NordMedia Abstracts for panel TWG 8 Audience Studies. 23rd Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research. Tampere, August 2017

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1 NordMedia rd Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research Tampere, August 2017 Abstracts for panel TWG 8 Audience Studies

2 Friday, 18 August Panel: Engaging audience and visitor studies Dimitra Christidou Visitor Studies: Understanding Visitors Meaning-Making Practices Sigurd Trolle Gronemann Young learners in the new inclusive landscape of participatory and mediated museum learning Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt From audience to visitors to participants

3 Visitor Studies: Understanding Visitors Meaning-Making Practices Dimitra Christidou, University of Oslo, According to Hooper-Greenhill (1996), visitors are the ones who will actually come to the museum, whereas audiences have yet to be persuaded to become visitors. Visitor studies, as a field, describes the activities and research undertaken specifically to identify the use and meet the needs of existing visitors, and reach out to potential audiences. For more than half a century, visitor studies has been a means of influencing how museums design for and understand their visitors, offering insight into the visitor experience in museum spaces, with exhibitions and learning programmes. This has entailed a shift from studies primarily concerned with tracking and time and collecting demographic information to a more holistic understanding of situated visitor practices and meaning-making. Providing an approach to understanding visitor experiences, the paradigm of meaning-making foregrounds the visitor's active role in the shaping of the museum experience in the new mediascape (Kidd 2014; Insulander 2010; Pierroux & Ludvigsen 2013). The role of the visitors constructing meanings, and becoming performers rather than just viewers, has been further foregrounded by digital interactivity in museums. As social and digital media increasingly merge physical spaces into museum mediascapes, visitor studies also explore how media invite and facilitate new behaviours and opportunities for meaning making, such as posing and taking selfies with artworks. Interactivity and digitization have undoubtedly added to the complexity of researching visitors encounters; understanding the impact of interactive media in this relationship as well as how visitors engage and make meaning. Additionally, digitization facilitates new techniques, methods and tools used to study visitors interactions with art. The presentation discusses the ways in which museum and research practices in Norway develop key concepts of visitor studies. To address the problem of how museums may conceptualize and study visitors meaning making to inform curatorial practices and decisions (Scott, Dodd and Sandell, 2014), a researchpractice partnership between the University of Oslo and the National Museum has been established. Within this collaborative framework, new tools and methods have been developed to better understand audiences and their meaning making processes. Visitracker, a tablet-based tool and online portal, has been developed to analyze real-time observations of individual and group interactions in museums. Visitracker allows for identifying the multiplicity of modes of meaning-making, foregrounding not only the curatorial aspect, but also the content and the processes of interaction through sensorial and embodied means such as touch, posing, and pointing. The presentation will discuss the potential contribution of this tool, some of the empirical results and the importance of this ongoing research-practice synergy. By bringing together various

4 elements of the museum experience that are often discussed and explored segmentally, the presentation will add to the advancement of our understanding visitors meaning-making practices. References Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1996). Improving museum learning. East Midlands Museum Service. Insulander, E. (2010). Tinget, rummet, besökaren: Om meningsskapande på museum. [Artefacts, spaces, visitors: A study of meaning-making in museums]. Doctoral Thesis, Stockholm University. Kidd, J. (2014). Museums in the new mediascape: Transmedia, participation, ethics. Farnham: Ashgate. Pierroux, P. & S. Ludvigsen (2013). Communication interrupted: Textual practices and digital interactives in art museums. In K.C. Schrøder & K. Drotner (eds.), The connected museum: Social media and museum communication, pp London: Routledge. Scott, C., J. Dodd & R. Sandell (2014) Cultural value, user value of museums and galleries: A critical view of the literature. RCMG, University of Leicester.

