In this section, we describe the documentation practices that take place during museum visits (i.e. the process of taking photographs and recording videos), as well as on sharing practices (i.e.
how photos and videos are shared during and after visits). First, we discuss ways the museum visit is re-configured when the experience is digitally documented, and how documentation itself becomes a key concern for visitors. Second, we discuss ways the online sharing of video and photos opens up the museum exhibit to new types of visitors, expanding the reach of the museum; and finally, we discuss ways mobile photo applications are used to manipulate photos, creating multi-layered, aesthetic documents of an experience.
New forms of participation around exhibits
Traditionally, interactivity in museum settings is considered as something related to the event there and then, but with smartphones the notion of interactivity is changing. Smartphones re-configure the interactivity of the museum exhibits in that it allows for new forms of interactions around exhibits. It is no longer the case that the principal activity is necessarily that of interacting with the exhibit, but there are also other ways of engaging with the exhibit. Documenting and making records of the museum visit is an important activity in itself. Clearly, the presences of cameras in museums is not new, but the advent of smartphones where it is quick and easy to share content online, entails the notion of a potential audience, when “the gaze of others is always present as a potentiality” (Okabe, 2004).
As part of our larger project on the use of mobile technologies in museums, we experimented
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with the use of a new video editing tool. In Figure 2 below, we see how our users are engaged in both documenting and experiencing a particular exhibit. The girl to the right is sitting in a chair, which is part of the exhibit, recording her picture in the mirror. The two girls to the right are busy capturing this experience on their mobile phones.
. Figure 2: Visitors to a museum engaging in documenting the exhibit.
In this way, the activity of capturing the interaction with the exhibit mobile phones creates new opportunities for involvement. Also, adding the activity of documenting the interaction with the exhibit, challenge the notion of a ‘principal user’ of an exhibit. Interacting with the exhibit and documenting that interaction, are two activities that are mutually co-produced and are inseparably intertwined.
Sharing exhibit experiences outside the museum through online video
Beyond re-configuring the ‘principal user’ of an exhibit and supporting new visitor roles, during our work to examine the ways visitors document and share their museum experiences, we have also found that mobile technology offers the possibility of extending the museum experience.
By sharing photos and video through social media such as YouTube, visitors are able to expand museum experiences across both time and space. On YouTube, for instance, viewers are able to comment on and discuss an uploaded video. The following example of a YouTube conversation is taken from the comment field from a YouTube video posted by a visitor to the Universeum (see Figure 3 below). The person named “Y” is the creator of the movie.
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Figure 3: Image of a video sequence from YouTube showing an electric eel at the Universeum X1 - its beautiful
X2 - shut up your balls are heavy X3 - is that in cologne zoo?
Y - Like the description says "Universeum in Gothenburg" it's in Gothenburg, Sweden, at a place called Universeum, a hugde in-door rainforest place, totally awedome.
X5 - The electric eel is the animal that is the closest to
being "invincible!" The have been known to kill caimans anacondas and just about anything that gets too close to it!
X2 - shut up
X6 - never heard of them killing them, I have seen them kill the eels but ot the other way around, it usually makes any large reptiles get away.
X7 - That eel was coolness! X3 love you, x7! You must put up more videos!!
As is the case with many online forums, the discussion above contains offensive posts from one user who displays no interest in the video. Five other users, none of whom represent themselves as having visited the Universeum, however, show interest in both the content of the video and the location it was shot in. This example shows how the interaction around a museum experience
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may continue beyond the walls of the museum mediated by video recorded during a visit that has been uploaded so that is can be discussed online. The comments above also illustrate the possibility that discussion outside the walls of the museum may not only expand the reach of a museum experience but also enrich it through additional perspectives.
Communicating exhibit experiences through smartphone photographic choices In addition to simply recording media such as video and posting it online, we have observed that many visitors use their smartphones to manipulate the media they produce before sharing it. A particularly common use of smartphones in exhibition spaces is taking still photographs.
