YES, YOU MAY TOUCH THE ART: NEW MEDIA INTERFACES
AND RHETORICAL EXPERIENCE IN THE DIGITALLY INTERACTIVE
MUSEUM
by
JESSICA ERIN SLENTZ
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
MAY, 2017
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
We hereby approve the dissertation of
Jessica Erin Slentz
candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy*.
Committee Chair
T. Kenny Fountain
Committee Member
Kimberly Emmons
Committee Member
Kurt Koenigsberger
Committee Member
William Deal
Date of Defense
March 9th, 2017
*We also certify that written approval has been obtained
for any proprietary material contained therein
Table of Contents
List of Figures
ii
Acknowledgements
iv
Abstract
vii
Chapter One: Introduction
1
Chapter Two: Touchscreen Interfaces in the Cleveland Museum of
Art and the National Archives Museum
31
Chapter Three: Yes, You May Touch the Art: Habits of Interaction
and Participatory Experience
59
Chapter Four: This is How You Touch the Art: Rhetorical Experience
and the Visitor as Expert
119
Chapter Five: I’ll do Research, but Play is for Kids: Visitor Participation
in the Work of the Museum
156
Chapter 6: Conclusion
181
Appendix A: Types of Data
196
Appendix B: Interview Questions – Cleveland Museum of Art
197
Appendix C: Interview Questions – National Archives Museum
198
Appendix D: Tracking Map
199
Appendix E: Curated Views
200
Bibliography
201
ii
Table of Figures
Chapter Two
Figure 1: The Collection Wall
34
Figure 2: Color
36
Figure 3: Water
37
Figure 4: Vessels
37
Figure 5: Gallery One Proper
38
Figure 6: Why Do We Paint Lens
40
Figure 7: Lens Home Page – Look Closer
41
Figure 8: Records of Rights and the Touch Table
45
Figure 9: Color-Coded Categories
45
Figure 10: Event w/ 5 Documents
46
Figure 11: Keyword Tree
46
Chapter Three
Figure 1: Swipeable Image Stack
78
Figure 2: Number of Likes
78
Figure 3: Multiple Ways of Navigation
80
Figure 4: Records Related to Event
80
Figure 5: Keyword Link Tree
88
Figure 6: Story Lens
94
Figure 7: Remix the Picasso
96
Figure 8: Drag Each Piece
96
Figure 9: Email
97
iii
Figure 10: Select a Technique
99
Figure 11: Make Your Own Painting
99
Figure 12: Palate
101
Figure 13: Finished Painting
101
Figure 14: Start Sculpting
103
Figure 15: Video and Skip
103
Figure 16: Email Your Vase
110
Figure 17: React and Share
112
Figure 18: Assign Reaction Words
112
Chapter Four
Figure 1: Please Do Not Touch sign at the CMA
128
iv
Acknowledgements
As I complete this dissertation and this PhD adventure, I feel so blessed and
grateful for so much, I feel at a loss for a way to fully quantify that gratitude in writing.
But I’m going to give it a shot:
First, thank you, Kenny, for being the best advisor I could have ever asked for. I
am so happy that I have gotten to work with you over these past 5 years, from
coursework through this dissertation, and will be forever grateful, not only for your
caring and supportive mentoring, but also for the example you set of the kind of
teacher/scholar/friend/colleague one should aspire to be. I appreciate, so much, your
patience, humor, and work-ethic, and have really enjoyed getting to know you (and
Ryan!) over the years. We often don’t realize how much the little things we say and do
affect other’s lives…I want you to know that my life is forever better because of you.
Second, Kim and Kurt, thank you for all of your support, encouragement,
mentorship, advice, teaching, suggestions, laughter, tissues (when I fall apart in your
office), candy, softball games (the Catchers in the Rye will forever be a legend) and
awesomeness over these last five years. Bill, thank you for coming on as my fourth
reader; it was wonderful to get to work with you again all this time after our semester
teaching together. Like Kenny, you three have really been wonderful examples of how to
be a teacher/scholar/friend/colleague in this crazy world we call academia, and I feel
blessed and proud to be able to have gotten to work with you.
Thank you all for agreeing to be my committee and join me on this crazy journey.
I knew when I was bugging Kurt prior to admission that I was meant to be at CWRU, and
you four are the main reason I still believe that every single day. Thank you so so SO
v
much for everything! I truly hope we get to work together in the future and I am looking
forward to that time.
Thank you to my quirky, warm, incredible family for always being there for me,
reminding me that I am unconditionally loved, that someone has my back, and that I am
always held by God’s hand. Thank you for your stories, your jokes, your hugs, your
prayers, your ears and shoulders any time I’ve needed them, your trust in me when I
doubted myself, your love of life, your creativity, and your ever-present love. You guys
have gotten me through some really intense times these last five years, and I could not
have done this without you. I love you so much.
Thank you to Catherine and Kristin for being the best friends a girl could ever
wish for, for always being there for me, for becoming my family in CLE, for making life
awesome, for always reminding me that all the feels are normal, and for all of your
support this last year even from a distance. I could not have done this without you either
and I can’t wait for our future adventures together. They are going to be epic and
amazing!!!
Thank you to the Cleveland Museum of Art, especially Elizabeth Bolander, who
coordinated approval for my data collection and allowed me to schedule my work around
CMA research activities taking place within Gallery One, and Jane Alexander, who is a
wealth of knowledge about Gallery One, its history, and its future. Thank you to the
National Archives Museum, especially Alice Kamps, who has been so supportive of this
project, both with the logistics of data collection and in conversations since. Thank you to
the English Department and the College of Arts and Sciences for the Dean’s Fellowship,
which it possible to include the National Archives Museum as a site of study in this
vi
project. Thank you to the Baker Nord Center for the Humanities for the Digital Interfaces
Grant and the Graduate Research Grant, which together provided the technology and
technological assistance needed for data collection and analysis. And thank you to the
English Department and the School of Graduate Studies for the Adrian-Salomon
Fellowship, which helped me to successfully finish writing and defend on time.
A huge thank you to all of the other wonderful people who make my life amazing
every single day. To my Viva Dance Studio fam and the Dance Konnection (sic) team,
especially Crystal, Rachel, and Kaitie…my dissertation got written largely because you
three kept me sane. To Camille, who brightens up every day and is patient even when I’m
a very boring fur-mom. To Little Italy, which became my home and my refuge in a very
real way. To Cleveland, which will always hold a special place in my heart. To Murray
Hill Market and Pho & Rice, who kept me fed the last month of writing. To Trader Joe’s
Gluten Free Brownies, which staved off many a panic attack.
And a lastly, my biggest thank you to God, who has blessed me over and over and
over again still, who heard a lot from me this past year, and who has always, always,
always had my back.
vii
Yes, You May Touch the Art: New Media Interfaces
and Rhetorical Experience in the Digitally Interactive Museum
Abstract
by
JESSICA E. SLENTZ
New media technologies, particularly touchscreen interfaces, are playing a highly visible
role in new exhibition practices within museums. Many museum studies scholars see the
participatory experiences mediated by such technologies as potentially redefining
relationships between the institution and the public by allowing museum visitors access
to roles and discourses traditionally reserved for a cultural elite. In these pages, I employ
rhetorician Gregory Clark’s (2010) theory of rhetorical experience to investigate the
claim by museum studies scholars that a “paradigm shift” is being enacted by digital
technologies within museums. I show that digitally mediated experiences, particularly
those facilitated by touch, can induce actions on the part of the visitor that shift their
engagement in the museum from the private, solitary practices of viewing and
interpretation, to the documented, public roles of educator, curator, researcher, and critic.
I also show that the rhetorical nature the experiences that invite visitors to participate in
such activities can effect changes in attitude and identity on the part of the visitor from
visitor-as-spectator to visitor-as-co-producer.
viii
This qualitative study takes place in two public institutions with recent installations of
groundbreaking exhibition technologies, the Cleveland Museum of Art, in Cleveland,
Ohio, and the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. I use ethnographic
methods, including participant observations and interviews, to identify what I term the
“habits of interaction” afforded by the touchscreen interfaces in these hybrid spaces of
physical and digital activity. Interrogating the integral relationship between one’s ability
to take up new interpretive positions through participation in digitally mediated
experiences and one’s previously existing digital literacies, I closely examine the
rhetorical experiences visitors engage in through interaction with touchscreen interfaces.
Museum visitors interacting with these interfaces see themselves as actually “able to
touch the art” and thus as active participants in the work of the museum. Such
experiences can shift visitors’ interpretive positions by persuading them to take up the
roles of instructor, researcher, critic, and curator, which are traditionally reserved for the
institution itself.
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
On January 21, 2013, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) in Cleveland, Ohio,
unveiled its newest exhibition space, Gallery One, in a public opening. In this 13,000
square-foot (Alexander et al., 2013) exhibition space that sits off both the main entrance
and the expansive atrium of the CMA, visitors found not only paintings, sculptures,
prints, ceramics, tapestries, and furniture from the museum’s permanent collection, but
also seven ground-breaking pieces of touch-controlled technology – a 40-foot micro-tile
touchscreen called the Collection Wall, and six three-foot wide tablet-like screens called
Lenses. The CMA created quite a stir in the museum world with the opening of Gallery
One.1
The development of Gallery One, funded by a 10-million-dollar donation from the
Maltz Family Foundation (Alexander, Interview), was part of a several-year-long effort
on the part of the museum “to make visitors central to the reinstallation and
reinterpretation of the permanent collection” (Alexander et. al.). The CMA team involved
in envisioning and executing the installation of the space set out with the goal of creating
digitally-mediated experiences that could “bring visitors closer to the art” (Alexander,
Interview). They worked to offer visitors access to the permanent collection through both
the interfaces housed in Gallery One and the CMA’s ArtLens app, which was launched at
the time of Gallery One’s opening.
While the actual, physical technology that the CMA installed in Gallery One is
groundbreaking, the motivation behind the creation of the exhibition space, the
concomitant mobile app, and the digitally-mediated experiences visitors can engage in
1
At the time of defense, four years after its opening, Gallery One still houses technology that no other
museum in the United States has.
