Dani's Day Nine Reflections

June 17th, 2016

Meeting with Laura

10am-11:30ish am

The meeting was much less formal than our previous meeting about observation strategies. Laura apologized for the meeting on Tuesday and clarified that every Tuesday meeting will focus more on sharing our findings. She then reminded us to focus the interview questions on discovering whether or not the prompts promote close-looking.

She feels that a semi-structured model for interviews would be best for our project because it would allow our interviewees to have more freedom in their responses. Nonetheless, she wanted us to be careful not to have biased/leading questions and to focus on what we need to know. She informed us about how important it is to establish a sense of physical and mental comfort with our interviews and not to overwhelm them. It shouldn't feel like a test (which is ironic because we will literally be discussing how they used the prompts in the exhibit). According to Laura, the basis structure of the interview should resemble this:

1. Friendly Introduction of Interviewer and Project
2. Soft Ball Question: An easy warm-up question
3. Deeper Questions
4. Demographic Questions
5. Any Additional Thoughts
   

Drafting Interview Questions

11:30-12pm

After the meeting with Laura, Maeve and I drafted prompt-specific interview questions.

Intro: "Hi! I'm so and so, and I'm an intern here at the museum doing research on the ways visitors are engaging with the prompts in the Look Again exhibit. Would you mind doing a quick interview with me? It shouldn't take longer than 10 mins and we can sit down if that would be more comfortable.

1. Is this your first visit to the museum? If not, are you a member? Is this your first time seeing the Creative Africa exhibit?
2. How familiar are you with historical African art?
3. Did you have a favorite section of the Look Again exhibit? What was it? Why did it stand-out to you?
4. Did you notice the prompts in that section of the exhibit? If so, did you read them?
5. Do you remember if you read the prompts before, after or while looking at the objects in that section?
6. In terms of the entire exhibit, did the prompts enhance or detract from your overall experience? Why?
7. Did you dislike anything in the exhibit? If so, why?
8. Please rate the following statements from 1 to 5, 1 being that you strongly disagree and 5 being that you strongly agree
   
   • I'm glad the prompts were in the exhibit.
   • I understood what the prompt was asking me to do.
   • These types of prompts belong in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
     

9.Why do you think the prompts were included in the exhibit?
10. May I ask your age, gender and race?
11. Are you a local?
12. Is there anything else you'd like to tell me about your experience?

Lunch

12pm-1pm

Observations

1pm- 2pm

Maeve and I did continued to observe visitors.

Reviewed Interview Questions

2:00-2:20pm

Laura made a surprise visit and reviewed our interview questions with us. Apparently she needed to return to the building to drop something off and thought that she'd check in on us as well. She suggested taking out question #5. She was in favor of everything else.

Pilot Interviews

 2:20pm- 4pm

Maeve and I piloted the first three interview questions with visitors. One of the visitors I interviewed made an interesting comment about the prompts. He is an an art teacher at the Tyler School and said that he felt that the prompts were othering because they aren't used to describe art from other cultures.