hoped to blog about all this as I went, but my feet have scarcely touched the ground! Good thing I’ve taken hundreds of photos to jog my memory! It might take me a while to organise them all.
So the countdown is finally over and I’m in the US! I arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina on Sunday night (the longest Sunday in my life thanks to crossing the International Date Line) for the 25th Visitor Studies Association Conference. This event typically attracts about 200 delegates, bringing together more people whose work I’ve read and/or cited in one room than anywhere else I’ve ever been. It’s venerable company.
While formal conference proceedings don’t kick off until tomorrow (in a few hours actually – jetlag has me up writing this at 3am), over the past two days there have been a selection of pre-conference workshops. I’ve attended ones on impact measurement, evaluation methods, survey design and participatory evaluation. Each in its own way has had its own piece of take-home insight that will inform my future work.
Sorting and analysing responses in the Participatory Evaluation workshop
The social program started this evening with a reception at the North Carolina Museum of Art. As this is the 25th anniversary of the conference, this called for some reflection and reminiscing on the part of the veteran attendees, although I’m by no means alone as a first-timer to the conference.
Anniversaries call for cake of course . . .
Delegates have stickers on their badges indicating how many conferences they’ve been to, and I’ve seen plenty of other people with a blue “1” on their badge just like me – indeed, first timers were abundant in the workshop sessions. It’s good to know you’re not the only one!
The schedule over the next few days is pretty packed, although I’ll try and note my thoughts and reflections as I go. If you’re interested in the conference, follow the #vsa25 hashtag between now and Saturday (US time). I’m also uploading photos from my visit to my Flickr page – expect this to fill up rapidly over the next couple of weeks as I visit as many museums I can while I’m in the Eastern US.
Yesterday I presented a seminar to my fellow UQ PhD students about how social media can be used as a research and collaboration tool, based on my own experiences.
It was a fairly low-key, off-the-cuff presentation, but I duly uploaded it to Slideshare and posted a link to it on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (the main platforms my presentation was talking about). Overnight it has picked up nearly 180 views and was featured on Slideshare’s “Hot on Facebook” and “Hot on LinkedIn” pages. I confess I don’t really know what that means but it sounds good and it’s nice to see there was some interest in it!
The main thrust of the presentation is comparing and contrasting the networking merits of Facebook (which I called “closed networking”), Twitter (“open networking”) and LinkedIn (“strategic networking”), as well as the value of blogging to a PhD student. It also includes a brief case study of how I used social media to recruit a participant sample for the first phase of my PhD research.
With the London Olympics just around the corner, it seems like a good time to contemplate the cultural significance of sport in relation to the arts.
Think about the typical sections in an average newspaper, or an evening news bulletin – sport is usually second only to breaking news in terms of prominence. It’s seen as a perfectly natural and normal thing to foster an interest in. There seems to be an assumption that sport (primarily spectator sport) is for the ‘everyman’ – egalitarian and intellectually undemanding. By comparison, the arts (and sciences for that matter) are often cast as the exclusive domain of the intellectually minded and culturally initiated – the ‘elites’. But can we take it as axiomatic that a football game is inherently more accessible than a Van Gogh?
Sport is full of shared norms, assumptions and meanings that are by no means obvious to an outsider – the scoring structure of gymnastics and the offside rule in soccer are just two examples that spring immediately to mind. People who would never consider themselves “intellectual” will happily muse for hours about the strategy of a match or the merit of an umpire’s decision. Sporting choices are also laden with significance – our cultural identity, socio-economic status or ethnic background can all be reflected in the sports we follow.
In contrast, a work of art can have many of layers of meaning that would take an expert to deconstruct, but it can also be appreciated on the basis of pure aesthetics (as can sport). While there are certainly codes, norms and assumptions surrounding the arts, I would argue they are no more difficult to become conversant with than those associated with many sports. So why is one seen as inherently more accessible than the other?
It probably comes down to enculturation – I was raised in an AFL-loving family and Dad sitting me down and explaining the rules to me was just a natural part of growing up. Attending Saturday matches was a regular winter ritual. But visiting museums and art galleries was also part of my upbringing. So while I don’t always profess to ‘get’ art (or Dad’s forensic post-match analysis for that matter), I don’t find either inherently inaccessible either.
However it seems that “high” and “low” culture frequently regard each other with mutual suspicion. And does cut both ways – a friend of mine once told me how his theatrical colleagues were bemused by his love of Port Power, as to them it seemed to be an interest not worthy of a patron of the arts. While I don’t approve of his choice of team (Go Crows!), I’m siding with my friend on this one.
Sometimes you see the words “audience” and “visitors” being used more or less interchangeably. But to me they represent different concepts and there was a discussion on this point some time ago on the Museum Audience Insight blog. While there was some debate about this, I took the view that “audiences” was a broader term than “visitors”; audiences were passive recipients whereas the word “visitor” implied something more active (through physical or virtual presence). So, you try to reach audiences but they may or may not be listening. Visitors, on the other hand, have fronted up and expect to see something that interests them.