2
through them is not unusual in the museum world today. As personal computing
technology evolves and influences the ways that visitors view, interpret, and
communicate information, museums are increasingly seeking to augment linear and topdown media experiences with emerging digital media technologies and social media
platforms that can foster interactive experiences (Mulburg and Hinton, 1994; Luke, 2002;
Samis, 2012; Simon, 2012; Titlow, 2016). Digital interfaces facilitate museum
experiences that have the potential to offer visitors relationships with the materials
displayed, relationships that linear interpretive technologies, such as wall placards and
audio tours, cannot. As the CMA has, many museums today, are working to explore and
incorporate emerging technologies in an attempt to stay relevant in a highly digitized
world. John Titlow (2016) quotes Sree Sreenivasan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
chief digital officer, as saying, “People ask me: What is your biggest competition…Is it
MoMA? Guggenheim? Our competition is Netflix. Candy Crush. It's life in 2016.” Like
Sreenivasan, many museums recognize the reality that the majority of their visitors
navigate their daily experiences with the assistance of digital computing devices and are
responding accordingly by offering digitally-mediated experiences within the physical
space of the museum.
At the same time, while the museum’s motivation for incorporating emerging
technologies into their exhibition practices is a concerted effort to bolster visitor
engagement and retention, many museum studies scholars see this digital turn in
exhibition practices as manifesting a significant cultural shift in the museum world. Many
scholars agree that contemporary exhibition practices that seek to merge virtual and
physical engagement within the museum denote what Gail Anderson (2011) describes as
3
“a fundamental shift in ideology and practice” (p. 8), a shift in the museum sector that
redefines the traditional relationships between the “institution” and the “public,” allowing
museum visitors access to roles and discourses traditionally reserved for a cultural “elite”
(Haskins, 2007; Parry, 2007). Ross Parry (2007) goes so far as to argue that new media
interfaces and participatory exhibition displays are fundamentally changing entrenched
notions of authority and curatorship and reshaping traditional notions of who controls the
cultural narrative shaped by a museum’s collection.
It is this hypothetical “paradigm shift” that this dissertation seeks to interrogate.
The claim that digitally-mediated experiences within museums can fundamentally change
entrenched hierarchies of access to cultural production and interpretation is a significant
one. It is also a potentially problematic one. Many digital exhibition technologies do offer
visitors multiple points of access to the artifact – by providing additional educational
material, by involving senses other than sight, or even by incorporating game play.
However, most of these technologies often do little more than that, and instead continue
to facilitate the traditional interpretive hierarchy of an institution educating the lay visitor
in proper ways to interact with the work of art or text. The question becomes, then, is
there, in fact, a paradigm shift, what Parry (2007) calls “realignment of the axes of
curatorship” (p. 102), taking place in the museum world? And if so, what kinds of
experiences are driving that shift?
The paradigm shift that museum studies scholars laud is ultimately a rhetorical
one. Scholars suggest that new media interfaces can be used by museums to invite the
visitor to engage in activities, such as curation, instruction, and public response, that were
previously reserved for the expert in the institution. In other words, new media interfaces
4
can be used to create experiences that persuade visitors to identification with the
institution in ways that were previously not possible. I argue that rhetoric, in particular an
approach to digital rhetoric that incorporates a working theory of rhetorical experience,
gives us a unique way to understand and analyze the rhetorical work that is happening in
visitors’ engagement with new media interfaces in museums. But in order to understand
the rhetorical work that is being done in visitors’ interactions with new media
technologies in spaces of exhibition and display, we must first take a closer look at those
interactions and the experiences visitors participate in through them.
Project Description
My dissertation investigates the rhetorical experiences composed by and through
interaction with new media interfaces in spaces of cultural exhibition and display,
examining how and why such interfaces persuade the visitor to take up particular
interpretive positions and roles. Inspired by the work of Kenneth Burke, I define rhetoric
as the use of language, visuals, texts, and objects to induce actions, attitudes, and belief in
others. For Burke, this inducement, this persuasion, is made possible largely through
processes of identification, namely by coming to identify with the positions, views, and
values of another. By experience I mean any phenomena one personally encounters,
undergoes, or lives through as well as the act or process of perceiving those phenomena.2
In this qualitative study, I use the ethnographic methods of observations and interviews to
focus on museum visitors’ encounters with ground-breaking touchscreen exhibition
technologies. Owing to their recent installation of innovative touchscreen exhibition
technologies that invite visitors to participate in previously institutional activities in ways
2
My definition is adapted from the most common of sources, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary.
5
that are unique to these institutions, I conducted this study within the Cleveland Museum
of Art, in Cleveland, Ohio, and the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C.
Refining the theory of rhetorical experience as set out by rhetorician Gregory
Clark (2010), my study intervenes in contemporary work in digital rhetoric by modeling a
workable vocabulary and effective methodology with which to study experience as
rhetorical, meaning as forming attitudes and inducing actions (to paraphrase Kenneth
Burke's [1969] famous definition of rhetoric [p. 41]). A vocabulary and methodology
with which to examine rhetorical experience will allow rhetoricians to analyze the
attitudes and social relationships that can be fostered or shaped by a user’s interactions
with digital interfaces. My study also contributes to the field of digital rhetoric by
providing a critical investigation of the rhetorical implications created by touchscreen
interfaces, new media interfaces that continue to evolve and have not yet received the
kind of scrutiny that traditional museum media have in rhetorical scholarship. The
rhetorical approach of my study contributes to contemporary museum studies by offering
increased insight into the rhetorical nature of new exhibition practices, complimenting
current museological studies of new media interfaces and participatory experiences that
are taking place within museums themselves and which often focus primarily on
institutional concerns such as visitor response and retention.
Research Questions
This study is explicitly concerned with the experiences composed by and made
available through touchscreen interfaces in spaces of cultural exhibition and display. As
touchscreen interfaces become ubiquitous in modern society, they are increasingly
playing a role in new exhibition practices as a key type of interactive interpretive
6
technology. The influential technology housed in both the Cleveland Museum of Art and
the National Archives Museum offers an opportunity to understand how this emerging
technology can influence visitors’ rhetorical experiences and the future of participatory
experiences in museums. The research questions driving this study are as follows:
1) What types of interactions and experiences do institutions hope to foster with
touchscreen interfaces?
2) How do visitors in these spaces engage with these particular touchscreen
interfaces?
3) What experiences do the affordances of these interfaces make available?
4) Do these interfaces shape a visitor’s interpretive position in relation to the work
of art or text, and/or to the museum itself? If so, how?
In the chapters that follow, I answer these questions, showing that the rhetorical
experiences visitors perceive as being made available by touchscreen technology in both
the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Archives Museum do in fact persuade
visitors to take up particular interpretive positions within the museum, and shift visitors’
perception of their relationship to both the object and the institution. Ultimately I show
that the rhetorical nature of the experiences that invite visitors to participate in
traditionally institutional activities such as research, instruction, and critique can effect a
change in attitude and identity on the part of the visitor, causing a shift from visitor-asspectator to visitor-as-co-producer.
Museums Studies and Interactive/Participatory Technology
Rhetoricians have long found museums to be rich sites of study. Much
scholarship on the rhetoric of display and exhibition explores the ways that the spaces
7
and materials of museum exhibition work to preserve and inform public memory (Blair et
al., 2010; Haskins, 2007; Prelli, 2006). Museums serve as driving forces of cultural
preservation and production, and as such are often sources of hotly contested cultural
debates as well (Dubin, 1999; Falk, 2012; Luke, 2002; Pearce, 1994). The cultural
production and framing that museums enact is always inherently rhetorical, as museum
collections and exhibitions are always, whether overtly or not, constructed for particular
audiences and with underlying political agendas or biases (Pearce, 1994; Potter, 1994).
Since the release of the groundbreaking report Museums as a Social Instrument by early
museum scholar Theodore Low (1942), which galvanized the role of the museum in
American society, both museologists and rhetoricians have been concerned with the
interchange between the institution of the museum and the public at large. The museum,
Low stressed, is a "social instrument" (p. 7) which holds a distinct responsibility to
educate the public and drive, "advances in social thought" (p. 21).
How museums should and do work to motivate advances in social thought has
been debated in museum studies since Low’s formative piece. At the time of his report,
museums traditionally operated with the purpose of preserving collections, an
institutionalized practice, and one seen as problematically elitist.3 Instead, Low said,
museums should work to situate themselves as institutions of education: "The purpose
and only purpose of museums is education in all its varied aspects from the most
scholarly research, to the simple arousing of curiosity" (p. 21). To this end, Low
contrasted "conservative" approaches to education – linear, top-down, scholarly
3
As I will discuss in Chapters 2 and 4, the elitism of mid-twentieth century museums that Low was
responding was highly connected to classist views of who should and should not have access, particularly
through touch and object handling, to the museum’s collection.
8
endeavors governed by fiscal concerns and a board of trustees – to "progressive"
approaches of audience-driven popular education and public work, claiming that the
museum must shift towards the progressive in order to survive and justify its existence in
a modern world (p. 22).
This tension between what Low termed conservative and progressive educational
practices has remained as relevant within museum studies today as it was then, and the
conversation has grown increasingly dynamic over the last half-century as the role of the
museum as a cultural institution has evolved. Museologists have given much attention to
museums’ changing modes of communicating with their visitors, (Anderson, 2011; Clark,
2010; Luke, 2002; Parry, 2007; Pearce, 1994; Potter, 1994; Samis, 2012; Simon, 2012).
The museum studies subfield of “new exhibition studies” is concerned with the greater
reliance now being placed on new media technologies and digitally-mediated experiences
within the museum.
The chief tenet of new exhibition studies is participation, or the crafting of
experiences that engage visitors in cooperative activities within exhibition spaces. As
Sharon Shaffer (2015) explains, the focus on participation in museums is at the heart of
the “paradigm shift” that is occurring in exhibition practices, as “the original primacy of
the object [is giving] way to a shared role, with the visitor as a player in meaning
making” (pg. 23). Creating participatory experiences, in Nina Simon's (2012) words,
"means trusting visitors' abilities as creators, remixers, and redistributors of content" (p.
331). In other words, as museums invite visitors into participatory experiences within the
space of the museum, they also potentially shape for them a different kind of subject
position within the museum itself.
9
The manner and extent of a visitor’s participation within an exhibition space and
the museum as a whole are driven by the type of technologies and interfaces used to
engage and educate the public within these spaces. Several rhetoricians have begun to
examine the ways that digital interfaces contribute to such spaces and the rhetorical work
that such technology does (Haskins, 2007; Brady, 2011; Parry, 2007; Samis, 2012;
Schwartz, 2008; Zagacki, 2009). However, little attention thus far has been paid to the
actual experience of participation itself, and how that experience is rhetorical. I argue that
in order to understand the rhetorical work done by contemporary exhibition practices and
to interrogate the full extent and ramifications of the conceptual shift that many claim is
occurring in those spaces, close attention must be paid to the rhetorical experiences
afforded by technologies of exhibition and display, specifically to touchscreen interfaces
that, through both their affordances as new media interfaces and the content they mediate,
persuade the visitor to take up certain interpretive positions.
