Making Museums Relevant to the Public: Innovating Visitor Research Practices
This project aims to contribute to innovation in the cultural sector through the widespread adoption of a new product that will transform visitor research practices in museums, foster knowledge sharing across organizational boundaries, and thus make museums more relevant to a broad public.
VisiTracker studies in Belvedere Museum. Photo: Armin Plankensteiner, University of Vienna, Department of Art History
About the project
Museums are increasingly faced with the challenge of how to remain relevant as places for public learning, engagement, and participation. This project addresses this challenge by supporting museums in collecting and sharing new knowledge about visitors’ experiences, using an innovative tool collaboratively designed by university researchers and engineers, and museum curators.
Background
The project builds on the research platform Visitracker, an outcome of a university-museum partnership in three different research and innovation projects funded by The Research Council of Norway over the past eight years.
The partnership involves curators at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design and researchers and engineers at the Department of Education, UiO. Read more...
Workshop with project team, National Museum of Art, and Munch Museum in November 2022. Photo credit: Tom Martin Bjarne Seidel
Selected publications
Project presentations
UiOs Innovasjonsfrokost, 6. jan. 2023 08:30 – 10:00, Domus Bibliotheca
Scientific journals
Christidou, D. (2020) Social Meaning Mapping as a Means of Exploring Visitors’ Practices in the Museum. Visitor Studies, Published online: 13 July 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/10645578.2020.1773708
Diamantopoulou, S. and Christidou, D. (2018) Children’s eye view of an archaeological site: Multimodal social semiotic perspectives in the use of drawings. Museum and Society, Volume 16, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v16i3.2793
Christidou, D. (2018) Art on the move: The role of joint attention in visitors' encounters with artworks, Learning Culture and Social Interaction. Volume 19, December 2018, pp. 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2018.03.008
Christidou, D. and Pierroux, P. (2018) Art, touch and meaning making: an analysis of multisensory interpretation in the museum. Museum Management and Curatorship. 34:1, 96-115. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2018.1516561
Book Chapters
Christidou, D. (2020). Measuring the visual in the museum: Social meaning mapping as a means of capturing more than meets the eye. In D. M. Baylen (Ed.), Crossing boundaries and disciplines: The book of selected readings 2019 (pp. 96-113). International Visual Literacy Association.
Pierroux, P. and Steier, R. (2016). Making it Real: Transforming a University and Museum Research Collaboration into a Design Product. In V. Svihla & R. Reeve (Eds.), Design as Scholarship in the Learning Sciences, Chapter 9, pp. 115-129, London: Routledge
Conference Presentations
Christidou, D. Designing a digital tool for researching visitors, museums and collections. Fifth Biennial Conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS), University College London, August 26-30, 2020.
Christidou, D. Social Meaning Mapping as a Means of Exploring the Visual in the Museum. International Visual Literacy Association 2019 Conference, Brussels, October 16-16, 2019.
Christidou, D. & Reitstatter, L. Trails of Walking, Ways of Talking: From Observation to Self-Reflection. Visitor Studies Association Annual Conference. Detroit, July 10-13, 2019.
Pierroux, P., Steier, R. and Qvale, A. Studying Visitors' Exhibition Experiences in a Virtual Reality Environment. Visitor Studies Association Annual Conference. Detroit, July 10-13, 2019.
Christidou, D. and Pierroux, P. A Study of Touch as a Way of Knowing in an Art Exhibition. Visitor Studies Association Annual Conference, Detroit, July 10-13, 2019.
Steier, R. and Pierroux, P. Mapping Mediated Interaction in Museums: VisiTracker tool for ethnographic observations of visitor groups. International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, CSCL 2019. Lyon, June 17-21, 2019.
Christidou, D. and Pierroux, P (2018). Visitors’ Hands-on Encounters with Art: The role of touch in meaning making. 2nd Symposium on Embodied Interaction: gesture, touch and embodied meaning-making. Odense, Denmark, 26-27 June.
Christidou, D. (2018). Big Data, Thick Data, No Data? The importance of an interdisciplinary approach, Visitor Studies Group 2018 Conference, 8-9 March 2018, London, UK.
Christidou, D. (2018). Designing digital tools for exploring interaction in museums. Visual and Multimodal Research Forum, University College London, Institute of Education, February 22.
Christidou, D., Qvale, A. and Pierroux, P. (2017). Visitracker: a tool for visitor studies designed through a University and Museum Research Collaboration, The Connected Audience Conference 2017, 2nd International conference on Audience Research and Development, Vienna, September 14-16.
Christidou, D. (2017). Visitor Studies: Understanding Visitors’ Meaning-Making Practices, NordMedia Conference, Tampere, Finland, 17-19 August 2017.
Christidou, D. (2017). Touching Art: A learning perspective. Museumspedagogisk påskeseminar, April 03, 2017.
Pierroux, P. & Qvale, A. (2016) Studying Group Interactions with Visitracker: A Design-Based Research-Practice Partnership. Visitor Studies Conference, July 19-23, Boston, MA
Masters Theses
Biuso, E. (2020) Rom, sted og tilstedeværelse i en virtuell arkitekturutstilling. Master's thesis. Oslo: UiO.
The partnership involves curators at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design and researchers and engineers at the Department of Education, UiO. Read more...