Museums and the Web 2018 – Presentation Slides with Captions

I had the privilege to present at Museums and the Web in Vancouver, Canada on April 20, 2018. The following are the slides I used during the presentation, each slide is followed by a caption that captures what I said (or at least meant to say) that morning.

I am honoured to be here today and to be able to share with you this research project. Thank you to Museums and the Web for inviting me and to you all for being here.

I’ve structured this presentation to maximise our time together and to be as comprehensive as possible about this project. I will go over my assumptions leading up to the project, the theoretical and methodological framework I used, the results I observed, and the potential effects that these results could have for the museum’s management. I will close my presentation with a brief discussion of the ethical implications of this type of research.

Going into the project, I brought with me previous experience in using the museum as a field site and a little over four years of living in Qatar as an expat. This experience lead me to a few observations.

First we see that the museum sits on a man-made island, which make it visible from the coast line of the city.

As of today, the museum is the number one thing to do in Doha according to TripAdvisor and it is featured as a destination in marketing materials produced by the government’s tourism authority.

The museum exudes elegance and exemplifies a lifestyle that is particular to the country and to the region.

An elegance that is translated inside, where the vast collection is displayed with minimal intrusions.

Finally we see that the museum offers a wide variety of activities, not only those related to the collection (such as tours and educational programmes), but also activities such as music performances, bootcamps, and weekend bazaars.

By considering these features, I believe the museum can be thought of as a place of convergence, where cultures are brought together symbolically (through the collection) and physically (as seen by its audiences and visitors). Geographically, the museum links ‘old’ and ‘new’ Doha – and it can often be a place of introduction to the country and its culture, to expats and tourists alike. Finally, the museum experience is unique as it intersects lifestyles and traditions, as well as different media – from its collections, to food and drink, to digital media (such as audio tours and social media)

Assuming that the museum is a place of convergence, I was curious to know what its visitors perceived the museum to be. Particularly, I was interested in what visitors recorded and shared online as part of their experiences at the museum.

To do so, I decided to focus on Instagram as a ‘field site’ and Instagram images as the objects or units of my research. I quickly realized that this type of research was highly overlooked, with the exception of a very few studies. In the end this project ended up as a way of testing a viable methodologies to study Instagram images and what these could tell us about visitors’ experiences at the museum of Islamic art.

Researching social media in a museum setting meant that I was dealing not only with museological theories, but also with frameworks within media and communication studies. So I developed an interdisciplinary scheme that I could use to interpret the results. The scheme uses two supporting themes: Socio-cultural practices and digital technologies, and media enabled narratives. The main theme centers around performative processes.

We start by acknowledging the mutually constituting relationship between our everyday behaviours, digital technologies, and contemporary social and cultural contexts. From this perspective meaning and value are ascribed to social media texts through a cultural framework and by the individuals who ascribe to this frameworks.

One way to conceptualise social media is in its capacity to offer the space and opportunity to create and maintain identities, for example by using and associating with certain images or experiences. At the same time, social media offers us the space and opportunity to interact with others and to create communities through shared narratives and collaborative meaning-making – potentially changing how we think about others and about ourselves.

Both photography and museum visiting are embodied experiences, these are processes that ask the body to be placed in different spaces and situations, mediating between public and private contexts, as well as between institutional and non-institutional contexts. These embodied experiences affect the meaning-making processes of cultural and heritage values. In a networked society, the values created affect not only how digital technologies are approached, but also how they are distributed within and between communities. Theoretically then, museums and their media are catapulted onto personal and collective narratives that accumulate value through collaborative participation – which in turn, inform socio-cultural contexts.

There are a variety of methods that can be used to study photographs, for this project I employed visual content analysis. The aims of such research is to show trends in content through the quantification of sample units that are “classified into distinct categories” (Bell, 2004, p.14), rather than “to gain a profound understanding of a single [media]” (Bock et al., 2011, p.266) as in semiotics. Various literature suggest specific steps to follow: define the sample unit, define the unit of analysis, define the codebook, and encode the sample.

First, the sample was defined as: public images shared on Instagram, tagged to MIA’s location during a twelve-month period. This definition helped make the dataset more manageable: first only images that were publicly available were considered; second the geotag location used was the same one used by the museum’s official Instagram account; and third the time period (1 November 2014 and 30 November 2015) was sufficiently short to have a manageable dataset, yet still offered a variety of content – ranging from museum visits to special events, such as exhibition openings and outdoor festivals.

The unit of analysis was defined as a single post, excluding all text associated with it (such as caption and hashtags) as well as other interactions (such as likes and comments). This meant also excluding composite or collage photos.

The codebook was defined in two stages, the main categories were defined using the museum’s main physical areas – the interior of the building and its exterior. A third main category was added for any image that did not fit within these other two categories. The second stage included the definition of subcategories, this was done in an inductive manner – meaning that as images were coded for content the sub-categories emerged organically.

The last step was the most laborious and tedious, but the most essential. Here I had to encode more than 4000 images. You’ll notice that throughout this presentation I’ve blocked out some faces and in this case the username column. I’ll come back to this issue at the end of the presentation.

After encoding the images I was able to observe a variety of trends in the content of these images.

First, however, I should note that when I started coding the images some had been made private or deleted, these instances slightly narrowed the sample by 4%. Of the remaining publicly available images the majority featured the interior of the museum, followed by the exterior and images where the museum was not identifiable.

Overall less than half of the images showed a person or a human element (such as hands, or feet). Here we see an inverse trend where pictures without museum features were more likely to have a person, than the exterior and the interior of the museum.

