Social Meaning Mapping as a Means of Exploring Visitors’ Practices in the Museum

Abstract

This article introduces Social Meaning Mapping (SMM), a digital qualitative tool embedded in the Visitracker tablet-app. SMM is designed to be used by visitors post-visit to recount their experience in a museum room verbally and visually by marking it on an illustrated floor plan, using several paint tools. The app records their verbal and visual input. This article details the theoretical underpinnings of the tool and exemplifies its use through two out of the nine Social Meaning Maps collected from nine groups (N = 21) visiting a gallery room at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway. Each example represents one of the two ways in which visitors used the tool: (a) visitors cocreated their path using one colored line and (b) visitors created two different paths using different colored lines. These two cases showcase how SMM as a tool for conducting visitor studies can complement third person observations through timing and tracking conducted by the researcher with visitors’ self-reflections and thus, capture a more holistic snapshot of the museum experience.

Notes

1 The project has been approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Cultural Heritage Mediascapes: Innovation in Knowledge and Mediation Practices project, led by Professor Palmyre Pierroux, and funded by the Research Council of Norway and the KULMEDIA Program. Visitracker was developed by EngageLab at the Faculty of Education, University of Oslo.

Notes on contributors

Dimitra Christidou

Dimitra Christidou is a senior researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology where she is working for the H2020 COMnPLAY SCIENCE project. Dimitra holds a PhD in Museum Studies from University College London (UCL), and has working experience as a researcher in the museum sector in the UK, Sweden, Norway and Greece. Her research focuses on informal learning, visitor studies, multimodality, and embodied interaction in museums and makerspaces. In 2020, Dimitra was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship in Museum Studies from UCL Qatar to conduct research on museum visitors in Doha.