Thinking about this again more recently, I’ve noticed that there’s an interesting semantic distinction between the two. Readers familiar with their latin roots will not be surprised by the fact that that “audience” is derived from the word for hearing and listening, whereas “visitor” has its roots in videre, which means to see or to notice. And, at least in Western cultures, we tend to privilege what we see above what we hear (compare how we think of “eyewitness testimony” as opposed to “hearsay evidence”). So it’s not surprising that such assumptions have, knowingly or otherwise, crept into the way we conceptualise audiences as opposed to visitors.
But something is still missing. Visitors themselves can still be passive or active. In media, this has been described as a “lean-forward versus lean-back” model for the way people consume online content. “Lean back” is passive relaxation mode, while “lean forward” is active involvement in searching, creating and critiquing.* In a visitor experience context, I’ll draw upon Nina Simon’s work and characterise these “lean forwards” as participants. Just like there are many different types of visitation, Simon has characterised varieties of participation (but I won’t go into details here). Participation also has interesting etymological roots, having come from the Latin participium, itself borrowed from the Greek meaning “to share”.
So how do audiences, visitors and participants relate to one another?
At the simplest levels, Participants can be considered a subset of Visitors, who in turn are a subset of Audiences. In theory this could also be conceptualised as a progression, with an individual moving from Audience Member to Visitor to Participant. Is moving through this progression a meaningful measure of engagement? It it an unhelpful oversimplification? Do we need a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between audiences, visitors and participants?
*I recall attending a presentation that referred to “lean-forward” versus “lean-back” in heritage interpretation, and I *think* I remember who it was, but I’m not 100% sure. If it was you, let me know so I can link to it!
I recently visited the newly re-vamped Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. One of the recent additions to the visitor repertoire is the MCA Insight smartphone app, and I thought I’d give it a go.
The MCA Insight home screen
Choosing the ‘Explore’ option takes you to a clean and easy to use interface that lets you look for specific works or see a map of the gallery. It uses the Museum’s wi-fi to locate you so can also select the option for it to only show works that are near you. This works most of the time but in some cases it got a bit confused due to the location of gallery walls – sometimes you were physically near something you couldn’t actually get to.
The “Explore” screen
If you were looking for something in particular, you could use the app to locate it in the gallery. If you were already nearby the work this was helpful, but the lack of gallery labelling or signposting of locations beyond the level number and the location of walls could make it difficult if you were using this as your principal way to find your way around.
The location of a work on MCA Insight
As you walked around, the Insight app gave you more information about the works. In most cases it was nothing different from the label, but it was often easier to read the text on your phone while standing back to take a work in, rather than having to peer at the text on the wall. Overall I found the app quite easy and fun to use.
An example of a label on the MCA Insight app
I was a bit underwhelmed by the follow-up though. On the way you were able to collect works to add to ‘My Gallery’. Then, if you enter your email address, the app promises to send a record of your visit. I think I was a victim of my own expectations here – I was expecting to receive something akin to what you get with MONA’s “O”. This sends you a wireframe model of the route you actually took through the museum as well as the artworks you selected. I was looking forward to seeing my meandering route through the museum rendered in 3D. However, what I got was a straightforward list of the works saved in My Gallery (mine is here), along with some additional details about the works and the artists. This was good enough (except in the cases where the only additional information was the page where you could purchase a $49.95 catalogue), but I was a bit disappointed because of my loftier expectations. I think it would be better if MCA re-worded how they describe the ‘record of your visit’ so that it’s a better description of what is actually offered by the app.
Experience, n & v:
n: 1 – actual observation or practical acquaintance with facts or events —2 – knowledge or skill resulting from this —3 – an event regarded as affecting one (an unpleasant experience)
v: 1 – to have experience of, undergo —2 – feel or be affected by (an emotion, etc) – Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 2nd Ed (2002)
Straightforward enough, huh? Well maybe not.
I’ve been reading Experience, evidence and sense: the hidden cultural legacy of English by Anna Wierzbicka. In it, she argues that the word experience, particularly in the third sense of the noun described above, is a peculiarly Anglo-English concept that cannot be easily translated into other languages. Furthermore, this use of the word is a relatively recent development in the English language, not appearing until around the 18th century. Its rise coincides with the rise of empiricism in British philosophy (Hume, Locke), in contrast to the rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz) that continued to dominate philosophical thought in the rest of Europe.
