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ABSTRACT
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, how to attract back visitors has been a major problem for museums across the world. Among diverse museum activities, human-guided tours remain under-studied to date. A post-hoc case analysis on Xuhui Art Museum provided empirical evidence demonstrating the potential power of guided tours. Quantitative methods in content analysis and semantic network analysis were employed to identify general features of visitor comments from both visitor books and social media. An in-depth interview was also conducted with the Chief Curator. Results reveal that the work of ‘jiangjie’, or tour guiding, is greatly appreciated and plays a vital role in improving visitor experience and satisfaction. This study calls for re-evaluation of the functions, potential and effects of tour guiding, and a renewal of live tours for better on-site experience in a post COVID-19 period.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the managerial team of Xuhui Art Museum for their support of the study, and special thanks to Ms. Liqing Tang for her assistance and encouragement. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the discussion and instruction from Professor Terry N. Clark at the Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Professor Rachel Skaggs at the Ohio State University. And thanks to all interviewees for volunteering their time, openly sharing their views and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Cultural relics and objects are authenticated and classified according to the National Cultural Relics Collection Grading Standards. They are classified into precious cultural relics and general cultural relics, and precious ones would be rated by values as extremely important (Class 1), important (Class 2), or moderately important (Class 3).
2 ROSTCM 6 (ROST Content Mining) is a toolkit for content analysis developed by ROST research team led by Professor Yang Shen at School of Information Management, Wuhan University. It is designed for researchers not specialized in computer and information technology and has been employed by many scholars in China for analyzing Chinese text data to date. In this study, it was employed mainly for semantic network analysis.
3 The Chinese word ‘jiangjie’ can be literally translated into English as ‘explain’, but when used in the museum context, it usually signifies museum tour guiding, so this word can be interpreted as explaining things while leading tours. The person who performs ‘jiangjie’ would be called ‘jiangjieyuan’(explainer) or ‘laoshi’(teacher) in Chinese, but ‘docent’ is used more as an equivalent in this paper.
4 Trying to be more objective, all the quoted text which transcribed from visitor comments and the depth interview was first translated with Google Translator, then slightly modified by the authors.
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Xinrui Peng
Xinrui Peng, is a PhD student at National Institute of Cultural Development, Wuhan University. She also worked as a staff member at Wuhan Museum of Science and Technology between 2015 and 2019, mainly serving in the Education Department and the Curation Department. Her current study focuses on cultural participation and policies on public cultural services.
Bo Chen
Bo Chen, is a Doctor of Management, full professor and the Executive Deputy Director of National Institute for Cultural Development, Wuhan University, former visiting scholar at University of Chicago in 2016. He is also a consulting expert of the Think Tank of National Public Cultural Services System, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China. His research fields include cultural tourism industry and its policies, public cultural space studies, cultural consumption and scene theory.