Digital Rhetoric and Touch Technology
Digital Rhetoric is a young field, vibrant and as varied as the ever-evolving
technology it aims to interrogate. Digital Rhetoric serves to show, as James Zappen
(2005) succinctly explains, “how traditional rhetorical strategies function in digital
spaces, and suggest[s] how these strategies are being reconceived and reconfigured
within these spaces” (p. 319). Instead of seeking to redefine rhetoric, digital rhetoric aims
to “rethink (or reinvent),” as Collin Brooke (2009) puts it, the driving tenets of classical
rhetoric to understand the practices of design (both textual and visual) and meaning
making that occur through communication mediated by, and interaction with, digital texts
and technology (p. xiii). Many foundational scholars in digital rhetoric focus on how
10
concepts from classical Greek and Roman rhetoric (Gurak, 1997; Welch, 1999; Miller,
2001) or the classical rhetorical canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and
delivery (Gurak, 1999; Brook, 2009; Porter, 2009; McCorkle, 2012; Rice, 2012) take on
new meaning when applied specifically to digital communication. Some argue for the
adoption of interpretive and analytical practices unique to digital texts (Lanham, 1999;
Bolter and Grusin, 2000; Hayles, 2004; Roswell, 2013). Still others begin their work at
the point of interaction with the interface itself, seeking to understand the rhetorical
issues arising from particular pieces of technology (Brooke, 2009; Carnegie, 2009;
Farman, 2012; Swarts, 2012).
My study is situated in the relatively new tradition of the latter: the practice of
interrogating a particular aspect or type of technology as it emerges to better understand
the rhetorical implications it holds. Scholars who approach digital rhetoric through an
interrogation of technology place special emphasis on the interface itself. By definition
(IEEE, 2000), an interface is “a shared electrical boundary between parts of a computer
system, through which information is conveyed” (p. 574). Digital rhetoricians, however,
have expanded on this technical definition of interface by incorporating the rhetorical and
communicative implications of interactions between user and interface into their
definitions. Steven Johnson (1997) argues that interfaces are more than just digital
objects; rather they serve as a “translator, mediating between the two parties, making one
sensible to the other” (p. 14). Synne Skjulstad and Andrew Morrison (2005) stress that
“interfaces have come to be understood as more than a static, graphical layer lying
between system and user. They exist as devices for shaping and spatializing the
organization, selection and articulation of what is to be communicated electronically” (p.
11
413). In other words, digital interfaces both display and frame the content and message
mediated by them and are, simultaneously, part of that content and message.4 Because of
the integral role interfaces play in any digitally mediated communication, Collin Brooke
(2009) emphasizes that interfaces are essential to any workable theory of digital rhetoric.
At their core, interfaces are about interaction, sensory perception, and meaning making,
which makes them just as rhetorically significant as the textual and visual content they
mediate.
As digital interfaces have evolved over the last decade, increasing attention is
being given both to “pervasive” or “invisible” interfaces, “such as mobile phones, RFID
[radio-frequency identification] tags, and other location-based technology” (de Souza e
Silva and Firth 2012, p. 3) and haptic, or touch-operated, interfaces (Swarts, 2012;
Farman, 2012; de Souza e Silva and Sheller, 2014; Martinussen et. al., 2014). In
particular, the field of haptics, generally understood as “the science of applying tactile,
kinesthetic, or both sensations to human-computer interactions” (El Saddik 2011, p. 5),
has gained increased attention from both new media scholars and rhetoricians within the
last decade because of the growing pervasiveness of haptic interfaces and the unique
mode of interaction digital haptic interfaces afford users, namely the mode of touch. It is
this exciting new turn in digital rhetoric to which this project speaks.5
Historicizing touch within the Western rhetorical canon, Mark Paterson (2007)
emphasizes that “touch is crucial to embodied existence” (p. 2). Yet touch, Paterson
4
The idea that the interface is part and parcel with the content it mediates echos Marshall McLuhan’s
(1964) claims that “the medium is the message” (p. 7).
5
Haptics is a wide-ranging field of study, and haptic interfaces take many forms, including sensoryaugmenting, wearable technology that allows users to sense objects they are not physically touching. For
the purposes of this study, I am focused specifically on digital touchscreen interfaces, similar to those of
tablets and mobile smartphones. To avoid conflation of touchscreen interfaces with other types of haptic
interfaces, I will refer to the interfaces studied as “touchscreen” interfaces from here on in.
12
argues, has traditionally been under-theorized in rhetorical studies, and has been seen as
the “basest sense” in a longstanding culture of “oculocentrism” (p. 6). Challenging
rhetoricians to pay closer attention to the sense of touch, Paterson claims that touch, as
the “co-implication of body, flesh and world” (p. 32), presents a unique focal point
through which to examine the immediacy and physicality of a person’s experience with
the world (and with touch technology). Touch also has a rich and complicated history
within museum studies, as who can and cannot touch objects in the museum is steeped in
institutional hierarchies and class politics (Candlin, 2008). For centuries, access to touch
within museums, seen as taboo, has been limited to the elite and the expert. It is precisely
because of this complicated history of touch in museums that experiences with touch
technology do the kinds of rhetorical work that I will explicate in this dissertation. I will
discuss the history and importance of touch in museums and how it informs both visitor
experience and this project in more detail in Chapters 2 and 4.
Despite the rise of both the predominance of touchscreen interfaces in daily
computing and the increased scholarly attention being paid to them, digital rhetoricians
do not currently have a vocabulary or methodology unique to these types of interfaces
and the interactions they afford; instead rhetoricians who study digital haptic interfaces
borrow from the vocabularies of engineering and computer science (when discussing
usability), cognitive science, textual analysis and visual rhetoric, often treating the
interface as a two-dimensional text without fully addressing the three-dimensional reality
of a user experiencing something through interaction with it.
I believe it is crucial for digital rhetoricians to have a dynamic vocabulary and
methodology with which to interrogate touchscreen technologies, one that seeks to
13
address the specifically rhetorical concerns and rhetorical opportunities these
technologies manifest. As technology continues to evolve we will continue to see a shift
from touch-operated interfaces to “touchless,” gesture and expression-operated interfaces,
a trend that is already progressing steadily (Olsen, 2015). Unless we can fully understand
the rhetorical implications of touchscreen interfaces in their own rights, rather than
approaching them as two-dimensional texts, we will not be able to effectively interrogate
any further shift that occurs in emerging technologies and the rhetorical experiences those
new technologies might afford. Through a close examination of the experiences afforded
by touchscreen interfaces, and the employment of a vocabulary that seeks to identify how
users interact with them, namely my discussion of habits of interaction which I outline in
Chapter 3, this project offers the field of digital rhetoric a model through which to better
understand the rhetorical implications of touchscreen interfaces and their use.
Theoretical Framework
Throughout this project, I use the concept of rhetorical experience as set forth by
rhetorician Gregory Clark (2010) to explore the experiences made possible by visitors’
interactions with touchscreen interfaces in spaces of exhibition and display. Clark offers a
compelling argument for viewing human experience as rhetorical. However, as Clark
does not offer a workable vocabulary with which to do so, I expand on Clark’s theory by
using James Gibson’s (1986) theory of affordances to model an operational vocabulary
with which to speak about rhetorical experience. I will introduce both of these theories
briefly here. I then expand upon Gibson’s theory of affordances and Clark’s theory of
rhetorical experience further in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively.
14
In his essay “Rhetorical Experience and the National Jazz Museum” in the
collection Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (2010),
Gregory Clark proposes his “outline of a theory of rhetorical experience” (p. 114).
Merging both aesthetic and rhetorical theory by bringing into conversation the work of
John Dewey (1934) and Kenneth Burke (1969), Clark makes a strong case for the
importance of approaching experiences – particularly the aesthetic experiences composed
by various spaces and media of exhibition and display – as objects of rhetorical study.
Quoting Dewey’s understanding of aesthetic experience, which views “aesthetic” as
related to meaning making and human communication broadly construed (p. 113), Clark
agrees with Dewey that experience is the “‘interaction of organism and environment
which…is a transformation of interaction into participation and communication’” (p.
115). Experience, as interaction between one’s self and one’s environment is, as Clark
points out, always situated in “particular places at particular times” (p. 116).
Additionally, as “transformation” of interaction into “participation and communication,”
experience is neither a passive nor a solitary occurrence; it always produces a result that
translates into some kind of action, and it always has social ramifications. Clark posits,
thus, that all experience is rhetorical, as experience always enacts some sort of change in
attitudes, or deeply held thoughts and convictions, on the part of the individual that then
“become civic in their consequences when those attitudes affect [public] identities” (p.
118).
Clark notes that rhetorical experiences are not only lived by the interacting
audience, but they are also composed, or “carefully designed” (p. 122) by a persuading
rhetor to produce particular actions and interactions on the part of an audience; as such,
15
Clark argues, experiences can be approached by rhetoricians as objects of rhetorical
analysis. Clark uses a brief sample analysis of potential experiences within the National
Jazz Museum in Harlem to show how a theory of rhetorical experience might shed
greater light on how audiences move through and engage with spaces of exhibition and
display. His conclusion is that rhetorical experience, which involves simultaneously
interacting with and navigating multiple works, texts, and identities through a wide range
of sensory channels, including sound, touch, and smell, can be seen as embodied in a way
that “the rhetorical work of display” cannot (p. 132). Clark argues that seeing aesthetic
experience as rhetorical encourages rhetoricians to focus on the particular moment of
interaction itself – the locus of activity and the rhetorical effects that activity produces –
rather than on a critical, rhetorical analysis of a specific, stationary work or text.
In my discussion, I use Clark’s understanding of experience as rhetorical,
embodied,6 interactive, and having the power to effect some kind of change on the part of
the individual. However, while Clark provides a useful and significant way to analyze
and articulate practices of interpretation and meaning making that involve more than just
reading or viewing a work, he goes little further than to argue that experience is rhetorical
and should be seen as such. Clark’s theory does not offer us a clear vocabulary with
which to apply this theory to specific rhetorical experiences. In order to augment Clark’s
theory to more effectively be able to analyze particular rhetorical experiences, I turn to
psychologist James Gibson’s (1986) notion of affordances.