5 Young learners in the new inclusive landscape of participatory and mediated museum learning Sigurd Trolle Gronemann, University of Southern Denmark, Young learners have always been at the heart of media and museum studies. With the rise of more inclusive and holistic perspectives of learning (Drotner & Erstad 2014; Meyers et al. 2013; Sefton-Green & Erstad 2012), new media have been viewed in museums as essential tools for conceptualising learning. With this, new user-centred and participatory development approaches have been applied in museums, and researchers have begun to employ more holistic research designs and interdisciplinary research approaches to capture and frame the complex and interrelated dimensions of today s mediated museum learning. However, the new dominant discourses of inclusive learning and participatory processes continuously leave the concept of the young learner in a liquid state: they navigat from notions of more traditional receivers of learning to free-choice learners and they variously regard and engage the young as users, visitors, audiences and co-producers. The blurring and mutability of how young people are perceived and engaged with in relation to mediated museum learning, and its consequences for museum and research practise, is the focus of this presentation. The paper draws on five years of analysing and co-designing ICT for learning in two large Danish naturalscience institutions, the National Aquarium of Denmark and the National History Museum of Denmark. Incorporating insights into both institutional and procedural aspects on the one hand, and understandings of young peoples perspectives and actual engagements on the other, this meta-analysis aggregates across a total of seven ICT projects that have targeted young learners both onsite and online. Three key issues that relate to the interrelated commonalities and divergences between media and museum studies are emphasised. First, the juxtaposition of online learning audiences primarily located in formal learning contexts and physical school visitors engaging with ICTs onsite serve to confuse museums approaches to framing learning and learners. Second, a discrepancy exists between processes that, in some instances, are approached through participatory design processes and participatory ICTs, yet in other instances maintain more traditional ways of viewing learning in museums, views that are often cultivated by museums as well as teachers and young people alike, and which serve to maintain the traditional power relationships in both processes and communication practises. Third, researchers wanting to use people-centred research approaches and methods, such as examining learners experiences by adopting learners perspectives, are challenged by how to frame and define young people s roles and motivations in learning contexts. As a

6 result, researchers risk eliciting insights into young people s motivations, interests, opinions and needs in relation to mediated museum learning that is conditioned by the same discrepancies that affect museum framings. References Drotner, K. & O. Erstad (2014). Inclusive media literacies: Interlacing media studies and education studies, International Journal of Learning and Media, 4(2): Meyers, E. M., I. Erickson & R. V. Small (2013). Digital literacy and informal learning environments: An introduction, Learning, Media and Technology, 38(4): Sefton-Green, J. & O. Erstad (2012). Identity, community, and learning lives in the digital age, in J. Sefton- Green & O. Erstad (eds.), Identity, community, and learning lives in the digital age: Transactions, technologies, and learner Identity, pp Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7 From audience to visitors to participants Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Malmö University, This presentation looks into the different paradigms of discussions when it comes to looking at the people in the museum. The traditional understanding of visitors places them often with a certain distance like good guests in our house, they are welcome, but are expected to leave after certain time without leaving too many traces behind. At the same time, the paradigm shift in audience studies (Livingstone, 2013) towards more participatory audiences together with the need to reevaluate museums role in society brings us to looking for new words in relation to people in museums. This presentation will discuss the ideas and usefulness of audience studies tools and vocabulary in relation to museums. While mostly theoretical, the inspiration for the paper comes also from five years of experiments with Estonian National Museum where we conducted a number of interventions to change the relationship between the museum and its people (Runnel & Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, 2014). Meta-analysis of these experiences allows me to distill the people in museum to five levels of relationships where each next level is more engaged and more actively playing a role in the museum. The articulation of these relations strives to avoid normativity and rather sees these different levels as repertoires potentially always present in different forms. The different approaches to the people will look at the following concepts. 1. The concept of public, which emphasizes the civic role and place of the museum. 2. The concept of audiences in plural sense from media studies to discuss the level of changed engagement to the issues related to the museums. 3. The concept of visitors directly familiar from the museum studies with its limitations and possibilities. 4. The concept of users, borrowed and expanded from the digital communication, but also highlighting the active role of the people in taking heritage to an active engagement level. 5. The concept of participants, which demands critical examination of how and under which conditions can people be participants in museum and really make impact in the sense of maximalist democratic perspective (Carpentier 2011). The presentation aims to highlight the differences in the paradigmatic approaches whether people are looked at potential public, audiences, visitors, users or participants as these words and labels play a role in institutional treatment. At the same time, the discussion proposes some ideas as to how to move between the different concepts so that the repertoires of the museums could be enhanced from the discursive diversity.

8 References Carpentier, N. (2011). Media and participation: A site of ideological-democratic struggle. Intellect. Livingstone, S. (2013). The participation paradigm in audience research. The Communication Review, 16(1-2): Runnel, P., & Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, P. (2014). Democratising the museum: Reflections on participatory technologies. New York: Peter Lang.

UNIVERSITY OF THESSALY DEPARTMENT OF EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION POSTGRADUATE STUDIES INFORMATION GUIDE

UNIVERSITY OF THESSALY DEPARTMENT OF EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION POSTGRADUATE STUDIES INFORMATION GUIDE 2011-2012 CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 3 A. BRIEF PRESENTATION OF THE MASTER S PROGRAMME 3 A.1. OVERVIEW