Comments on: What a Physics Student Can Teach Us About How Visitors Walk Through a Museum

By: Stephen Bitgood

Stephen Bitgood — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 14:14:06 +0000

I disagree that we have little knowledge about what visitors do in museums. There are many observational studies of visitors — not all survey studies. There have been numerous tracking and timing studies over the years dating back to Edward Robinson and Arthur Melton. I did a review in Curator in 2006 of how visitors move through museums (and other public places for that matter). I can assure you from the literature that visitors do not always move in zig zag patterns — their movement is a function of the layout of the exhibit space. My 2011 book (Social Design of Museums: The Psychology of Visitor Studies) also has a section that deals with visitor orientation and circulation through museums that presents much of the observational data. In addition, many of my colleagues have collected observational data. If you were not able to find the studies, you didn’t look for hard!

By: Jamie Allen

Jamie Allen — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 16:59:09 +0000

Some initial related work coming out of the European museums research project MeLa (http://www.mela-project.eu/) by our group at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (http://ciid.dk/). We’re looking at ways of using head-mounted cameras to look at walkthroughs as an analysis, documentation and (perhaps in some ways) design tool:

https://vimeo.com/groups/130054/videos/42823490
https://vimeo.com/groups/130054/videos/42533271

The videos above are absolutely initial attempts – works in progress – but they are sketches and steps towards looking at the internal (pixel data) information from a head-mounted camera-recorded walk through a museum, as well as the more external-to-experience aspects of quantitative (interview, museological information) techniques for “capturing the museum experience.” Thoughts / comments welcomed on the Vimeo channel…

By: Andrew Oriani

Andrew Oriani — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 04:06:41 +0000

Might I begin by thanking everyone for their comments. They have been very insightful in guiding my readings of similar motion studies. I am more than aware that motion tracking has been around for quite some time, having been used in almost every facet of life from traffic patterns to studies in workplace effeciency. I would however like to address several concerns as to what may make this sort of study unique. People and the movement of patrons is much too complex to understand using logic that quantizes each aspect of human interaction into a simple equation. What I am proposing is a much more powerful way of understanding system dynamics. With today’s technology we are able to collect uncomprehensible amounts of data, and using tools such as numerical interpolation or decomposing raw data into linear systems one can model any system they would like with the power of a modern laptop computer. I recently tested this by looking at voting records of the 112th congress. By turning the raw data into a vectorized system and doing singular value decomposition I was able to quantify partisanship and even predict which point of data corresponded to which senator. While this is not an analogous to this study it does similarly turn something incomprehensibly complex into a rather simple system where statistics play a larger role than a deeper understanding of human habit and psychology. But as Jay said these techniques along with the application of crowdsourcing may introduce a new dimension to something we had originally thought we understood. Unlike art history, science is about asking the what if question, and for those who ask why, my answer is simple, why not?

By: Patty Milich

Patty Milich — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 22:20:19 +0000

And another complexity: the density of attendance in the room. How can that be accounted for? How many times have you not gone on the course you would have intended in a museum because there were people in the way. Perhaps this experiment or obsrvation needs to be done with very few or no people in the room.

By: Katherine Hamilton-Smith

Katherine Hamilton-Smith — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 14:20:42 +0000

I welcome another person from a non-museum field studying museum behavior, even if a similar approach was undertaken 10 or 80 years ago. That something similar has been done before doesn’t negate the doing. If the study and its resulting conclusions/musings are posted TODAY, then new eyes will read and apply. I have been working in and thinking about museums for 30 years (help!), but found this fascinating. AND found that the follow-up comments lead me back to the earlier studies — also a good thing.

By: Kaleberg

Kaleberg — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 16:34:34 +0000

Before photography paintings were expected to represent life independent of scale. Viewing a painting was supposed to be like being there, so paintings were set up with a standard viewing distance. If you were actually concerned with brush strokes, you’d stand closer, closer than you would in real life. Of course, you were expected to ignore the brush strokes and look at the picture, so people do.

Since the development of photography, the mechanics of the representative process have become more important. If you just wanted it to be like being there, you’d look at a photograph. Paintings became less about what than about how. That often meant they looked different at different distances so it made sense to view from varying distances. You would see and learn different things, not about the subject of the image, but about how visual representation works.

(True, there were many pre-photography paintings designed for varying distance viewings, for example, those large state event pictures which served as political cartoon from a distance, but contained precise details of the event such as icons, emblems, and insignia. Only modern viewers up on the relevant iconography and details are likely to do much close viewing of these.)

By: Stuart Reeves

Stuart Reeves — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 13:19:47 +0000

Interesting, but as others have pointed out, time and motion studies in museums are not particularly new. I also would caution against the tendency to think about museum visitors with physics analogies—interesting, no doubt, but probably quite distorting of reality.

One set of literature I would point you to is that generated by Christian Heath, Paul Luff and Dirk vom Lehn at King’s College London, who have conducted extensive qualitative studies of verbal and bodily interaction in museums and galleries. They provide detailed descriptions of the subtle ways in which many of the phenomena you have highlighted in this post work out in practice, and might provide some insight into various questions you are uncovering.

By: Patricia

Patricia — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:17:46 +0000

The variables to assess this topic seem very complex: I am most inluenced by the crowd in a museum exhibition and the well-known work(s) of art in a particular room. The number of people gathered around a famous work will make the path of a newcomer deviate from what is natural. (1) Crowds force one to change the natural path to view works easier to see and to backtrack to the previously crowded one when the coast is clear. (2) People often make a bee-line to the noted work immediately upon room entry, or at least keep watch for an opportunity to get closer view, which likely distorts identified patterns.

By: Jeffrey Abt

Jeffrey Abt — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:22:58 +0000

The conclusions, as well as the drawings, nearly replicate the findings and diagrams published almost eighty years ago in Arthur Melton’s study: “Problems of Installation in Museums of Art” (Washington, D. C.: American Association of Museums, 1935). Melton was what, today, we would call a social psychologist and he used actual museum galleries and systematically altered displays to test his observations. Melton’s work is fascinating but not as well known as it ought to be. Part of the reason is that the museum profession–paradoxically–doesn’t know its own history. Accordingly it has neither significantly improved on Melton’s research methodologies nor made effective use of his findings.

By: Alberto

Alberto — Fri, 25 May 2012 07:11:13 +0000

I wonder if anyone has added pain as a factor in museum art viewing. For me this is always a prime factor due to arthritis, painful feet etc. I don’t have the ability to stand for long periods of time without a break of sitting down for a spell. Gallery after gallery just is too painful and daunting for me.

Also, the museums often overheat the building, particularly in Europe. I have great discomfort wandering around inside an oven that happens to have works of art in it.

I get overwhelmed with the sense of being bombarded with the sublime and the masses of art. It is all too much – I give up and go outside to breathe fresh clear air.

Alberto.