While some visitors to the Gothenburg Natural History Museum, for example, carry a dedicated camera such as a single lens reflex (SLR) camera, we have observed many more using their smartphones as cameras. These visitors also often take advantage of other smartphone features not available on dedicated cameras to, for example, directly edit and share their photographs on the Internet. Having observed that visitors were taking and directly sharing photographs while visiting exhibitions, we searched for their work on a variety of online image sharing platforms such as Flickr, Picassa and Instagram. Some of these platforms such as Flickr provide users with opportunity to simply display their photographs on a site with social media features such as location tagging and comments. Others, such as Instagram combine a social media network with a specific application on a user’s smartphone that allows them the possibility to manipulate their photographs before sharing them. Specifically in the case of Instagram, we found that a large number of visitors manipulated their photographs of exhibits by adding filters that changed the look of an image, for instance, to make it appear as if it were taken by an old film based camera and not a digital smartphone. Examining the 66 most recent photographs shared on Instagram from Gothenburg Natural History Museum, only five had been posted without first being manipulated with a filter. Of those visitors who had posted more than one image, over 50% had chosen a new filter for each of their photographs. Though Instagram has a wide variety of filters that can be used, the majority of those chosen by visitors were filters that gave their images a vintage feel by, for example, reducing colour depth, making parts of the image appear out of focus, or adding a border. In Figure 4, an example of a visitor’s photograph manipulated and shared with Instagram can be seen.
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Figure 4: Visitor photograph taken, manipulated and shared using Instagram
This photograph is representative of many of the photographs posted from the Gothenburg Natural History Museum. It is taken in the Whale Room exhibit where a number of full size whale skeletons and mounts are arranged. Like much of the museum, this room has the feel of a classic museum with an interior filled with ornate carvings and dark hardwood surfaces. In keeping with the look of the exhibition, the visitor has chosen to manipulate her photograph by adding the ‘Earlybird’ filter. This filter desaturates the colours of an image, gives it a yellow cast, and applies rounded corners and a thick off-white border. The overall effect of this filter is close to the look of photographs taken with 1970s Polaroid instant cameras. In this case as with many of the images shared by visitors while at the museum, both the subject and the chosen manipulation reflect the vintage character of the exhibition. With this photograph, as with many of those shared from the museum, the visitor shares her experience of the exhibit not only through the choice of subject but also through the choice of filters. Exploiting the features that smartphones provide beyond those available from dedicated cameras, visitors create complex layered forms of visual communication and share them online all from within an exhibition.
Conclusion
In this paper, we examine three specific topics related to the documentation and sharing practices of museum visitors who use smartphones during their visits. These topics have emerged from the preliminary analysis of data collected through ongoing fieldwork at a variety of informal learning settings. First, we addressed the r-configuration of the museum visit through digital documentation, and ways that documentation itself becomes a central concern for visitors.
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Through the activity of documenting interaction with an exhibit, smartphones support expanded possibilities for involvement while challenging the notion of ‘principal user’. Interaction with an exhibit and documentation of that interaction become activities that are co-produced and inseparable.
Second, we gave an example of the ways that online sharing of video makes museum exhibits accessible to new types of visitors and reshapes the boundaries of the museum. When visitors use their smartphones to record media within exhibitions and then share it online, interactions around their experience continue beyond the walls through online discussion. These discussions may not only expand the reach of a museum experience but also enrich that experience through additional information and perspectives.
Finally, we spoke to ways photography applications on smartphones are used to create multi-layered, aesthetic documents of a museum experience. Using applications that not only support the taking of photographs but also their manipulation and sharing, visitors communicate their experiences of exhibits through both their choices of photo subjects and the ways they choose to manipulate and present them.
Taken together, these topics illustrate a key emerging theme from our work to examine the ways young people use their own mobile technologies in informal learning settings. Rather than limiting interaction between participants, our preliminary results show that technologies such as smartphones support re-configured and expanded interaction both between visitors within exhibitions and with new types of visitors outside. They show that these increased possibilities for activity during visits and ways of communicating those experiences support new forms of engagement that rather than detracting from the richness of museum visits may instead enrich them.
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Abstract
Social media has become a widespread tool among museums as part of their digital
(democratization) strategies aimed at making the museum accessible and engaging. Although museums have experimented with different social media formats and platforms for a number of years, the amount of larger scale empirical research of the impact of social media and the cultural participation of publics on social media is still very limited. This paper aims to provide new
knowledge into the field of digital museum communication and examines the museum social media users, who they are and to what extent they engage and participate.
IT University of Copenhagen Rued Langaards Vej 7 2300 Copenhagen S Denmark
E-mail: nholdgaard@itu.dk Mobile: +4526843803
Word count: 4.475 words
Museum Facebook Users… Who are they?
Introduction
The first phase of the web 2.0 era denotes an age of networked and interactive forms of
communication including blogs, wikis, social network sites, and other online content-creation and Proceedings of The Transformative Museum page 150
Museum Facebook Users... Who Are They?
