Measuring the Visual in the Museum:
Social Meaning Mapping as a Means of Capturing More than Meets the Eye
Dimitra Christidou
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Abstract. The duration of visitors’ visual engagement with the museum collection has been treated as a proxy for their visual literacy. Researchers draw upon different methods to measure this engagement, including eye-tracking and timing and tracking studies. This chapter presents Visitracker, a tablet-app designed to be used in timing and tracking studies, and Social Meaning Mapping (SMM), a digital tool embedded in the Visitracker app, designed to be used post-visit by the visitors. For SMM, visitors are invited to recount their experience verbally while marking it on a digital copy of the room’s floor plan projected on the tablet. Visitors’ audiovisual annotations are recorded by the app and can be accessed later through the Visitracker portal. This chapter argues for the value of coupling timing and tracking with SMM in approaching the museum experience as an embodied and multimodal event, unfolding in specific time and space. Examples from two studies highlight SMM’s contribution to a multimodal understanding of visual literacy in which vision is one of the multiple modes enacted.
Keywords: Informal learning, museum experience, multimodal, sociocultural, visitor studies