6
By “embodied,” I mean embodied practices, by which, to borrow from T. Kenny Fountain’s (2014)
definition, “I mean types of habitual social action and social knowledge that are constructed and
communicated in and through the materiality and physical movements of the body” (p. 13).
16
With his theory of affordances found in The Ecological Approach to Visual
Perception (1986), Gibson provides a useful vocabulary with which to describe how
environments influence experiences. Gibson defines affordances as what an environment
“offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes” (p. 127). John Sanders (1999) clarifies
Gibson’s term, defining affordances as “opportunities for action in the environment of an
organism” (p. 129). For Gibson, much like Dewey, an environment is made up of both
animate and inanimate objects. The animate objects, or animals (including people),
perceive the available affordances offered by the materiality of the environment –
objects, surfaces, and other animals. Affordances, the opportunities for action that one
perceives in the objects within one’s environment, ultimately dictate one’s behavior
within that environment.
Affordances, according to Gibson, directly influence behavior by determining the
available means of action (or limitations to action) in any given space and time. Gibson
goes so far as to say "[w]e were created by the world we live in" (p. 130). It is the
materiality of the environment, then, that makes any kind of experience possible. Gibson
also stresses that the affordances of an object, surface, or person are not self-contained,
universal properties possessed de facto by that object, surface, or person. Rather
affordances are perceived by the animal and are relative to that animal (p. 135); they are
contingent upon that particular actor in that particular space at that particular time.
Sanders (1999) explains the connection between the interface and users’
perceptions of affordances in Gibson’s theory, saying that “things in our experience are
not just neutral lumps to which we cognitively attach meaning. The things we experience
‘tell us what to do with them’” (p. 129); there is an active exchange between user and
17
interface. The affordances of a particular object, Sanders says, offer an interaction with
the world that goes beyond “an embodiment that is merely physical” (p. 135).
Affordances, by dictating what a user “can do” (p. 135) in the world around them, are
responsible for the experiences one has in that world, and thus, if we return to Clark’s
understanding of rhetorical experience, the kind of transformation of attitudes and
identity that can occur in those experiences.
Gibson’s term affordances has been appropriated by many digital rhetoricians
seeking a way to discuss user interactions with various media and interfaces; however,
much of the work that has incorporated a notion of affordances has veered, some further
than others, from Gibson’s original understanding of the term. Gunther Kress and Theo
van Leeuwen (2001), often touted as first to use the term in visual and digital rhetoric,
and many scholars following their example (Bogost, 2007; Gurak, 2009; Jones & Hafner,
2012; Zappen, 2005), reduce the term to mean simply the options for action that
technology offers its users that control what a user can do (usually paired with the
corollary of “constraint” that determines what a user cannot do). Similarly, in his article
“Technologies, Texts and Affordances,” Ian Hutchby (2001) discusses affordances as
qualities that artifacts – in this case technological artifacts – possess on their own, which
“constrain the ways [the artifacts] can be ‘written’ or ‘read’” (p. 447). Hutchby’s, like
Kress’ and others’, use of affordances thus downplays the role of a user’s perception,
holding an affordance to be something that is inherently in the artifact itself rather than
contextual and perceived by a particular animal in a particular environment.
For the purposes of this study, I return to Gibson’s original understanding of the
term affordances, viewing affordances as opportunities for action as perceived by
18
particular actors in a particular space and time in relation to the material objects in their
environment. As I will show in Chapter 3, this aspect of Gibson’s theory is crucial to an
understanding of the affordances of digital technologies. In previous reductive and
inconsistent appropriations of Gibson’s term, much of the importance that the term can
hold for digital rhetoricians is lost, particularly the strong relationship that Gibson sets up
between affordances and the interface. Applying Gibson’s original understanding of
affordances to an analysis of digital interfaces, we can see that the affordances a
particular interface offers a user depends entirely on that user’s perception of those
affordances, which in turn relies on that user’s previously existing digital literacies.
Because Gibson’s notion of affordances is expressly concerned with the relationship
between an actor and their environment that results in an embodied, interactive
experience that can prompt shifts in attitudes and identification, I use the term
affordances as the foundation for my discussion of both the habits of interaction visitors
perceive as being made available to them by the touchscreen interfaces studied (Chapter
3) and the roles that visitors take up through those habits of interaction (Chapters 4 and
5).
Research Sites and Methods
Research Sites
This study was conducted in two sites, the Cleveland Museum of Art in
Cleveland, Ohio and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Both the Cleveland
Museum of Art and the National Archives have implemented groundbreaking interactive
exhibition technology into their permanent collections that invite the visitor to participate
19
in previously institutional roles such as creating tours for other visitors to follow and
tagging archival documents with keywords.
Designed to “seamlessly integrate” (CMA website) technology with the
museum’s permanent collection, Gallery One, a multi-room exhibition space at the
Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) features cutting-edge exhibition media not found in
other peer institutions. This hybrid exhibition space includes, alongside its interactive
technology, select pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. For the purposes of
this study, I am concerned with the seven touchscreen interfaces contained within and
connected to this hybrid space: the Collection Wall and six interactive kiosks called
Lenses.7
The centerpiece of Gallery One is the Collection Wall, a 40-foot multi-touch
MicroTile screen. The Collection Wall’s digital display, which is the largest in the United
States, refreshes regularly to display either a mosaic of small images or curator-composed
categories of larger images. Some of these categories are germane to the discourses of art
history, such as “Funerary Equipment” and “Still Life.” Others organize artworks under
more “vernacular” (Samis 2012, p. 307) designations such as “Hats,” “Patterns,” and
“Top 10 Faves.” Visitors can use the touch-screen Collection Wall to access digital
7
The CMA also offers an app for both iPhone and Android users. The ArtLens app complements both
Gallery One and CMA’s larger collection. ArtLens operates both as a haptic, mobile device (users carry
iPads with them throughout the museum) and as locative media (necessarily location-based, it uses geolocation to give users access to additional information about artworks that are physically near them).
ArtLens allows visitors to “scan” a work of art, accessing multimedia educational material that is
superimposed and/or played alongside their view of the physical artifact. ArtLens allows users to save and
share “favorites” at the Collection Wall docks, elsewhere in the museum or when at home. Users can create
and title their own tours through the museum proper, as well as access and follow other visitor-created
tours. While I will reference ArtLens several times in the course of this project, it is primarily in situations
where visitors reference the app use in relation to their use of the touchscreen interfaces. A whole other
study could be conducted simply on visitors’ use of their own mobile devices within museums, and indeed
this is a ripe field of study currently. However, for the purposes of this study, and answering my research
questions, I am focusing on the touchscreen interfaces installed by the museums, not the mobile devices
that visitors bring into these spaces with them.
20
images of every object on display in the museum, flip through “related” artworks, browse
visitor-created tours, and save “favorites” to their ArtLens account.
While the Collection Wall connects Gallery One with the museum proper, the six
Lenses, large touch-screen monitors that stand at approximately 5 feet high, offer
significant interaction with artworks displayed near them in the Gallery One space. These
re-imagined kiosks invite visitors to virtually interact with art they can not otherwise
touch, by “sculpting” clay, learning to draw with perspective, experimenting with abstract
painting techniques, searching CMA’s collection using their own facial expressions, and
more.
Similar to the ways in which Gallery One offers CMA visitors unique interactive
engagement with the artworks in the museum’s collection, the National Archives
Museum in Washington D.C. uses touchscreen technology to foster unique engagement
with the archive itself. A 17-foot touch-screen table, which National Archives staff calls
“A Place at the Table,” is housed in the David M. Rubenstein Gallery on the first floor of
the National Archives Museum. The touchscreen table allows visitors to browse “more
than 300 National Archives documents on subjects such as workplace rights, First
Amendment rights, equal rights, and Native American rights” (National Archives
website), to tag documents with appropriate themes and with their responses as readers
and share them with the rest of the visitors in the gallery space.
The touchscreen interfaces at both institutions invite visitors to participate in the
work of these institutions in distinctive ways. The CMA uses interactive exhibition media
not only to give visitors a variety of educational experiences, but also to allow them to
participate in traditionally institutional activities, such as designing tours of the
21
permanent collection. Similarly, the National Archives uses touchscreen technology to
give visitors the experience of browsing, tagging and analyzing archival texts. In chapter
2, I will describe and analyze these sites further, as well as discuss each institution’s
goals for both their unique touchscreen installations and the hybrid spaces of virtual and
physical activity in which they are housed.
Data Collection
I obtained IRB approval for this qualitative, ethnographic project on April 3,
2015.8 Following IRB approval, I collected data over the course of 2015, spending three
weeks in residence in Washington D.C. to complete on-site data collection at the National
Archives Museum in June of 2015,9 and 15 weeks of study at the Cleveland Museum of
Art between May and December of 2015.
The bulk of the data collected for this study is in the form of observations and
contemporaneous field notes. Observation and contemporaneous field notes, according to
Emerson, Fretz and Shaw (2011) are crucial to successful ethnographic research, as they
serve to “inscribe” social processes (p. 13) and are the primary source of data in any
ethnographic study. Over the course of data collection, I observed close to 500 (499)
museum visitors, while recording field notes about my observations. My field notes
contain information about visitors’ approximate age and gender, size of the party, how
long they spent interacting with a particular interface, how they approached the interface
and what they did after they left that interface, transcriptions of conversations or portions
of conversations they had with those around them and/or museum employees, notes on
the actions they engaged in in interacting with the screen, and my interpretation of their
8
9
CWRU IRB Protocol Number: IRB-2015-1124
Made possible with support from the Dean’s Fellowship.
22
interactions with and reactions to other visitors also engaging with the interfaces or
occupying a nearby space. The observations and field notes I completed allowed me to
record, and later analyze, how, in real time, visitors perceive the affordances made
available by these new media interfaces and exhibition spaces and how they respond to
their perceptions of those affordances.
Most of my observations were done focusing on one interface at a time. On a
typical data collection day, I would spend 2-4 hours in front of one particular
touchscreen, for example, the Collection Wall, recording all the activity that happened
there during that time. However, in addition to these typical observations, in the
Cleveland Museum of Art I also completed eleven (11) full tracking observations, in
which I followed a particular group of visitors around the entire Gallery One space,
notating where they stopped, how long they stayed, and what activities they did there.10
For these trackings, I used a gallery map provided by the CMA, which they use for
internal studies. These trackings are similar to the primary core of observations and field
notes, but differ in that I spent a longer time observing one particular party of visitors
rather that focusing on the activity surrounding one interface. These trackings are similar
to data that is collected by the CMA in its research, but as they are intended to, and result
in, primary information about visitors’ preferred pathways through the space, they were
less useful for my purposes, and thus I did not continue with them after the first 11.
