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Many visitor studies make social background variables the central point of departure to explain participation patterns. How the past is 'staged', however, also has an influence on those to whom it appeals. This relational perspective calls for new conceptual tools to grasp empirical reality. Inspired by the historical philosophy of Georg Simmel and the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin a number of concepts which enable us to grasp the subtle relationship between museum presentations and visitors are presented. Bakhtin's notion of chronotopy serves as a key concept. By linking museum presentations and visitor perceptions with each other, it is also possible to identify certain tendencies within the contemporary museum landscape.
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Even though more than seventy-five years have passed since the end of WWII, its prominence in entertainment media productions along with the global emergence of memorial markers have contributed to its omnipresence in people’s minds. Nevertheless, the perception of this historical event is still far from reaching consensus as nations tend to interpret and remember episodes in accordance with their perspective, thus adding up to the complexity of WWII and of Holocaust memories. With this in mind, this article describes the idiosyncrasies of Portugal’s recent tribute and remembrance strategies for the victims of WWII. The country’s neutral status, along with a set of cultural and historical specifics, has led to the dissemination of tropes leading to the idea of Portugal as an inherently tolerant and mild-mannered nation. A perception that is often fostered by resorting to monuments, museums, tourism and leisure activities. Despite evidence provided, mostly, by recent academic studies and documentary films, these tropes continue to fuel Portuguese popular imagination and are still prevalent in some recently established WWII memory places.
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This publication gives an account of the Public Annotation of Cultural Heritage research project (PACE) conducted at the Crossmedialab. The project was carried out between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2009, and was funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. Three members of the Dutch Association of Science Centres (Vereniging Science Centra) actively participated in the execution of the project: the Utrecht University Museum, the National Museum of Natural History (Naturalis), and Museon. In addition, two more knowledge institutes participated: Novay and the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. BMC Consultancy and Manage¬ment also took part in the project. This broad consortium has enabled us to base the project on both knowledge and experience from a practical and scientific perspective. The purpose of the PACE project was to examine the ways in which social tagging could be deployed as a tool to enrich collections, improve their acces¬sibility and to increase visitor group involvement. The museums’ guiding question for the project was: ‘When is it useful to deploy social tagging as a tool for the benefit of museums and what kind of effect can be expected from such deployment?’ For the Crossmedialab the PACE project presented a unique opportunity to conduct concrete research into the highly interesting phenomenon of social tagging with parties and experts in the field.
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This study assessed the effect of visitors' personality and emotional response on finding positive meaning in life and the intention to spread positive word of mouth. The sample (n = 260) consists of visitors to Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum near Berlin. Findings indicate that the emotion of interest positively contributes to finding positive meaning in life and positive word of mouth. The effects of personality are marginal. Personality explains little of the variance in positive meaning and positive word of mouth. Emotional response accounts for 25% of the variance in finding positive meaning in life-in terms of finding personal benefit from the visit, controlled for personality. Despite the dominant negative emotional response, tourists find positive meaning in their visit. These findings correspond with those observed in studies on personal trauma and loss. Positive meaning could potentially contribute to adjustment processes to cope with what occurred. Future research should include address longer term effects on postvisit behavior.
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This article describes how the 4 period rooms of the city museum in the Dutch town of Bergen op Zoom were redesigned using storytelling and how this design has been received by visitors. For this redesign, rooms were reframed as sets of the story of Marie Anne van Arenberg, Marquise of Bergen op Zoom, and the objects as props to stage her story, which was full of secrets and of unexpected turning points. The visitor is enticed to discover cues to unlock these secrets in order to get a grip on her story while exploring the museum space. This is however not a treasure hunt, nor simply a game, but an exploration in which visitors are invited to discover and to create meaning and a journey into what matters to them. To this end, they have indeed to resort to their own frame of reference and to their personal life story in order to come to a narrative closure at the end of their visit. We used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to understand the visitors’ lived experience, both emotionally and sensorially at different moments and situations during the story-driven experience and to understand how the chosen design helps tell the story and how visitors use their personal context and frame of reference to make sense of it.
