Putting People in the Picture: learning from museum visitors’ social …

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No notes for slide

We’re going to start right on time

We have a tight session with 4 speakers and some time to chat and take questions at the end.

In this session – we going to explore how museums could most effectively LEVERAGE AND RESPOND to their visitor’s social media photos?

How can we better understand the MOTIVATIONS for taking and posting a social photo when visiting the museum?

What TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS solutions could we use to turn our visitor’s social media photos into an analysable dataset?

How can we learn from our visitors and work those learning into our RESPONSE?

To visualise this topic, we have this swimlane diagram. It’s not so much a topic, but a journey. One that ties museum areas together.

This is an IDEALISED JOURNEY. Like an ambiguous POST IT NOTE,
goes on a ‘HAPPY PATH’ into the museum and exerts influence as it goes.

Once it is published online by a visitor (TOP 2 LAYERS)
- MUSEUM TECHNOLOGY might ingest it as a dataset – to sit alongside collection data.
- the MUSEUM SOCIAL MEDIA manager responds and engages – builds a relationship with audiences and visitors
- and MUSEUM EDUCATION uses insights from the dataset to inform their programming

This service structure might not exist like this in any one institution - but parts of it do in some.

Going across – social photographs move in and out of the museum – building a relationship between a visitor or an audience. This system is SCALABLE.

The cycle starts to OVERLAP – like a ROUND ROBIN.

It continues until we might ask - which comes first in VISITOR ENGAGEMENT? The visitor or the museum?

Jenny Kidd will unpack the first layer - the role of the social media photograph when it’s out in the wild and published by the visitor.

We know that social photography – photos taken on smartphones and shared amongst networks (primarily social networks) – is a big deal in 2016.

INTRODUCE PHOTOS - [Images shared from Ann Veronica Jensen’s yellowbluepink installation at Wellcome Collection, London]

Perhaps the most pervasive form of social photography is the selfie, and a number of people have sought to unpack what its implications might be in the museum. Alli Burness’ chapter ‘New Ways of Seeing’ is a great example of that. Multiple sites of identity construction have become very much the norm online; sometimes we might foreground certain aspects of our identity (say, on LinkedIn) and at other times, we might highlight different ones (say, on Facebook). There is more work to be done however to understand just what this means for (say) the #MuseumSelfie. The selfie is a stubbornly ambiguous thing (Senft & Baym 2015).

What kind of selves are created within such a format? Indeed, what kind of museums? Does a social photo represent a new opportunity for a museum user to perform their visitation? If so, what kind of a performance is it?

- (Sometimes) as a performance of power as in feminists trying to reclaim the selfie, those who post photos for trans day of awareness, or to highlight violence in the favelas of Brazil. It can provide a civic refuge. Azoulay (2008) says that ‘Photography, at times, is the only civic refuge at the disposal of those robbed of citizenship’. Powerful stuff.
- Support collocated ‘photowork’, sharing and display (Lindley et al 2008); social practices of capturing, ordering and editing often surround such photos and museums have quickly cottoned on to this potential
- Express and create ‘self’ through everyday creativity (vernacular creativity Burgess 2016)
- Bear witness – link to migrant stories (Alan 2016)
- Co-construct intimacies: to forge and explore new patterns of intimacy (Miguel 2016)

So what can social photography do within a museum context? Well, it can:
- Offer different stories (and different truths) ... and pose new questions. It can frame and focus the museum differently
- Inspire… empathy, play, creativity, curiosity
- Lead to more/better social interaction
- Re-curate, re-interpret, re-value the archive. Re-craft a museum brand (Burness 2016 – social photography can help construct museum identities also)
- Forge ‘new ways of looking’ and ‘place-making’ (Burness 2016)
- Be part of a ‘live’ cross-platform multi-media conversation (Weinemann et al 2013)
. Senft and Baym remind us of the relationship between a social photo and the ‘digital superpublic, outliving the time and place in which it was original[ly] produced, viewed, or circulated.’ As with this photo which picks up on a broader debate about the politics of heritage, display and ‘participation’. This is a quite radical potential of social photography.