To enhance the data collected in field notes, I also conducted interviews with both
museum employees and visitors. Interviews with museum visitors allowed me to
compare researcher observations in field notes with first-person accounts from those
10
Visitors I tracked generally stayed for about an hour.
23
observed. In choosing participants to interview, I approached adults over the age of 18, as
I had IRB clearance to speak only with adults or children accompanied by their guardian.
Interviews with museum staff, along with official press documents and documents
involved in the development of the interfaces and spaces, provided background
information on the rhetorical and institutional goals of those responsible for the design
and function of the exhibition spaces and technology observed. Overall, I conducted and
recorded interviews with 43 visitors and with gallery directors at both sites. These
interviews amounted to over four (4) hours of audio files, many of which were
compromised in quality due to the architectural idiosyncrasies of the museum spaces they
were recorded in and the background noise of often large crowds of museum visitors. To
aid in ease of coding, and to ensure the greatest accuracy in interview transcription, I had
my interview data professionally transcribed by an online transcription company
Rev.com.11 I had initially anticipated transcribing the interviews on my own, but as I do
not have sophisticated audio equipment, it became clear that having them professionally
transcribed would be a better alternative. I listened to each interview multiple times again
during coding to verify their transcriptions and fix any misunderstandings or mistakes.
In addition to observations, field notes, and interviews, I also collected
photographs and video, known as researcher generated visual data (Spencer 2011, p. 42),
which served as ways to record both the spaces and interfaces themselves, as well as
visitors’ experiences with those spaces and interfaces. I collected 137 photographs and
four (4) video files. A complete table outlining the data collected for this study
(Appendix A), the interview questions asked at CMA (Appendix B) and the National
11
Transcription costs were covered by a Baker Nord Center for the Humanities Graduate Research Grant.
24
Archives Museum (Appendix C), and the gallery map used for tracking (Appendix D)
can be found in the appendices.12
Data Analysis
I conducted qualitative and interpretive analysis of all data collected, grounded in
rhetorical analysis, visual ethnography, and qualitative coding. I primarily used NVivo,
OneNote, and Microsoft Excel to organize my data. I used open-to-focused coding
methods recommended by Emerson, Fretz and Shaw (2011) and John Saldana (2012).
Making multiple passes through my data, I used open coding to identify categories and
themes that arose in the data. Some of these categories and themes include words or
phrases used by visitors, such as “interactive” and “fun,” and others describe actions or
responses that I observed such as “Swiped” or “Watched other Visitors.” As I continued
making passes through my data, I focused my coding to identify patterns and create
theory. These more focused categories, for example “Visitor-to-Visitor Instruction,”
direct the discussion of my findings in this dissertation.
As a portion of my researcher-generated data is photographs and video, I also
incorporated principles of visual ethnography into my overall analysis. Visual approaches
to ethnographic research have received a good deal of attention over the past decade, as
researcher-generated or found visual data (such as artwork, images, or video) and
respondent-generated visual data has become an important part of ethnography and other
social science research methods (Spencer, 2011, p. 42). A longstanding approach to
synthesizing images with textual data assumes the research will transform these visuals
representations of experience into textual data by transferring them into written
12
Any published articles, white papers, institutional studies by museum employees, and press documents
are not included in Appendix A, but rather cited in the works cited.
25
descriptions (Ball and Smith, 1992, p. 6). Visual ethnography, in contrast, challenges the
researcher to pay close attention to the role of the image in their research as a piece of
data in its own right. For the purposes of this study, I treated researcher-generated and
respondent-generated images as pieces of visual data, not merely as visual representations
of descriptions written in my field notes. Employing visual ethnographic approaches
theorized by Stephen Spencer (2011) and Sarah Pink (2012), I coded visual data
alongside textual data, in a similar process of open-to-focused coding, taking all
emerging categories and patterns into account in final analyses.
Summary of Findings
In this study, I identify and analyze what I term the “habits of interaction” made
available by the touchscreen interfaces in these hybrid spaces of physical and digital
activity. Interrogating the integral relationship between one’s ability to take up new
interpretive positions through participation in digitally mediated experiences and one’s
previously existing digital literacies, I examine the rhetorical experiences visitors engage
in through interaction with the interfaces studied. I show that through a combination of
the immediacy of touch and a visitor’s existing digital literacies, the interfaces, for many
visitors, “disappear.” What I mean by this is that as a visitor physically interacts with the
touchscreens studied through the habits of interaction that I identify, the interfaces fall
way and the content displayed “takes over.” That visitor then sees herself in direct
relationship, not with the artifact that the digital content displayed represents, but with the
original, physical artifact itself. In other words, museum visitors interacting with these
touchscreen interfaces see themselves as actually “able to touch the art” and thus as
active participants in the work of the museum.
26
The experiences visitors engage in through the habits of interaction I identify
ultimately shift visitors’ interpretive positions by persuading them to take up the
traditionally institutional roles of instructor, researcher, and critic. Participation in these
roles, in turn, persuades visitors to see themselves as active participants in the work of the
museum. At the same time, visitors do not see all experiences afforded by the
touchscreens as equally important. In addition to their previously existing digital
literacies, museum visitors bring a number of biases, or previously existing attitudes, to
their engagement with the touchscreen interfaces. These biases, particularly the beliefs
that digital experiences are intended more for children than adults, and that play and work
are diametrically opposed activities, directly influence how visitors respond to the
experiences they participate in. It is only in the more “serious” experiences of research,
creation, and critical response that the erasure of the interface and the physicalization of
the digital image occur in visitor accounts, and in which visitors see themselves as
contributing to the cultural work of the museum. Visitors’ ability to identify, or as
Kenneth Burke (1969) says, to see themselves as “belonging,” as an active participant in
the work of the museum is dependent, not just on their previously existing ideas about
what the work of the museum is, but on their previously existing ideas of what the work
of the museum is not and who does and does not have a role in it.
Ultimately, the findings of this study demonstrate that powerful rhetorical
experiences are indeed being enacted through museum visitors’ interactions with new
media interfaces. In other words, when we examine the “paradigm shift” that museum
studies scholars claim is occurring through new exhibition practices, we can see that there
is indeed a rhetorical shift in attitude and identification taking place in certain digitally-
27
mediated experiences. At the same time, not all digitally-mediated experiences within
museums do the same kind of rhetorical work. When we examine the habits of interaction
visitors perceive as afforded by the touchscreen interfaces studied, the role that visitors’
previously existing digital literacies play in shaping their experiences with those
interfaces, and the existing biases that influence visitors’ ability to be persuaded, we
realize that there are particular users and bodies that perceive access to certain
experiences and others who may be precluded from interaction with the interfaces
altogether.
Dissertation Outline
Chapter 2: Touchscreen Interfaces in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National
Archives Museum
In this chapter I describe and situate the interfaces at the center of this study: 1)
The Collection Wall and six touchscreen kiosks called Lenses at the Cleveland Museum
of Art, and 2) the touch table installation titled “A Place at the Table” in the Record of
Rights exhibit at the National Archives Museum. Using data collected from museum
employees, I discuss how the institutions that house them intended these interfaces to be
used. I then introduce the complicated history of touch in museums, highlighting the
significance of visitors being able to interact with objects through touch in the museum
spaces studied. I also introduce the tension that underlies this study, which is that while
visitors are “touching” objects, they are not, in fact, touching objects in the museums’
collections directly, but rather a mediating screen.
Chapter 3: Yes, You May Touch the Art: Habits of Interaction and Participatory
Experience
28
In this, the first of three data-driven chapters, using Gibson’s theory of
affordances as a foundation, I show that visitors perceive various actions as afforded by
the touchscreen interfaces in both field sites. I term these actions, which are borrowed
from visitors’ previous experiences with mobile and touch technology, “habits of
interaction.” Using visitor accounts, I demonstrate how six key habits of interaction –
touching, swiping, zooming, hyperlink browsing, favoriting and sharing, and creating
with touch and motion – formed by the immediacy of touch and visitors’ existing digital
literacies, can enact an erasure of the interface. Specifically, visitors interacting with
these interfaces see themselves in direct relationship, not with the touchscreens or the
digital content displayed, but with the physical artworks and artifacts themselves.
Chapter 4: This is How You Touch the Art: Rhetorical Experience and the Visitor as
Expert
Museum visitors contrast these touchscreen interfaces with traditional interpretive
technologies, such as wall placards, audio tours, and brochures, which many see as
barriers to access that narrow their range of possible engagement. While many visitors
initially decry museums as “antiquated,” “tedious,” “boring,” and “elitist,” they view
their interactions with these interfaces as a “completely different kind of experience.” By
and large, visitors see these interfaces as creating an accessible space where the
museum’s collection is no longer “for a select few.” In this chapter, I employ Clark’s
theory of rhetorical experience to explore the change in visitors’ attitudes and identities
from lay viewers of a private collection to participants in the work of the museum. I show
that the rhetorical experiences afforded by these interfaces persuade visitors to take up
“situational expertise” that is manifested in the enacting of institutional roles, particularly
29
the role of instructor, researcher, and critic. I then show that in taking up these roles,
visitors recognize shifts in subject positions within and attitudes toward the museum.
Chapter 5: I’ll do Research, but Play is for Kids: Visitor Participation in the Work of the
Museum
Visitors in both museums initially equate participatory interfaces with children’s
play, viewing the activities often afforded by new media interfaces as being “for kids.”
For many, ludic, or playful, experiences stand in contrast to the more “serious” tasks of
the museum, such as research, education, and conservation. After interacting with these
interfaces, many visitors were surprised to “find such adult technology” that allowed
them to “pursue their own interests” and “have a role” in the more serious work of the
museum. While visitors of all ages interact with the touchscreen interfaces with the same
habits of interaction, visitors equate ludic experiences as entertainment for children, and
the more “adult” experiences of research, creation, and critical response as contributing to
the cultural work of the museum. In this chapter, I show that rhetorical experiences are
shaped not just by participation in a particular experience or role, but by pre-existing
biases one holds prior to that experience. I show that it is primarily in the more “serious”
experiences of research and creation that the erasure of the interface and the
physicalization of the digital image occur in visitor accounts, in which a change in
attitude and identity occurs in which visitors see themselves as contributing to the
cultural work of the museum. This chapter raises salient questions about visitors’
understanding of the work of the museum and who has access to participation in it.