Nanna Holdgaard, IT University of Copenhagen
sharing services and platforms, and the hopes and expectations of scholars and museums were
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1
Data analysis
Data were analysed based on demographic categories; engagement and sharing metrics, and page consumption in the Facebook data. The demographic categories selected for data analysis in this particular study were gender, age, city, and country2. Facebook defines engagement as page click, whereas sharing in Facebook lingo can be defined as “shared stories” or “talking about”.
“Shared stories” include the act of liking content on the page, wall postings, commenting, sharing page content, answering a questions, responding to an event invitation, tagging or checking in.
Page consumption is categorised as users who clicked on Facebook content: link, video, photo, or other clicks (Facebook, n.d.).3
1st of December 2011 was chosen as a reference point for all metrics in the data analysis and data collected for user engagement, sharing and page consumption are an
aggregation for 28 days. The total number of Facebook fans of Danish museums was 96.117. The museums with most fans had almost 50.000 Facebook fans and the museum with least fans had 34 fans.
As the numbers of natural history museums and special museums in this study and in general are limited, the results of these should be interpreted with caution. The data was compared with statistics from a national museum user survey (Moos & Brændholt, 2010a) and data from a national survey of the Danish Museums' Web Users (2010).4
2 Demographic data from Facebook Insights are information provided by the users in their Facebook profile.
3 The definitions of engagement and participation made by Facebook are arguable as they conflate the concepts to merely interaction. For further discussion on engagement and participation see for instance Carpentier (2011).
4 I have received right of access to the raw data from the museum web user survey. The results of the survey in this study slightly diverge from the results in the publications as users who only used museum websites but not visited onsite museums were omitted from the analysis (Moos & Brændholt, 2010b, p. 8).
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Results
Gender distribution
The majority of museum Facebook users are women. 64% of Danish museum Facebook users are female and 33% are male. Figure 2 below shows the distribution of gender of museum Facebook users, onsite museum visitors and museum website users across museum type. Of the
participating institutions, art museums have more female Facebook users than other of the
museums. 65% of Facebook users of art museums are women whereas 31% are men. For cultural heritage museums the gender distribution is 60% female and 37% male.
2
Age distribution
Figure 3 illustrates the distribution of age of museum Facebook users, museum website users and Danish Facebook users. The majority of Danish museum Facebook users are between 25 and 44
years old. Contrary to this are the age groups 13-17 and 18-24. These groups are under-represented compared to the total Danish Facebook users. With respectively 4% and 11% of the museum Facebook users, the age groups 13-17 and 18-24 are the smallest groups of the museum users. In the other end of the age scale is the age group 55+, 14% of Danish museum Facebook users belong to this group.
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3
Figure 4 below shows how the age groups are distributed across museum type. Cultural heritage museums have a relatively older Facebook audience than the other types of museums. Less than 37% of cultural heritage users are older than 45 years and 17% are more than 55 years, whereas natural history museums appear to have a relatively younger Facebook audience. 30% of
Facebook users at natural history museums are 13-17 years, in contrast cultural heritage and art museums have less than 5% of their users in the exact same age group.
4
Facebook users distributed by country
As Figure 5 illustrates, the majority of Danish museumsʼ Facebook users are from Denmark. 66%
of museum Facebook users are from Denmark, 17% are from Sweden and 4% are from Norway,
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neighbouring countries to Denmark. However, Danish museumsʼ have Facebook fans from
countries all over the world. 3% are from United States of America, 2% are from Germany, and 8%
are from the rest of the world.
Figure 5
Active museum Facebook users
Figure 6 presents the distribution of engaged and sharing museum Facebook users. As the figure suggests, there are more engaged users than sharing users. 20% of all museum Facebook users are engaged users, whereas 7% can be regarded as sharing users. Cultural heritage museum have higher percentages of engaged fans (33%) and sharing fans (12%) than any of the other museums. Even though art museums have more Facebook fans in general, the proportions of users who engaged with content (18%) and participate (6%) are lower than both cultural heritage museums and special museums, but still not as low as natural heritage museums.
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6
The majority of museum Facebook users are females and the majority of participating museum Facebook users is likewise females. Females 25-34 are the largest group of participating museum users with 18%, next is females 35-44 with 15%, females 18-24 cover 12% of participating users, and 11% are females 45-54. The youngest groups both female and male 13-17 comprise the
The majority of museum Facebook users are females and the majority of participating museum Facebook users is likewise females. Females 25-34 are the largest group of participating museum users with 18%, next is females 35-44 with 15%, females 18-24 cover 12% of participating users, and 11% are females 45-54. The youngest groups both female and male 13-17 comprise the