Seeing and Being Seen: The Multimodality of Museum Spectatorship

This article argues that museum visiting and the act of ‘spectatorship’, both of which are often assumed to be ocularcentric, are multimodal events. Anchored in Goffman’s dramaturgy and frame analysis theory, as well as Kress’s multimodal and social semiotic theory of representation and communication, this article presents an apposite interpretative and methodological framework to account for what has not been widely addressed by museum studies; that is, the multimodality of the museum experience. By drawing upon audio-visual excerpts of museum encounters, this analysis brings to the fore the embodied visiting and viewing practices of visitors in museum galleries. Specifically, this article highlights the range of modes of communication and representation, beyond gazing and looking, which are employed, negotiated and regulated within the social context of the visit. The article suggests that visitors’ experiences are embodied and performative interactions with the exhibits and other visitors.Key words: embodiment, multimodality, museums, social interaction, visitor

Children’s ‘eye views’ of an archaeological site: A multimodal social semiotic approach to children’s drawings

This paper presents eight-year-old children's ‘eye views’ of the archaeological site of the Agora in Athens, Greece, based on drawings made during an educational programme on site. Complementing a significant body of research on drawings, we introduce a multimodal social semiotic perspective to explore drawings as ‘designed’ accounts of children’s ‘eye views’. We argue that each account arises as an agentive response to their interests and prompts in the environment framing their experience, such as features of the site and the educational programme. Based on four drawings, we identify salient elements of children’s experience in their representations which we analyze as material realizations of (i) their interests and agency, (ii) their visual and embodied engagement with the archaeological site, and (iii) the framing of the educational task and overall programme. Our findings contribute to research on the importance of visual in learning

The Educational Museum: Innovations and Technologies Transforming Museum Education. The Benaki Museum, Athens, 17 October 2013

<p class="p1">The main topic of 'The Educational Museum: Innovations and Technologies Transforming Museum Education 'conference, third in a series of conferences organised by the Benaki Museum in partnership with the American Embassy and the British Council in Greece,<span class="s2"> </span>was the use of technology and social media as means of transforming museum education and, sometimes, funding museum exhibitions and educational programmes. Among others, the conference aimed to discuss the use of digital applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Kickstarter by museums in order to attract a wider audience, interpret their collections and even fund their programmes

Art on the move: The role of joint attention in visitors' encounters with artworks

Most visitors arrive at museums and navigate their way through the galleries as part of a group, a constellation requiring them to oscillate their attention between their companions and the curated exhibition. This paper focuses on two examples of videotaped data collected at an art museum in the UK to explore the ways in which visitors achieve joint attention with their companions in front of a painting. The analysis draws on interaction analysis and foregrounds the ways in which pairs of visitors achieve joint attention, especially when there is distance between them and they are not attending the same artwork. The findings contribute to a better understanding of attention as a resource for meaning making in the museum and complement the line of research exploring how visitors negotiate and make meaning in and through social interaction

Trails of Walking - Ways of Talking: The Museum Experience Through Social Meaning Mapping

This paper discusses the digital method Social Meaning Mapping (SMM) and its affordances to capture aspects of the museum visit. SMM, embedded in the Visitracker tablet-app, enables the annotation of visitors’ movement and interactions in a particular gallery room post-visit. During a researcher-led session, visitors handle the tablet and annotate their experience on its screen while sharing their thoughts aloud. Both visitors’ annotations and their voices are being recorded through the app. Each SMM can be accessed through Visitracker’s portal as a video which re-creates visitors’ ‘trails of walking’ (what they mark) and their ‘ways of talking’ (what they say) in synchronization. In this paper, we draw upon data collected at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere in Vienna to argue that SMM created by visitors can complement tracking and timing (T&T) data collected by researchers, allowing for a more holistic understanding of the museum experience. The analysis shows that SMM captures visitors’ experiences in a multimodal way, both visual and verbal, enabling them to foreground aspects of their personal experience, spatial practices, co-experience and social realms of their visit

Museum encounters: a choreography of visitors’ bodies in interaction

By viewing the museum experience as inextricably linked to an interactive nexus of bodies and objects arranged in the museum space, this paper foregrounds the significance of movement in the shaping of museum encounters. Informed by the fields of dance, symbolic interactionism and multimodal social semiotics, it introduces a conceptualisation of visitors’ movement as choreography unfolding either in compliance with the museum ‘script’ (scripted choreographies), or in response to prompts from other visitors sharing the same space (improvised choreographies). Attending to visitors’ positioning and alignment as key resources of movement, the analysis of video data from two London galleries illustrates how visitors oscillate between performing ‘scripted choreographies’ and ‘improvised choreographies’ through shifts in positioning and alignment, while being spectators of other visitors’ choreographies. Both kinds of choreographies are continuously shaped in interaction with the ‘scripted’ museum stage and other visitors’ ‘scripted’ and ‘improvised choreographies’

Using the lens of science capital to capture and explore children’s attitudes toward science in an informal making-based space

Purpose Governments and organizations worldwide are concerned over the declining number of young people choosing to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), especially after the age of 16. Research has foregrounded that students with positive attitudes toward science are more likely to find it relevant and aspire to a science career. This study aims to understand the factors shaping students’ attitudes as these are pivotal in promoting science learning. Design/methodology/approach This study uses the framework of science capital to understand what shapes young people’s engagement with or resistance to science. The authors conducted four Computational Thinking making-based workshops with 106 children aged 15–16 years, of which 58 filled in a questionnaire and 22 were interviewed. Statistical and content analyses were performed respectively. Findings The results indicate that children who are more exposed to science-related activities and contexts are more likely to have higher self-efficacy, and that those with higher prior coding experience scored higher in their self-efficacy and science capital. Six themes emerged from the content analysis, highlighting the diverse factors shaping students’ attitudes, such as teaching methods, stereotypes and the degree of difficulty encountered while engaging with science in and out of school. Originality/value By combining qualitative and quantitative methods with the use of science capital, the authors found a number of aspects of the school experience that shape students’ attitudes to science learning in and out of school, as well as their science career aspirations

Tools and Methods for ‘4E Analysis’: New Lenses for Analyzing Interaction in CSCL

This symposium aims to expand the use of and perspectives on Interaction Analysis (IA) and related methods in CSCL, and to explore new ways of collecting, editing, visualizing and sharing research data, including video and location-based data. We bring the development and use of novel digital tools and IA methods to the foreground and invite participants to join us in reflecting on and designing the next phase of IA in CSCL, which in keeping with the theme of the conference is coined 4E Analysis. During the session, we will share, compare and contrast four different digital tools and new approaches to studying collaborative learning that have been recently developed by CSCL researchers from across three different countries and four universities

Tools and Methods for ‘4E Analysis’: New Lenses for Analyzing Interaction in CSCL

This symposium aims to expand the use of and perspectives on Interaction Analysis (IA) and related methods in CSCL, and to explore new ways of collecting, editing, visualizing and sharing research data, including video and location-based data. We bring the development and use of novel digital tools and IA methods to the foreground and invite participants to join us in reflecting on and designing the next phase of IA in CSCL, which in keeping with the theme of the conference is coined 4E Analysis. During the session, we will share, compare and contrast four different digital tools and new approaches to studying collaborative learning that have been recently developed by CSCL researchers from across three different countries and four universities