The first visitors started to come in around 11:15, which is when we got started tracking them. Dani and I had agreed to add two more behaviors to our list: imitating (the power figures seemed to provoke a lot of mimicry on Saturday) and dwelling (we later learned we'd been defining this differently, with my understanding of it referring to dwell time at an object and Dani recording it as time spent dwelling in between objects or on phones). My first visitor was a very purposeful looker who generally ignored the labels in favor of getting as close as possible to the objects. I followed two more visitors--one of whom stayed for only a single minute--before we decided to take lunch.
After lunch, I followed a couple around for an hour and fifteen minutes. I couldn't help wondering what they could possibly think I was doing--the clipboard felt a lot more obvious than the coloring book had been, and spending that amount of time in the same areas of the exhibit as them couldn't have gone unnoticed. The good news is that they were definitely engaging with the prompts, asking each other questions about the objects, and generally being invested in learning things from the exhibit. They were especially interested in the ivories (neither of them mentioned the plight of elephants), the power figures, and the bronze weights, though they obviously spent considerable amounts of time at almost every single thing in the exhibit. The only things they didn't stop to look at were one of the power figures and a case of cups by the entrance. The woman mentioned potentially visiting the Penn Museum to learn more about the artifacts, and I wondered if that could be considered achieving the goals set for the exhibit by both museums.
At 4, we had our weekly meeting with the other museum staffers, which was a bit frustrating. There might just be too many people at the table, but it seemed like nobody had really listened to the part when Dani and I explained our methodology and our findings. I've been conducting research with the goal of seeing how people are using or not using the prompts in the gallery and whether they are engaging in close/directed looking at the objects. This does not seem like it will change. It was definitely interesting that the head of education said they don't really care if people learn anything from their museum visit--I wasn't sure if she was talking about the museum in general or this specific exhibit, but either way, it was certainly a revealing comment.
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| the tusk that draws the most attention (I started taking pictures of things to look less suspicious) |
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