The original sense of experience was something that built up over time: experience as a body of accumulated knowledge (e.g. an experienced tradesperson). However experience has expanded to also refer to something that can be, ahem, ‘experienced’ in the moment – it is sensory, self-aware and subjective, combining perceptions, thoughts and feelings. In other words we can have experiences, and we are aware that we are having experiences while we are having them. Experience has become a countable noun: we can have an experience going horseriding; this is a very different thing from gaining experience in horseriding. However, this relatively new and now ubiquitous use of the word experience apparently has no equivalent outside the English language:
“The word experience plays a vital role in English speakers’ ways of thinking and provides a prism through which they interpret the world. While its range of use is broad and includes a number of distinct senses, several of these senses have a common theme that reflects a characteristically Anglo perspective on the world and on human life. This is why the word experience is often untranslatable (without distortion) into other languages, even European languages” (Wierzbicka, 2010, p.31)
So I’m wondering what this means for the way we conceptualise and study Visitor Experiences in a global context. It’s a significant question, as numerous theories in tourism, education and other areas hinge on defining characterising the experience. Obviously, English speakers aren’t the only people to have ‘experiences’. But maybe we are the only linguistic group to conceptualise and describe them in the way that we do. So when we talk about experiences across cultures, how do we know we’re all talking about the same thing?
Pine and Gilmore's 1999 work set up a value chain that had commodities at the bottom, then goods, then services, then experiences. So now I'm left wondering how Anglo-centric this highly influential idea is . . .
“Given the central role of English in today’s science, including psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, it is particularly important that such culture-specific constructs are not absolutised and also that they be well understood” (Wierzbicka, 2010, p.30)
I’m probably late to the party on this – it’s likely others have already given this considerable thought. I’d appreciate links to additional resources on this point. Given ‘experience’ is a key word in my thesis title, it is probably worth my while mulling it over for a while.
References: Pine, B. J. I., & Gilmore, J. H. (1999). The experience economy: work is theatre & every business a stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2010). Experience, Evidence, and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The UK Museums Journal website has recently published the opinion piece Why evaluation doesn’t measure up by Christian Heath and Maurice Davies. Heath and Davies are currently conducting a meta analysis of evaluation in the UK.
Is this the fate of many carefully prepared evaluation reports?
The piece posits that: “[n]o one seems to have done the sums, but UK museums probably spend millions on evaluation each year. Given that, it’s disappointing how little impact evaluation appears to have, even within the institution that commissioned it.”
If this is the case, I’d argue it’s because evaluation is being done as part of reporting requirements and is being ringfenced as such. Essentially, the evaluation report has been prepared to tick somebody else’s boxes – a funder usually – and the opportunity to use it to reflect upon and learn from experience is lost. Instead, it gets quietly filed with all the other reports, never to be seen again.
So even when evaluation is being conducted (something that cannot be taken as a given in the first place), there are structural barriers that prevent evaluation findings filtering through the institution’s operations. One of these is that exhibition and program teams are brought together with the opening date in mind, and often disperse once the ribbon is cut (as a former exhibition design consultant, their point about external consultants rarely seeing summative reports resonated with my experience). Also, if the evaluation report is produced for the funder and not the institution, there is a strong tendency to promote ‘success’ and gloss over anything that didn’t quite go to plan. After all, we’ve got the next grant round to think of and we want to present ourselves in the best possible light, right?
In short, Heath and Davies describe a situation where evaluation has become all about producing the report so we can call the job done and finish off our grant acquittal forms. And the report is all about marching to someone else’s tune. We may be doing evaluation, but is it part of our culture as an organisation?
It might even be the case that funder-instigated evaluation is having a perverse effect on promoting an evaluation culture. After all, it is set up to answer someone else’s questions, not our own. As a result findings might not be as useful in improving future practice as they might be. So evaluation after evaluation goes nowhere, making people wonder why we’re bothering at all. Evaluation becomes a chore, not a key aspect of what we do.
NB: This piece was originally written for the EVRNN blog, the blog of the Evaluation and Visitor Research National Network of Museums Australia.
The trail was launched as part of a Victorian funeral re-enactment staged during the About Time history festival. Over 400 people attended the re-enactment, which was an impressive turnout.
Crowds photographing the funeral procession as it enters the cemetery
I was responsible for writing the signage and self-guided leaflet for the trail, with the assistance of historian Geoff Speirs who helped me with some of the background research and sourcing of images.
In contrast to the Heritage Highlights tour, the Beliefs Attitudes and Customs trail focuses less on individual personalities and more on how the cemetery reflects both the religious diversity of South Australia and the change in social attitudes since the colonial era.
So this trail encompasses the different religious sections of the cemetery, the funeral rituals of these different faiths, and how these religious sections came about in the first place. It is also an opportunity to compare the practices of colonial times, which to modern eyes can seem very rigid and superstitious, with the more ‘scientific’ view of death and the grieving process prevalent today. However in the absence of the prescribed social norms of yesteryear, we now may find ourselves at a loss regarding how we are ‘supposed’ to deal with death and grief.
I have to confess that while fascinating, some of these more abstract ideas proved difficult to write about in a way that was clear, engaging and succinct. Time will tell how successful we were in this goal.