Some provocations then…
- Beyoncé is #museumselfie Not all social photography is created equally – we know for example that ‘influencer selfies’ are much more anticipated than those of the average visitor. And the simple truth is that museums probably place a greater value on them also.
- Instagram is not your community. Twitter is not ubiquitous. Social photography isn’t a diverse and open conversation anyone can take part in. Far from it. In these platforms someone is always excluded. Evidence shows us digital exclusion is still a massive problem – and a matter of education, age, race, gender, disability and geography. It is sobering that it is overwhelmingly those same people who are disenfranchised in the rest of society who are disenfranchised online.
- Anyone remember Facebook? Over time what happens to the accumulated archive of social photography that is constructed on a site? Where, how and in what format we archive social photos remains a big question and has an ethical dimension also (raises questions about data, use of third platform sites, digital accessioning and stewardship over time). Digital media are often seen as an antithesis to loss and to forgetting, but such claims are of course flawed and need to be questioned where they are found.
- Swipe-logic might be an emergent norm In the digital environment there is always potentially something more exciting on the next screen. Swipe logic might be here to stay and if it is, what does it mean for how we engage?
- We don’t all [heart] #SelfieTime Social photography makes laughable a conservative photography policy. There are instances of course where social photography – particularly the selfie – has been deemed problematic in the extreme for museums. Persistent bans on photography at some sites - and bans on selfie sticks of course – indicate that the kinds of performance ritualized in the selfie are unwelcome or inappropriate within hallowed museum contexts.
In some instances then, the new performances, networks and meanings brought about by the digital are deemed dangerous; to be actively controlled and discouraged rather than celebrated.

This is the black slide where I talk about death. The museum as mausoleum. This is where collection objects that have lived rich and influential lives coursing through culture come to a final resting place. Where we only talk about their past lives, before they were accessioned. And we disregard their current power.

Digital affords every collection object a new life, available, findable, surfaced by storytelling and connections. Now we can trace the activity of collections objects as they circulate through digital ecosystems. From gallery walls through visitor’s lenses, onto servers and over networks. We can see their traces when they’re tagged, geolocated or matched by computer vision algorithms.

Our collections are not dead. They are alive, and not just on the walls of the galleries. They are now coursing through networks, used, re-used, commented-on, liked, shared and incorporated by audiences. They are alive like never before.

Social media managers can sense trends--who’s noticing what, where, what’s catching people’s attention, what are the outliers--and this is important. It’s begging for a typology (as you’ll see).

<example pinterest boards of sorted Instagrams>

Find them by tag or location, collect them, sort them, (share them!), put them on your wall, save them.

What they reveal as individual images is charming, sometimes funny, poignant. What they reveal in aggregate is important. They are traces of life, of collection objects being used, singled out, marked and connected to people, connected to life.
A social media manager knows these trends, quirks, attachments, senses the life of the galleries and the collection, seen through the eyes of visitors.

It shouldn’t stop there. The institution should leverage that knowledge to better connect with audiences. (as Meagan will show us)

We need to save the stories around our collection objects. This means connecting things like Instagram posts to our collections, making note of how visitors, teachers, professors, artists, designers are using collection objects.

This is a mockup we call CollectionConnector. Imagine a social media manager finds a visitor pic on Instangram. Click and a bookmarklet appears, asking you to relate the image to the collection. Save and the image is connected to the collection.

This is just one part of a museum technologist’s dream--Making mission statements into operating systems.

Many museum mission statements include language that connects people to collections.

A true museum content management system would connect people (a CRM) on the left, to collections (a collections management system) on the right. In the middle are all the different bits of content (from within and without) that connect people to collections. An instagram post is one.

We know that objects are powerful and that we can have Experiences with them
So say you’re a visitor, you go to a place, you do a thing with an object---you experience it, you connect with it, you are transported by it
This is a special thing that happens but we know it happens

What next?

Experiences can happen in a variety of ways --- as Jenny said, taking a photograph in the museum and posting it to social allows for a new type of meaning-making on the visitor’s part

But how do we react as technologists?

Collections are circulating, like Chad discussed, and we see them living on social media
What can a social media manager do to capitalize on these vastly important yet fleeting moments of connection and personal importance?

My goal: to build on these moments; to build relationships between object and visitor / visitor and institution / visitor and EXPERIENCE
THING I MUST MENTION: THIS IS MY IDEAL, MY GOAL, MY DREAM
THIS IS NOT HOW I FUNCTION CURRENTLY, THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO HAPPEN …

But I’m curious about these questions---
A photograph seems so minute, so ephemeral, so silly. But really, it is a solid, tangible, firm piece of evidence that shows there is a moment of connection. Does this make sense?
The social media manager can visually see what our visitors are connecting to through social tracking tools -- this we know.
The museum can watch and listen and occasionally respond -- this we know.

But what I want to tackle is -- WHAT is that response, WHAT is the goal behind responding (more questions, more conversation?), and does it matter??

What do we do right now? We prompt looking and engagement with the collection in order to drive “an Experience”

I’m not talking about anything radical here
I’m talking about asking questions
Resharing images because I see everyone flocking to Monet

So here’s what I’m debunking today, this myth
I’m a museum educator, which I say all the time (sorry!)
Social media is “traditionally” or “usually” a tool for marketing, PR, promotion

We keep it separate from “teaching” our audiences something new -- museum education is, however, inherently about making deeper connections.

Guiding questions, prompting, asking people to look more deeply, what is the point of all of this?
Getting our visitors to think and react.