Chapter 6: Conclusion
30
The findings of this study demonstrate that museum visitors are indeed engaging
in powerful rhetorical experiences through their interactions with new media interfaces.
When we examine the habits of interaction those technologies afford, we realize that
there are particular users and bodies who perceive access to these experiences and others
who may be precluded from interaction altogether. This exclusion of certain persons and
particular bodies from participatory experiences in the museum sits in sharp contrast to
the lauded potential for the “democratization”13 of cultural experience that museologists
see resulting from these technologies. In this conclusion, I summarize the findings of this
study, using the results presented to refine the theoretical notion of rhetorical experience.
I then challenge the uncritical adoption of new media interfaces within museums by
arguing that the rhetorical experiences that make this shift possible can result in new
disparities in access, interaction, and participation.
13
The word “democratic” came up several times in conversation with museum officials. Former Director of
the CMA also used it when speaking about Gallery One (Bernstein, 2013).
31
Chapter 2
Touchscreen Interfaces in the Cleveland Museum of Art and
the National Archives Museum
In this chapter I describe and situate the interfaces at the center of this study: 1)
The Collection Wall and six interactive kiosks called Lenses at the Cleveland Museum of
Art, and 2) the Touch Table installation titled “A Place at the Table” in the Record of
Rights exhibit at the National Archives Museum. I introduce the complicated history of
touch in museums, highlighting the significance of visitors being able to interact with
objects through touch in the museum spaces studied. I also introduce the tension that
underlies this study, which is that while visitors are “touching” objects, they are not, in
fact, touching objects in the museums’ collections directly, but rather a mediating screen.
Cleveland Museum of Art: Gallery One
The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is located in the University Circle
neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, a 1-square mile area in which several of the city’s
major cultural institutions and three major institutions of higher education are housed.
Founded in 1913 (Clevelandart.org) and named the second-best museum in the country
by Business Insider in 2016 (Grebey), the CMA is a public institution, offering free
admission (except to special exhibits) and a variety of family-friendly events that are
open to the public. CMA recently underwent a massive renovation and building project,
with the opening of their expansive atrium entry area and the Gallery One exhibit in early
2013.
Gallery One was the result of a sizable donation from the Maltz family and
several years of deliberations about a hybrid exhibition space that would merge digitally
32
mediated experience with select artworks from the museum’s collection. Designed to
“seamlessly integrate” technology with the museum’s permanent collection, Gallery One
features cutting-edge and one-of-a-kind exhibition media. Six touch-screen “lenses”
invite visitors to virtually interact with art they could not otherwise touch, “sculpt” clay,
experiment with abstract painting techniques, search CMA’s collection using their own
facial expressions, remix famous artworks into their own creations, and more. The
ArtLens app allows users to save and share “favorites,” compose tours and follow other
visitor-created tours. ArtLens operates locatively inside the museum, showing visitors
what is “near [them] now,” and allows visitors to “scan” a work of art, accessing
multimedia educational material that is superimposed and/or played alongside their view
of the physical artifact. Visitors can use the Collection Wall to access digital images of
the museum’s permanent collection, flip through “related” artworks, browse visitorcreated tours, and save “favorites” to their ArtLens account. Adjacent to Gallery One is
another separate exhibition space called Studio Play. Studio Play, once a space designed
for young children, underwent a complete renovation in the spring of 2016, and now
features kinetic technology which offers visitors additional participatory experiences.
The Collection Wall
The Collection Wall is an imposing 5 foot by 40 foot multi-touch MicroTile
screen. Accessible directly off of the CMA’s main atrium, the Collection Wall is
mounted alone on the far wall of a large, open room that allows for a sizable group of
visitors to interact with the wall while other visitors pass behind them into the other
rooms of the Gallery One space. A small desk at which visitors can ask questions, rent
33
iPads (for five dollars a day) or set up their mobile devices for use14 sits to the right of the
wall. The space is dimly lit with recessed and track lighting, and the ceiling is lower than
in any of the museum’s other galleries, drawing the viewer’s attention directly to the wall
itself. Several low, wide, modern plastic chairs sit far back at the edge of the wood floor
that reflects the Wall’s light. The open space, the black frame in which the Collection
Wall is mounted and the viewing chairs all echo the way large paintings or installation
pieces might be displayed elsewhere in the museum. At the same time, the floor behind
the row of viewing chairs is carpet rather than wood, and there are tables with chairs
along with several bookshelves offering a preview of the CMA’s public Ingalls Library.
By thus conflating stark display and warm research space the surroundings of the
Collection Wall create a foundation for how the visitor should use the wall – as both art
object and interpretation tool.
The Collection Wall is currently the largest multi-touch display wall in the United
States. According to the CMA’s website:
The wall is composed of 150 Christie MicroTiles and displays more than 23
million pixels, which is the equivalent of more than twenty-three 720p HDTVs.
The Christie iKit multi-touch system allows multiple users to interact with the
wall, simultaneously opening as many as twenty separate interfaces across the
Collection Wall to explore the collection.
14
Visitors use iPads to access the ArtLens app, which syncs to the wall via RFID tag. Visitors who have
their own mobile devices, Apple or Android, may download the app and request RFID stickers to adhere to
their device for that visit and future use. If a visitor wishes to use the ArtLens app in Gallery One and/or
throughout the museum but does not have and iPad with them, they may rent one for the day for five
dollars.
34
At the base of the wall there are eight docks (See Figure 1) that sync visitors’ own or
rental iPads to the wall’s database via RFID tags, allowing users to sync their favorite
images and tours from the wall to their ArtLens app account.
Figure 1: The Collection Wall
The Collection Wall’s digital display is divided into two hemispheres, separated
by the connecting frame, but visually it acts as one display despite the screen division.
The display refreshes every 30 or 60 seconds, alternating between a slowly scrolling
mosaic of small images (see Figure 1) that represents the CMA’s permanent collection
(which is displayed for 60 seconds), and selected displays of larger images (which are
displayed for 30 seconds each). The groupings of larger images take shape as one of 34
35
different “curated views of the collection” (clevelandart.org) 15, or as categories named
thematically (such as by time period) or by media type.16
Some of these categories are constructed on a timeline, offering a historical
overview of a particular theme for the viewer. Each historical overview encompasses a
different, inconclusive timeline with unclear starting and ending dates. The category
“Fashion,” for example, is set out from pre-1500 through post-1910, while “Mother”
spans from pre-600 through post-1950. Categories displayed with a timeline present a
wide scope of works in different media and create a particular heuristic through which to
interpret the category. For example, the category “Mother” includes medieval paintings
of the Madonna and Child as well as more contemporary portrayals of modern
motherhood in works from the early 1950’s; this conflation of works within the space of
the wall’s frame suggests a link between not only “Mary” and “Mom,” but between
religious and secular, and ancient and modern art. In addition to such historical
overviews, the display rotates through groupings based on a variety of continuums.
“Color,” for instance, includes mid-sized images of various works of all media, from a
wide range of time periods, in a spectrum that flows (left to right) from blue, to yellow to
taupe to red (Figure 2). Yet another display reads “Birth” in the upper left corner of the
wall and “Death” in the upper right, a continuum of images constructing a narrative from
the beginning to end of life, much like “Day” and “Night” which follows the same
pattern. The last type of category displayed is a grouping by object, media or theme
description, such as “Water” (Figure 3), “Vessels” (Figure 4) and “Hats.” The content
15
See Appendix E for list of curated categories at time of writing
There is no designation on the wall or elsewhere which of these categories are considered the “curated
views” and which aren’t, one exception being the category “Director’s Favorites.”
16
36
management system that runs the wall’s display display updates every ten minutes,
“[updating] the wall with high-resolution artwork images, metadata, and the frequency
with each artwork has been “favorited” on the wall and from within the ArtLens
iPad/iPhone app” (clevelandart.org). All of these curated themes and categories “can be
changed dynamically [by CMA curators] creating another mode of expression for staff,
and connecting with temporary exhibitions or creating new ideas for the permanent
collection” (clevelandart.org).
Figure 2: “Color”
37
Figure 3: “Water”
Figure 4: “Vessels”
38
The Lenses
In a large room connected to but separate from the space housing the Collection
Wall sits the main collection of Gallery One. It is in this space, which I refer to as Gallery
One Proper, that technology and art come together. The walls of Gallery One Proper
display paintings, prints, artifacts and sculpture much like the other galleries at CMA.
However, unlike the other galleries in the museum, the artwork in Gallery One does not
fall under one obvious category. Instead, sections of the gallery’s collection are intended
to coincide with the theme of one of the six “lenses” that are installed around the room
(see Figure 5).
Figure 5: “Gallery One Proper”
39
The Lenses are reminiscent of interactive, digital technologies, often called kiosks,17
used at other museums. Each Lens stands at 4.5 feet tall, and includes a 3ft touchscreen
interfaces framed by a silver metal frame and stand (see Figure 6). Each of the six Lenses
is titled with a question (which, for the sake of convenience, I assign a short name). The
Lenses are titled as follows:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Why Do We Paint? (Painting Lens)
What Does a Lion Look Like? (Lion Lens)
Where Do Stories Come From? (Stories Lens)
How Do Our Bodies Inspire Art? (Bodies Lens)
What Was the World Like? (World Lens)
How are Art and Trade Connected? (Vase Lens)
Each Lens has a home screen that displays a photograph of the section of Gallery One
located immediately in front of it. This photograph shows the artworks one sees if they
look beyond the Lens, but with a small icon of a magnifying glass underneath each one
(see Figure 7). When a visitor touches one of the magnifying glasses, they access what
Jane Alexander (2014), Chief Information Officer for the CMA, calls the “Look Closer”
feature:
which shows high-resolution images of the artwork, which may be rotated
360 degrees and zoomed by touch. The artworks reveal assorted
informational hotspots relating to specific details of the work, the artist,
era, etc. through slideshows, text, and video (p. 348).
The Lenses were called as such because the CMA wanted visitors to look through them,
as one does a lens, and “get closer to the art” (Alexander, Interview). According to Jane
17
A few visitors, familiar with digital technology often found in museums, referred to the Lenses as kiosks.
