Visitor perspectives on commenting in museums

ABSTRACT

Commenting in museums is a well-established way to give visitors a voice and encourage engagement with exhibition themes and with the institution. Despite its many benefits, we know little about the visitor perspective on commenting as current literature focuses mainly on museum and technology perspectives. This paper reports on a survey exploring visitors’ mental models, expectations and preferences when submitting comments to a museum. It briefly discusses related literature, describes the survey methodology and presents findings structured into six themes, including visitors’ (i) preferences for different commenting and feedback mechanisms, (ii) interest in personal information about comment authors, (iii) expectations on who reads submitted comments, (iv) assumptions about comment moderation, (v) views on the conservation of comments and (vi) opinions on ownership and potential reuse of comments. The paper concludes with a discussion of limitations and suggestions on how findings might inform policies and practices around commenting in museums.

KEYWORDS:

• Visitor-generated content
• user-generated content
• visitor comments
• visitor interpretation
• social interpretation
• participation
• content moderation
• content ownership

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Fabrica Art Gallery, Brighton and Hove Museums and Tate Modern for supporting this research by providing critical feedback on the survey instrument and allowing interviews to be carried out on their premises. We also thank our interviewees for volunteering their time and openly sharing their views.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Marcus Winter is a researcher at the Centre for Digital Media Cultures and senior lecturer in the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Brighton. He researches applications and interfaces enabling people to create and share content with and for emerging technologies in the contexts of learning, cultural heritage and public engagement. While his earlier work focused on computer-supported collaborative learning, with particular attention to situated and social-constructivist models of learning, more recent work explores game-based crowdsourcing and social interpretation in museums. Marcus collaborates with charities, educational institutions, cultural heritage organisations and industry partners in projects funded by Nesta, AHRC, ACE, JISC, Innovate UK and the European Commission.