I realise that this chart may not be readable, but I want to point out that in each category we can see clear preferences. For example, the majority of the interior images featured the exhibitions or the collection on display; outside the majority of images focused on the building’s architecture; and when the museum was not pictured it was the panoramas of the city that were on display.

40% of the interior images featured temporary exhibitions as well as the permanent collection on display. Of these images the majority portrayed the permanent collection.

This preference towards the Permanent Collection is most likely the result of museum policy, which allows no-flash photography inside the galleries

In most temporary exhibitions, however, photography was not allowed. This was likely due to inter-museum loans

Two exceptions are Marvellous Creatures and Qajar Women, which encouraged visitors to share their photographs and experiences on social media under specific hashtags.

Interestingly, other trends emerged from the exhibition images, whereas some focused on objects themselves, others focused on other elements such as interpretation materials or branding elements.

This emphasis could be the result of several factors, for example the layout and lighting of the Permanent Collection display cases favour close up engagement with objects, rather than overviews of the whole gallery. Alternatively, Marvellous Creatures used colourful illustrations to captivate the visitors and to bring the fables to life.

Another standout Interior subcategory was the courtyards. One in four Interior images portrayed one of the museum’s courtyards. Here we see that visitors seem to instinctively use the architectural space as built-in frames for their photographs. Care is taken to frame the image in certain ways, particularly when the image also features the courtyard water features. The images suggest that visitors are engaged with specific aspects of their visit, as it was also previously noted with the ‘Exhibition’ photographs.

One in three images in the total sample features views of the museum’s building and of the surrounding park. Within this main category, the majority of the images showcase the museum’s exterior architecture. These images are composed in a wide-angle manner in order to showcase a general view of the building. This composition style contrasts the ‘Interior’ images, where the emphasis was on specific aspects or detailed content/subject arrangements.

What is super interesting about this category is that the museum is photographed along with dhows – these traditional wooden boats – and with panoramas of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Doha in the background. This pattern suggests that the photographer is associating the museum within the larger cultural environment, thus situating the museum as a symbol of the country.

Lastly I want to point out here, that because of the museum’s location and the varied activities it hosts at the museum park, we cannot assume that the pictures of the exterior of the building were taken by visitors. This is especially visible when the images are taken at such wide angles that the photographer would have to stand well outside the museum’s premises.

Almost a quarter of the images of the total sample feature views and elements that do not directly represent the museum or park; the only reference to MIA is the geo-location used to tag the images on Instagram. The images classified in this ‘other’ category would suggest that when MIA is not pictured, its geo-location is associated with popular activities or other destinations of the city and the country. For example, users could be flaunting the modern landscape in which they live or have travelled to, or boast attending and being a part of glamorous international events. On the other hand, the geo-location is also used as an opportune way to capitalise on unsuspecting Instagram ‘scrollers’ – such as with spam or promotional images – highlighting the use of this platform as a viable e-commerce channel.

I would suggest that the results observed in this study are directly associated with, and may have potentially influencing implications for, managerial strategies and policies.

The museum allows and encourages photography in the galleries where the permanent collection is displayed, add to that the availability of free wifi and you have an environment that actively promotes interaction with mobile tools. I believe that thanks to this policy the majority of the images overall reflect the museum’s collection.

As we saw earlier, when users adopt images as part of their social media practices, they are making a conscious decision to include them within their identity- and cultural meaning-making practices. These symbols of their experiences at the museum enter not only their individual narrative streams but within their networked narrative streams. It would be of no surprise then that as these images are shared and acted upon (through likes and comments) they could change in meaning from that originally intended by the museum. This could benefit the museum greatly or it could work against it – I believe that the response and reaction by the institution can guide these experiences.

So we have a couple of factors working together, for example the flexibility afforded to social media managers has a direct impact on the way museums react to how their identity and collections are adopted by their communities. At the same time this flexibility is also reflected in how the museum uses contemporary trends as part of their ‘institutional’ narratives. These two examples showcase how trends and events have influenced the museum – and resulted in images that are laden with meaning to particular communities. On the left we see that the museum has their own salt bae and on the right we see the Omani flag juxtaposed with the museum’s building – a nod to a neighbouring country that is not currently holding an embargo on Qatar.

So we see that the museum is not impartial to their social, cultural, and political environments. This complicates this trend of showcasing the museum as a potential symbol of the country – informally through collective posts and formally as part of government tourism campaigns. Furthermore, this trend complicates the purpose of the museum as a neutral site where Islamic cultures coexist in harmony through their art.

I would like to close this presentation by briefly discussing the ethical implications of this type of research and the considerations we ought to take for future work. The main implications of social media research are: the question of public versus private content, the difficulty of getting informed consent, the concerns for anonymity and the potential for risk of harm to the unaware participants.

First we need to come to terms with what is considered private and public content, and whether or not this definition is enough to justify using such content. Then we need to consider options to obtain consent from participants, which becomes particularly important when their images are used for publications, including presentations, reports, and blog posts. Studying images can be particularly problematic in trying to retain anonymity for the participants, which works against intellectual property – so you have to balance a fine line between anonymising participants and giving them credit for their creative work. Lastly we need to consider how to protect participants from risk of harm, particularly when they are not anonymous.

I believe that as more institutions take on similar research, it is crucial that the process is openly shared with colleagues throughout the sector. This may be easier said than done, but by keeping the process open perhaps other institutions would be more willing to take on such projects. Finally by sharing results perhaps managers and stakeholders can better understand the value and impact their museums and social media managers are making to their communities.

If you want to want more information then I invite you to read the article at the MW website. Alternatively, if you made it this far and have questions, thoughts or comments please let me know!

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