Most, however, just referred to them as “touchscreens” or “screens.” In her 2014 article, “Gallery One at
the Cleveland Museum of Art,” CMA Chief Information Officer Jane Alexander calls the Lenses “kiosks.”
For the purposes of this project I refer to them as Lenses.
40
Figure 6: “Why Do We Paint Lens”
41
Figure 7: “Lens Home Page – Look Closer”
Alexander, the Lenses were intended to resemble easels, reminiscent of the kind of
workspace that visitors often associate with painters or other artists. The Gallery One
team wanted to craft a space that combined a birds-eye view of the museum’s collection
(from the Collection Wall) with participatory experiences that merge education with
visitor input (Alexander, Interview). The artworks chosen for display in Gallery One
represent a broad sampling of the museum’s collection, spanning eras, styles, and media.
42
According to Jane Alexander (2014), the CMA and their collaborators18 sought to offer
experiences that allowed visitors to feel more “involved” in the collection, and connected
to the museum (Interview). She said:
Team members wanted to convey information in ways that felt like
experiences rather than didactic lessons, allowing visitors to drive their
own encounters with works of art and share their results with each other.
(p. 305).
It is exactly this distinction between experiences and didactic, top-down lessons that I
will discuss in this dissertation.
Former Director David Franklin wanted technologically mediated experiences to
augment visitor’s experience within the space of the museum, rather than extend their
experience beyond the museum walls.19 In addition to offering new experiences and
“bringing visitors closer to the art” (Alexander, Interview), the installation of Gallery One
was, of course, a marketing decision. Museums are turning to emerging
technology and social media in order to stay culturally relevant in today’s highlydigitized world (Titlow, 2016). As journalist Fred Bernstein (2013) said shortly after the
opening of Gallery One:
The new director hoped to enlarge the museum’s audience while he was
enlarging its building. Technology, he believed, would lure new visitors,
especially ones experienced with digital devices. At the same time, he said
18
Gallagher and Associates (exhibit design), Zenith Systems (AV Integration), Piction (CMS/DAM
development), Earprint Productions (app content development), and Navizon (way-finding)
(Clevelandart.org).
19
Franklin adamantly refused to make the CMA’s collection available on Google Art, stressing the
importance of connecting the museum’s collection with the space of the museum.
43
he believed he could make seasoned museumgoers want to come more
often, by deepening their understanding of the artworks.
At the time of this writing, I was not given access to internal analytics that the CMA is
compiling, but the message the CMA informally presents is that the overall effect of
Gallery One has been positive, both in terms of visitor response and in terms of visit rate
and retention.
National Archives Museum: A Place at the Table
The National Archives Museum (NAM), in Washington D.C., is an imposing
building located several blocks away from the United States Capitol and directly across
the street from the Smithsonian Institute’s sculpture garden. As a federal organization and
a public institution, the NAM offers free admission; however, the museum can only
accommodate a certain number of visitors at a time and there is usually a long line for
entry. In addition to a gallery that houses a rotating collection, the NAM has several
permanent gallery spaces and a rotunda in which the Declaration of Independence,
Constitution of the United States, and other governing documents can be viewed. The
first gallery visitors see as they pass through security is the David M. Rubenstein Gallery,
which houses the Records of Rights exhibit. The permanent20 Records of Right exhibit,
with the Touch Table as its centerpiece, opened in 2014.
The Touch Table sits at the center of the Records of Rights exhibition space. The
Table sits between two walls on which are mounted video screens that display a softly
rolling series of images and quotes from the gallery’s collection; the other two sides of
the table are open to the rest of the gallery space (see Figure 8). The Touch Table is 17ft
20
Curator Alice Kamps said that “permanent” exhibits stay up about 10-15 years (Kamps, Interview)
44
long and features 12 “stations,” 6 on each side, from which visitors can access the records
displayed there. The “stations” are not physically framed (there is a frame that cuts
through the middle of the table but it serves a structural purpose and does not seem to
prevent visitors from looking over it from one station to the other); each station operates
as its own display. Down the center of the table is a river-esque graphic that undulates
with greater speed as more visitors interact with the Table. There are six categories of
records in the form of digitized documents, images, and video, each which has a
corresponding color that frames and fills boxes of text and navigational symbols (see
Figure 9). The six categories of records accessible from the Table are: Equal Rights
(green), Rights to Freedom and Justice (pink), Rights to Privacy and Sexuality (blue),
Workplace Rights (red), First Amendment Rights (yellow), and Rights of Native
Americans (purple). Each of these categories is divided into “chapters,” each category
has a varying number of chapters, and each chapter is labeled and includes a box of
introductory text. When visitors click one of the categories from the menu (see Figure 9,
bottom) they open a new page which shows that category’s chapters on a timeline, in
chronological order from left to right. When clicked, each chapter, in turn, opens to
reveal a number of different “events.” Users can navigate through chapters either by
quickly selecting a new chapter from a short line of chapter numbers in the lower left of
the screen, or by swiping left to right through the chapters. If a visitor navigates from a
chapter to an event, they then bring up a new page that shows, on the left, the text
detailing that event and, on the right, a number of different records related to that event
(see Figure 10). Selecting one of these documents brings up yet a new display showing an
image of the document on the right (with a brief overlay of text that says
45
Figure 8: “Records of Rights and the Touch Table”
Figure 9: “Color-coded Categories”
46
Figure 10: “Event w/ 5 Documents”
Figure 11: “Keyword Tree”
47
“pinch to zoom,” which I discuss in Chapter 4) and informational text specific to that
document on the left. Along with the informational text, each event includes a number of
archival tags (“keywords” according to Kamps, see Figure 10) that when selected bring
up a site map - like page that shows that particular tag across all 6 overarching categories
(for instance, one can touch to see where "women" come up in all 6 categories and then
select related documents from other categories) (see Figure 11).
In house, the Touch Table is officially titled “A Place at the Table.” Curator Alice
Kamps, in charge of the Table’s creation and installation, said that the design team
wanted to make an “interactive,” the museum’s term for digital interfaces that visitors can
engage with, that many people could use simultaneously, but that would also allow
visitors to speak with each other as they would across a dinner table (Kamps, Interview).
The name, “A Place at the Table” however is not displayed anywhere on the touchscreen
itself or in the Record of Rights gallery; it has been kept largely internal. The Table is
most often referred to as the Table or the Touch Table, which is what I call it in this
study.
The Touch Table was the result of an 18-month collaboration between a team at
the National Archives Museum and Second Story, a New York City based company that
designs digitally mediated experiences (Kamps, Interview). It was initially envisioned
after work on the Records of Rights exhibit had begun, in part as a way to give visitors
access to a much larger portion of the archive than the gallery space allowed for display
on the wall or floor-mounted cases. Unlike the CMA’s extensive press surrounding
Gallery One, the NAM says very little about the Touch Table on the website. I would not
48
have known what it was had I not visited in person and stumbled upon it almost
accidentally.
Alice Kamps was very clear about her motivation behind the installation of the
Touch Table. She said:
The goal that I had was that people have a way to pursue their own line of
inquiry that we wouldn't dictate the information that was presented to
them. They could search or explore based on what interested them. We
tried to design it with multiple entry points. That's why it has different
ways of navigating through the record.
As I will show in the following chapters, visitors echoed Kamps language; she applauded
visitors being able to “pursue their own line of interest,” and visitors used this language
to describe their own experiences. The NAM has not conducted their own analytical
research about the Touch Table or Record of Rights exhibit, but from my findings from
visitor responses, Kamps and her team achieved her goal as many visitors expressed
excitement that they were able to “follow their own interests.” While both Kamps and
NAM visitors see the Touch Table as offering an experience of following one’s own
interests, it is important to note that what is displayed by and accessible through
interaction with the Touch Table is still a curated, and limited, portion of the NAM’s
archive. I explore this tension further in Chapter 4.
On Touching Things in Museums
In speaking about the touchscreen interfaces at the center of this study, both Alice
Kamps of the National Archives Museum and Jane Alexander of the Cleveland Museum
of Art spoke of the importance of what they called “interaction,” of visitors participating
49
in certain experiences, and with some autonomy, within the space of the museum.21
While both Kamps and Alexander lauded the benefits of visitor participation within the
museum, neither of them addressed the specific role that touch plays in the digitally
mediated experiences they helped curate. Both women seem to see touch as a given;
touch is an understood aspect of the technology they implemented, a tool with which
visitors could use the interfaces and little else. For them, the important aspects of the
technology were the experiences visitors could have and the roles they could see
themselves taking up through interaction with the touchscreens.
For the visitors at both sites of study, however, the reason those experiences and roles
were significant to them was precisely because those experiences were facilitated
through touch. Unlike the museum officials responsible for the installation of the
technology studied, who saw touch merely as a means to an end, museum visitors viewed
the ability to touch as a monumental aspect of both of these exhibition spaces. For
museum visitors, touch is exactly what set the experiences they had in these exhibition
spaces apart from their previous experiences in other museums.
As I will show in this dissertation, visitors approach exhibition technology with a host
of digital literacies borrowed from their experience (or lack thereof) of mobile technology
(Chapter 3) as well as with existing biases about the kinds of experiences traditionally
available to them in museums (Chapter 5). Visitors also, importantly, see the interfaces in
context, forming opinions about them based in part on their understanding of museums in
general, what kind of work museums do, and who participates in that work, which I
discuss further in Chapter 4. As such, while visitors recognize the interfaces as
21
The actual experiences visitors take part in will be explored in detail throughout this dissertation.
50
touchscreen technologies to be interacted with via touch, they still often exhibit
reluctance to actually touch them. As an example, a young boy, approximately 5 years
old, began to run from the Collection Wall into Gallery One proper towards the Painting
Lens with his hands outstretched. His mother followed, yelling in a panicked tone, “No!
Don’t run! Don’t touch!” She finally caught her son’s hand before he reached the Lens,
and the pair left Gallery One having touched nothing. Other visitors expressed their
hesitation or reluctance to touch to one another, asking their fellow visitors questions
such as, “Do I just touch it?”, “You just touch it, right?”, and “We can put our fingers on
this, right?” (CMA visitors). Similarly, at the NAM, many visitors who approached the
Touch Table on their own, seeing no other visitors already interacting with the table,
would just stand and read from the Table with their arms folded or with their hands in
their pockets, and leave without touching it at all.
