Evaluating digital cultural heritage 'in the wild': The case for reflexivity

Digital heritage interpretation is often untethered from traditional museological techniques and environments. As museums and heritage sites explore the potentials of locative technologies and ever more sophisticated content-triggering mechanisms for use outdoors, the kinds of questions digital heritage researchers are able to explore have complexified. Researchers now find themselves in the realm of the immersive, the experiential, and the performative. Working closely with their research participants, they navigate ambiguous terrain including the often unpredictable affective resonances that are the direct consequences of interaction. This article creates a dialogue between two case studies which, taken together, help to unpack some key methodological and ethical questions emerging from these developments. Firstly, we introduce With New Eyes I See, an itinerant and immersive digital heritage encounter which collapsed boundaries between physical/digital, fact/fiction and past/present. Secondly, we detail Rock Art on Mobile Phones, a set of dialogic web apps that aimed to explore the potential of mobile devices in delivering heritage interpretation in the rural outdoors. Looking outward from these case studies, we reflect on how traditional evaluation frameworks are being stretched and strained given the kinds of questions digital heritage researchers are now exploring. Drawing on vignettes from experience-oriented qualitative studies with participants, we articulate specific common evaluative challenges related to the embodied, multimodal and transmedial nature of the digital heritage experiences under investigation. In doing so, we make the case for reflexivity as a central - and more collaborative - feature of research design within this field going forward; paying attention to, and advocating, the reciprocal relationship between researchers and the heritage experiences we stud

Hybrid material encounters - expanding the continuum of museum materialities in the wake of a pandemic

For SHORT INSIGHT PAPERS - Museums and COVID 19: First Responses. Our undertsanding is that no abstract is required. Do let us know if you need one.

Far away is close at hand: an ethnographic investigation of social conduct in mixed reality museum visits

This thesis investigates how museum companions organise their conduct regarding their engagement with the exhibition and their social interaction with each other in the course of a visit. The main objectives of the thesis are the empirical investigation of social conduct in casual group museum visits and the exploration and understanding of social conduct in real-time distributed museum visits through mobile mixed reality technology. A third area of interest is the application of qualitative methodology, based on ethnomethodology and ethnographic methods, for the fulfilment of the above objectives. In particular this thesis presents and discusses fieldwork of collocated casual group visits alongside video recording and interviews collected in distributed museum visits during trial sessions in the Mack Room mixed reality museum environment. Drawing on vignettes of activity among collocated and distributed participants, the thesis develops discussion around three themes: the collaborative exploration of museum artefacts, aspects of the collaborative management of shared museum visits and the constitution of the visiting ‘order’ in and through social conduct. Among others, issues of collaborative alignment, awareness, indication of engagement and disengagement and conflicting accountabilities are discussed. The contribution of this thesis in current research in museum studies, CSCW and social science is explored. Findings reported in this thesis extend current visitor studies research to include the study of social conduct in the management of collocated visits and the constitution of visiting order. They also suggest that studies of sociality among distributed visitors may open opportunities for museums to support mutually complementing local and distributed experiences. With regard to understanding asymmetries in mobile mixed reality environments, the thesis points out that asymmetries could be better understood with reference to the activity in context rather than the technological features themselves. This thesis also makes a contribution to social studies research with regard to exploring the changing character of talk in distributed collaborative settings. Future research with respect to mixed reality applications for museum visits is also outlined

Blurring the boundaries of the Mackintosh room

In this paper we describe a prototype interactive systemsupporting a shared synchronous experience for physical,World Wide Web and virtual reality visitors to anexhibition devoted to the designer and architect C.R.Mackintosh. The system provides awareness betweenvisitors that spans multiple media while also providinglocation- and device-sensitive content to each visitor

Other People’s Stories: Bringing Public-Generated Photography into the Contemporary Art Museum

Constituting the ‘defining other’ of art photography, amateur photographic practices have long been neglected or specifically excluded from official histories of photography. Even the term ‘amateur’ has historically been characterized by semantic ambiguity. In recent years, however, contemporary amateur photographs have been capturing the art curatorial imagination. This is often motivated by the institutional and political impetus to engage with personal, local stories, rather than official, national narratives alone. Amateur photographs, with their apparent rawness and immediacy may afford the art museum with a more credible record of ‘real life’ and enable the display of polyvocal narratives. Furthermore, the changing digital media landscape has opened up opportunities for art museums to reach new audiences through public-contributed content. In response to these developments, this article asks: How has amateur photography acquired a protagonist role in contemporary art museum displays? Drawing on contrasting case studies of exhibitions in the US and Europe, which have incorporated user contributed photographic content in their displays, this article discusses how everyday photographic creativity and the raw materials of people’s stories serve as a means to interact with institutionally constructed histories of photography

The Challenge of Evaluating Situated Display based Technology Interventions Designed to Foster a Sense of Community

In this paper we discuss the obdurate problems associated with evaluating the extent to which technological interventions – in particular those based on mobile and ubiquitous technologies – can be judged to have 'improved a sense of community' in their given deployment settings. We report on experiences gained from several deployments of ubiquitous systems that share this design goal, and analyze common issues we observed during real life use of these systems. Based on these we discuss some of the key challenges for evaluating ubiquitous systems of this genre

Other People’s (Hi)stories: Bringing Public-Generated Photography into the Contemporary Museum

Constituting the "defining other" of art photography, amateur photographic practices have long been neglected or specifically excluded from official histories of photography. Even the term "amateur" - often linguistically interchanged with the conceptually distinct terms "vernacular," "folk," "popular," and "mass" - has historically been characterized by semantic ambiguity, connoting both the joys of the pastime and a lack in professional skill. In recent years, however, contemporary amateur photographs have been capturing the curatorial imagination. On the one hand, this is motivated by the institutional and political impetus to engage with personal, local heritage, rather than official, national heritage alone. Amateur photographs, with their apparent rawness, immediacy and everydayness, may afford the museum with a more credible and authentic record of "real life" and enable the display of polyvocal narratives. On the other hand, the changing digital media landscape that has given rise to social media and networking has opened up opportunities for museums to diversify their activities and to reach new audiences through public-contributed content. In response to these developments, this essay asks: How has amateur photography acquired a protagonist role in contemporary museum displays? It will explore this question through contrasting case studies of exhibitions in the US and Europe, which have incorporated user-contributed photographic content in their displays. We thus discuss how everyday photographic creativity and the raw materials of other people's (hi)stories serve as a means to interact with institutionally constructed histories