If I publish a photo with a question based off someone else’s photo, I’m encouraging a chain reaction of thinking and reactions from our visitors.
Can we start to establish a trend?
Can we start to watch our visitors and their behaviors?
This can help us alter what we do and say on social media so that we can become more aware, more human, more personal and MORE REAL.

For instance, I see that people are posting contemplative images of looking at works of art. I repost one, ask a question, ask visitors to share their thoughts. We get responses plus an influx of more images. Have I shaped the visitor experience? Have I changed modes of engagement, or just urged them along?

The point still remains that you must guide with principles of museum education in mind---open-ended questioning, curiosity and wonder, etc etc

Constantly learning
Constantly resharing and asking questions of our audience
I get ideas from them
They in turn provide content for me
It is a win-win

What is the next step beyond this?

It’s unusual for me to be speaking from a museum education perspective – rather that a digital perspective - but that’s where I find myself today.

This project EXTENDS CHAD’S IDEA that we can “trace the activity of collection objects as they circulate through digital ecosystems”
PHOTOS BEGGING FOR TYPOLOGY

and MEAGAN’S IDEA that we can lean on our visitor’s as teachers.

I need to give a big SHOUT OUT to my colleagues in crime:

KYLIE BUDGE - Research Manager at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney (aka the Powerhouse)
JIM FISHWICK- a Museum Educator and all round very talented person, also at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences.

There were many INSPIRATIONS for this project.

In mid 2015 – the debate about SOCIAL MEDIA PHOTOS AS A VALID MODE of museum engagement raised its head yet again. In a major newspaper interview, a prominent museum director in Australia dismissed them as superficial.

At about that time – I was at MCN last year and Elissa Frankle tweeted this.

So Kylie, Jim and I set out to LOOK AT THE DATA
we wanted to understand what engagement with museum objects means from the perspective of visitors
we wanted to know how visitors engage with objects using visual social media.

In summary
- we harvested a set of Instagram images taken at a museum.
- we analysed the images and their captions using 2 different methods.
- we discovered a spectrum of different ways that visitors engage with objects using social photography.

The images we harvested – here shown on our public Tumblr site - were posted to one geotag at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. We used this site because of the high number of images posted from that museum, so we could generate a dataset relatively quickly.

In 7 days we collected 380 images. It was meant to be a test, but Instagram changed its API. Semi-automatically harvesting images using a service like IFTTT isn’t possible anymore and this has changed our future plans for this research.

Tumblr didn’t let us easily sort the images. We wanted to sort them into groups that organically emerged from the dataset. So we printed out every image and Kylie’s office became a kind of visual analysis lab.

The first time we sorted them - we applied a visual research method. We focussed on analysing the images themselves. We did this to address a gap in discourse analysis identified by Gillian Rose. She has argued that audiences have been a neglected aspect of visual research – that the visitor’s eye has been mostly absent from discourse analysis.

images broke themselves into relatively simple HIGH LEVEL CATEGORIES.

images that FOCUS ON OBJECTS are a majority,

groups that FEATURE PEOPLE make up a similar amount – indicating how influential that social aspect of the museum visit is.

To get more NUANCED AND MEANINGFUL categories - we paired VISUAL WITH LINGUISTIC analysis.

SORTED AGAIN

focussed on which aspect of the image was EMPHASISED IN THE CAPTION.

We found these emergent categories which spoke to the MOTIVATIONS for taking these images. They indicated a range of reasons for engaging.

The numbers indicate the SIZE of each category – from smallest to largest.

Note that ‘self love’ – being selfies or self portraits – was smallest
We felt that images which were a CREATIVE RESPONSE where the sweet spot. That point where the visitor became the museum and the museum became the visitor (to quote Falk) – both influences were in balance.

these groups OVERLAPPED significantly – not mutually exclusive like first sort. Each group could be related to the others, in a type of spectrum.

This HUB AND SPOKE sketch - first attempt to visualise.

Our latest visualisation.

To UNPACK it

One one side - types of INFLUENCES that visitors bring when they visit a museum. Fleeting down to prolonged.

One other side - categories of social media photo - as types of EXPRESSION of the museum visit. Not favouring museum goals, but reflecting visitor focus without imposed sense of value.

SORTED by visitor-centric to object centric - creative response in the middle, where both come together.

This is JUST ONE MORE SPECTRUM of visitor engagement. There are many already out there - some of which we all know and love.

Jim, Kylie and I see the spectrum we’re found is an EVEN PLAYING FIELD - NO DEEP OR SHALLOW engagement.

This spectrum is a way that museums can LEARN FROM VISITORS (as Meagan suggested) and SHAPE THEIR RESPONSE through programming.

***

Next steps
Interviewing the creators of these images
What‘s the motivation behind no caption?
Different types of museum collection – this was focussing on art, what about natural history?

Putting People in the Picture: learning from museum visitors’ social photos

Alli Burness

Putting People in the Picture: learning from museum visitors’ social photos