Visual content analysis of visitors’ engagement with an instagrammable exhibition

ABSTRACT

This study aims to show how a museum exhibition designed to encourage visitors to take pictures can affect visitors’ behavior. We analyzed visitors’ engagement with the Yumi's Cell Special Exhibition (hereafter Yumi) held in South Korea, employing computer vision for the analysis of visitors’ Instagram pictures. Our research questions are: What types of pictures do visitors post on Instagram during or after their visit? And can Yumi’s instagrammable features make visitors interact more with the exhibition? We also formulated two corresponding hypotheses: Visitors are primarily interested in taking selfies in the instagrammable environment; and visitors struck more active poses when taking pictures in an instagrammable exhibition than in a traditional art exhibition. Through the image analysis of Instagram posts of the exhibition, we found many pictures of people, but the proportion of selfies was relatively limited. This suggests that visitors were more interested in interacting with the exhibition rather than taking selfies. This has also been confirmed by the pose analysis, which showed that the participatory feature of the exhibition encouraged visitors to take photos in active poses, interacting, mimicking, and performing. The framework presented and the findings offer insights about how to design exhibitions to increase visitors’ participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Instagrammable exhibition
• visitor photos on Instagram
• image analysis
• computer vision
• pose analysis
• storytelling entertainment

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the Chung-Ang University Research Grants in 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Chung-Ang University: [grant number Chung-Ang University Research Grants in 2019].

Notes on contributors

Bo-A. Rhee

Boa Rhee received the B.A. degree in Library Science from Sung Kyun Kwan University in 1987, M.A. degree in Art Studies from Graduate School of Sung Kyun Kwan University in 1990 and Ph.D. degree in Art Management from Florida State University, U.S., in 1997.

Dr. Rhee is a professor at the College of Art and Technology, Chung-Ang University, South Korea. She is a museum technology and informatics researcher. Her works have focused on transdisciplinary approaches, hyper-connected museum, mediation between digital surrogates (i.e. digital exhibitions, VR and AR) and viewers, social media, and museum 3.0. She is currently working on the project of the development of exhibition visitor prediction platform using big data and artificial intelligence.

Federico Pianzola

Federico is Assistant Professor in Computational Humanities at the University of Groningen (Netherlands). He received a PhD in Italian Literature from the University of Florence. He is also member of the scientific advisory board of OPERAS (the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities in the European Research Area); and member of the governing board of IGEL (the International Society of the Empirical Study of Literature). His research concerns narrative theory and the impact of digital technologies on literature, especially regarding digital social reading and the use of Virtual Reality. In one sentence, he uses computational, qualitative, and quantitative methods to study reader response.

Jongwon Choi

Jongwon Choi received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 2012 and 2014, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering at Seoul National University. He was a research engineer at AI research center in Samsung SDS. He is currently an assistant professor of Department of Image Science and Arts at Chung-Ang University. His research interests include visual tracking, deep learning, and surveillance vision algorithm.

Wooseok Hyung

Hwang Jinsoo is now an undergraduate in Chung-Ang University, school of integration engineering, department of digital imaging. He wrote a research paper about the correlation between images and music through AI analysis. His research interest are deep learning, contents technology, and AI & big data-based UX analysis.

Jinsoo Hwang

Hyung Wooseok is an undergraduate in Chung-Ang University, school of Integration Engineering, department of Digital Imaging since 2016. He wrote a paper about Self-supervised video retrieval by using highlight extraction, semantic segmentation, and metric learning with co-workers. He is currently working on correlation in children's electroencephalogram and children's facial video.