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The advent of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has had and is having a major impact on Indonesian cultural resource management, and on the safeguarding methods of its tangible and intangible cultural heritages. Despite varied levels and visible gaps between rural and urban regions in terms of technology usage, innovative initiatives have been created, which correspond to the needs and expectations of a technology-savvy public. As a starting point, a number of public institutions dealing with tangible cultural heritage (e.g. museums, palaces, temples, World Heritage Sites (WHS) do use innovative digital tools in order to communicate to various audiences, as well as to enrich visitors' experience, especially taking into consideration young generations. This paper will firstly examine the role of ICTs in intangible cultural heritage (ICH) (e.g. Batik, Wayang puppet theatre, etc.); secondly, the authors will explain how ICTs can help to communicate and promote the values, history, and significances of ICH products, both for locals and tourists, with the goal of raising awareness on cultural identity. However, the knowledge of ICH still requires contacts with its own communities and is vulnerable, as it can be exposed to excessive cultural commoditization through e-platforms. This study aims at giving an overview and some examples of digital interventions for cultural heritage communication implemented by various stakeholders in Indonesia. In addition, this paper analyses to what extent a participatory approach engaging local communities, academics, private sectors, NGOs and the government, can ensure higher levels of effectiveness and efficiency, hence supporting the conservation of UNESCO tangible/ICH in Indonesia. This paper aims at: (1) presenting the development of digital heritage platforms in Indonesia; (2) providing a grid of analysis of digital heritage knowledge platforms dedicated to UNESCO tangible and ICH in forms of websites and mobile apps.
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Collecting local memories on-line is a growing practice with participatory elements on different levels. Three levels of participation – micro, meso and macro – are introduced by describing an exemplary case: the Memory of East in Amsterdam. These levels of this particular case can be grounded in the statements of the Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society. This indicates that the Memory of East case might be a good practice. However, looking at 53 other cases shows that the three levels are present, but designed differently with respect to the degree in which residents participate. Since the convention is not specific enough we choose the notion of cultural citizenship to assess the value of cases like these. We claim that the cases that have more focus on ordinary residents participating on all three levels assures a sustainable and self-feeding system, which is the best answer to the goals of the convention.
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Online platforms for collecting local memories are often claimed to be a driving force of empowerment for individuals, groups and the community as a whole. Long term online participation especially plays a key role in the claims for empowerment on group and community level. However, the present research on local memory websites lacks empirical data to substantiate these claims and leaves aside questions about their wider presence, the way they are organized and how their particular structure and affordances enable online participation. To address these issues, we develop six analytical dimensions in order to analyse a comprehensive number of such sites, examining in particular their organizational and online participatory features. On the basis of a cross-sectional design including 80 cases from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and various other countries, we show three types of websites can be distinguished, namely residential, institutional and associational. In addition, we find that the expectancy of online participation is maximized not only by organizational aspects that fosterautonomy, but also by characteristics that enlarge the sense of authenticity. Our findings also show a limited number of cases with a considerable level of online participation, which offers the empirical data for analysis in terms of empowerment on group and community level.Nevertheless, we conclude that in most cases the organizational characteristics and participatory affordances of the websites are not sufficient to produce empowerment on all levels.
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In January 2008 the online photo-hosting site Flickr introduced a new section entitled The Commons. Its two key goals were to show the hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives to the general public and to give Flickr community members the opportunity to contribute and describe these photos in order to enrich these collections. Surprisingly enough, little empirical research has been done on the actual usage of The Commons by the institutes and Flickr members. In our research we harvested a rich data sample over a 14-week period: 196,822 photos with user-generated content of 1.3 million tags, almost 130,000 comments and more than 22,000 notes. In total, 165,401 members from 188 different countries actively “did something” with the photos. This presentation will analyze this large data sample. In addition to the quantitative findings, we will discuss the qualitative findings regarding the content analysis of tags and comments.
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