Maeve Day 9

Friday began with a meeting with Laura to teach us how to conduct interviews. She reminded us that our main goal in this section of research is to find out the answer to the question: "to what extent are the panels promoting close looking behaviors?" We're doing open-ended interview questions, as opposed to the multiple-choice style interviews she conducts with her team. When writing questions, she cautioned us to avoid biasing, double-barrelled questions, and really wordy questions. One of the things we might need more help with is defining need-to-know, because we're trying to balance the research inquiries of two different groups (the museum and our own research for Monique). It's really difficult to stick to vague, unassuming questions that also don't come across as condescending but still prompt the kinds of answers we need. Laura also explained how we can best make the visitors comfortable and build rapport with them if we try to keep things short, open with softball questions, and let the visitor fill awkward silences (which is definitely going to be the most difficult part in my opinion). We remained undecided on whether we'd do paired interviews and a handful of other things which we thought might be easier to determine once we've begun piloting our questions.
After our meeting with Laura ended around 11:30, Dani and I set to work drafting our interview questions. I believe Dani has already posted our finalized set on their blog, so I'll just include some of the things we scrapped to give a sense of what we were juggling:
Have you been to the Penn Museum?
Did you read the prompts before or after looking at the objects?
Who did you come with today?
What do you think the objective of the prompts is?

Dani and I then took lunch around noon. We began observations at 1 PM. Since tracking was getting boring, I decided to try a participant observation approach if I saw any visitors reading the prompts at 1:40 PM. I stopped a woman by the gold weights and asked her the four questions Monique had texted us:

1. Did this encourage you to look more closely at the object?
2. Did it help you to understand the objects better?
3. Do you think the museum should use more of these types of labels?
4. Did you use any of the others? What did you think?

She was very excited about the prompts, responding quite enthusiastically to the third question and saying that while she'd originally thought the questions would be designed for younger people and children, she'd found that they were interesting and helpful to her as well. She specified that "it's a good method for historical art in museums, it makes you stop and pay attention," though she prefers human guides in general.

After a little while without seeing Dani in the exhibit, I went to the cafeteria and met with them and Laura. She helped us reword a few questions and told us we should pilot them in small batches that afternoon to avoid clashing with her department's exit interviews scheduled for Saturday. Starting at around 2:20 PM, we piloted the first handful of interview questions:

1. How familiar are you with historical African art?
2. Did you have a favorite section of the Look Again exhibit? What was it? Why did it stand out to you? 
3. Did you notice the prompts in that part of the exhibit? If so, did you read them?
4. Do you have anything else you'd like to share with me about your experience today?

One of the visitors I spoke with started off by telling me he "liked to look at art" and had "seen more than I could count" but that he wouldn't say he had much experience with historic African art. He then backpedaled and said that he'd seen many shows of historic African objects but that he didn't know much about the culture. His favorite part of the exhibit was the Kota mask display because he loved the design of the exhibit and thought the display "worked together very well to tell a wider story." He said he "liked looking at [African art] and getting close" because of how "African art tends to have an intimate, delicate quality" due to the level of detail rendered by manual art. Another visitor told me she had loved the exhibit because "I brought all my friends and I'm glad we all got exposed to this body of art we aren't used to seeing." Though she mentioned she had trouble remembering things she read, she told me her favorite part of the exhibit has been the embodied objects because she found it fascinating to think of how objects shaped to look like humans were used by humans and what it meant.