The hesitation to touch that these visitors expressed is not a hesitation to touch the
screen itself, which they all identified as touchable based on their previous experiences
with touchscreen technology, as I discuss in Chapter 3. The hesitation instead is a
reluctance to touch the screens within the environment of the museum that stems from a
social understanding of the traditional taboo against touching objects in the museum.
Touch has a complicated place in the history of museums and is rooted largely in
tensions of class politics. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, “both private and public
collections were often touched by visitors, and indeed experienced through a range of
sensory channels” (Classen and Howes, 2006). By the mid-nineteenth century, however,
“the acceptance of tactile experience had disappeared” (Candlin, 2008) as museums
restricted access to their collections, reducing the availability of visiting hours and
51
sensory experiences that the middle and working class had access to. As museums
expanded their collections and reexamined their role in society, many museum officials
emphasized the role of the museum as a steward and protector of a precious collection.
As such, many viewed the corrupting touch of the lower classes as an anathema to the
conservationist vision of the museum. As Candlin (2008) says of the museum elite of the
nineteenth century:
…they thought that the touch of their social inferiors was unruly and destructive.
Indeed, they even considered that the close proximity of working people and
valuable objects was enough to pollute or damage the objects. Both the possibility
of touching objects and the recognition that touch could contribute to learning,
pleasure and subjectivity all depended on who touched (p. 13).
This division between the institution, seen as part of the elite, and the public, seen as a lay
audience whose interaction with the museum’s collection needed to be carefully managed
by the intuition, lasted well into the later half of the twentieth century. During that time,
the ability to handle a museum’s collection via touch was seen almost solely as belonging
to those officially sanctioned by the institution, meaning curators, conservationists, other
experts, and collection owners (Classen and Howes, 2006; Candlin, 2008).
During the second World War, Theodore Low (1942) charged museums to
reexamine their role in modern society. Museums, Low said, were supposed to “play an
important role in community life” (p. 7), but had fallen short due to having become so far
removed from the public they were meant to serve. He contrasted “conservative”
approaches to education – linear, top-down, scholarly endeavors governed by fiscal
concerns and a board of trustees – to new, “progressive” approaches of audience-driven
52
popular education and public work, saying the museum must shift towards the
progressive in order to survive and to justify its existence in a modern world (p. 22).
Museums continued to evolve over the course of the twentieth century and conversations
begun by Low developed into the relatively new field of new exhibition studies.
Currently, new exhibition studies, which emphasizes the importance of visitor
participation in museums, includes a renewed look into object handling and touch in
exhibition spaces. Much work has been done on the benefits of multisensory museum
experiences over purely visual ones and on the importance of touch in visitor education
(Classen, 2005; Classen and Howes, 2006; Pye, 2007; Chatterjee, 2008). Indeed, many
museums today, both through providing access to direct object-handing of items in their
collections and through digitally-mediated experiences facilitated through touch
technology, are offering more tactile experiences in their exhibitions and spaces. At the
same time, the taboo surrounding touch in museums, and visitors’ understanding of touch
as purely the purview of the institution remains strong. The fact that so many of the
visitors I observed and interviewed expressed either a hesitation to touch and/or an
excitement about being given access to this unexpected activity (both of which I will
explore at length in this dissertation) suggests that the taboo of touch in the museum is
still alive and well in contemporary museum culture. In fact, surprisingly, there is still
much work in museums studies that reifies the traditional divides between the institution
and a corrupting public. Take this advice from Sharon Shaffer (2015) for example.
Shaffer (2015) says:
For many adults, an art museum visit is the supreme test of a child’s
behavior. These adults are constantly worried that the accompanying child
53
will touch or harm valuable art objects or embarrass the family in some
way with inappropriate behavior.
Addressing a child’s need to touch is an adult’s first job at the art
museum. Even though many sculptures and paintings beckon to be
touched, adults need to establish that an art museum is only a seeing place,
not a touching place. Some children respond to the idea of touching only
with the eyes” (p. 54).
Here, Shaffer, in a relatively recent piece on young-audiences in museums written for
both parents and museum officials, stresses that “an art museum is only a seeing place.”
She also presents a point of view that equates touch with “harm” and “inappropriate
behavior” unbecoming of a responsible museum visitor. It is institutional sentiments such
as this that visitors are responding to when they say things such as, “museums are usually
like ‘don't get too close, I don't think you should be touching that. Don't breathe too
hard’” (CMA Visitor), and when they claim that they largely see museums as “elitist,”
“boring,” and “tedious.” In the chapters that follow, I will show that underlying visitors’
responses to the experiences they perceive as afforded by the touchscreen interfaces, and
the rhetorical work those experiences make possible, is an appreciation for the experience
of being able to touch objects within the space of the museum that is directly contrasted
with visitors’ existing beliefs about access and their relationship to the institution.
For the majority of visitors studied, touching the flat, smooth screens of the digital
interfaces served as a direct stand-in for touching the actual art objects. In other words,
for many visitors who interacted with the touchscreens studied, the interfaces fell away,
disappeared, and visitors saw themselves as physically interacting with the actual art
54
object or archival artifact digitally displayed by the interfaces. As one visitor said when
describing why he was excited about the touchscreens at the CMA, “You want to interact
with art, you want to touch the art” (CMA Visitor). Other visitors spoke of being able to
“feel texture” of the artwork when touching the screens. Yet another said that he was
surprised to stumble into Gallery One, “Where you can actually touch the stuff and be
able to read about it” (CMA Visitor), implying that what he was touching was the same
as what he was reading about – the art object itself.
In his article “Fingerbombing, or ‘Touching is Good’: The Cultural Construction
of Technologized Touch,” David Parisi (2008) gives us a way to understand what is
occurring in visitor’s physical interaction with the touchscreen interfaces in these gallery
spaces. Parisi contrasts active touch, in which an actor directly manipulates objects with a
feeling, sensing hand with gaming touch, “in which the hand manipulates without
feeling…a model of touch absent of feeling in which the perceiver is only a manipulator,
a controller” (p. 319). Gaming touch, he says, requires a “technologically extended hand”
meaning that what the user is manipulating is a controller, a joystick, a mouse, a screen,
or some other kind of device that moves digital images of objects displayed on a
computer screen. Gaming touch of the digital representations of objects displayed on the
screen is not the same as active touch of physical versions of those objects. However,
Parisi claims, users respond to gaming touch in much the same way as they do active
touch depending on the framing of the “mediated experience.” What I will show in this
dissertation is that visitors equate the gaming touch of feeling only the smooth screen of
the touchscreen interfaces with the experience of physically interacting with, and feeling,
the actual art and archival objects. I discuss this phenomenon at length in the following
55
chapters, discussing both how this equation of the interface with the art object is
occurring in visitors’ experience and also how that equation influences visitors’ rhetorical
experiences.
While visitors’ recognition of the uniqueness of the touchscreen interfaces and the
experiences afforded by them at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Archives
Museum is significant, not all visitors view these interfaces and experiences as equally
beneficial or important. For every group of visitors I tracked at the CMA who interacted
with the Collection Wall and Lenses, there were many more who traveled through the
Gallery One space without interacting with a single piece of technology. Visitors of all
ages perused the gallery space following the perimeter of the room, viewing the art
objects, and avoiding the Lenses and Wall completely.
In my observations, I noticed that for some visitors the technology simply did not
create a pleasant sensory experience. One woman in her mid-60s, shying away from the
Collection Wall as the rest of her friends used it said, “it makes me a little dizzy” (CMA
Visitor). This woman eventually left Gallery One into the atrium area and waited for her
friends to join her there before continuing to the rest of the museum. Another woman in
her mid-20s approached the Wall, touched it briefly and, turning to the man with her,
said, “it stresses me out” (CMA Visitor). The couple then also left Gallery One without
touching any of the other touchscreens there.
Still other visitors viewed the technology as ultimately detracting from the ways
in which they normally prefer to view and interpret art. One visitor I interviewed,
ambivalent about his experience with the Collection Wall, said, “I prefer to look at the
art” (CMA Visitor). Another couple, in their mid-30s, spent about 20 minutes in Gallery
56
One proper without touching a single one of the touchscreens (though they had used the
Collection Wall for some time). When asked why they did not use the Lenses, they
responded:
Man:
Just interacting with [the Wall] without doing to the
touchscreens…I guess…Just talking amongst ourselves about it
[gesturing towards the art displayed].
Woman:
I think sometimes I like to look at the artwork before I read about
it, so I feel like they [the Lenses] almost have like spoilers or
something.
As discussed previously, Gallery One proper resembles a traditional exhibition space,
with the six Lenses distributed throughout. While this couple happily interacted with the
Collection Wall, which stands alone in its own space, when they entered the more
traditional exhibition space they did not appreciate the inclusion of the technology there.
This couple viewed the Lenses as potentially interfering with their interpretation of the
art, preferring to view the art objects displayed without supplementing their viewing with
the digitally-mediated experiences afforded by the Lenses.
The above couple’s response highlights one of the primary tensions underlying
this study, namely that the experience of viewing the art object is ultimately different
from that of viewing a digital image of that object displayed on a screen. Similarly, the
experience of touching a digital screen is not the same as that of touching the actual art
object. As I show throughout this dissertation, despite the reality of these two
distinctions, the lines between both experiences get very blurred in visitors’ experiences
and in visitors’ responses to those experiences.
57
Despite the fact that some visitors view digitally mediated experiences as
potentially detracting from their experience of viewing the museum’s physical collection,
and despite the anxiety or hesitation several visitors expressed over touching or
interacting with the interfaces studied, the vast majority of visitors I observed and
interviewed saw the touchscreen interfaces as unique, important, and exciting, and as
offering access to experiences not normally available to lay visitors in the museum. In
fact, as I will show throughout this dissertation, the majority of visitors, through
interaction with the touchscreen interfaces studied, viewed themselves as able to touch
the art, and, because of this ability, as active participant in the cultural work of the
museum.
At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that while the curators of both
exhibition spaces and the touchscreen interfaces studied cite their goals for those spaces
and interfaces as wanting to “bring visitors closer to the collection” (Alexander) and as
wanting visitors to feel like they are participating in the work of the museum (Kamps), it
can't be ignored that these kinds of new, expensive, and highly technologically-equipped
exhibition spaces are primarily a concerted marketing effort on the part of the museum.
Such new exhibition spaces, while they are contributing to the “paradigm shift”
(Anderson, 2011) that is occurring in exhibition practices, are still first and foremost an
attempt to keep the museum relevant, to attract and retain visitors at a time when, as John
Titlow (2016) says, “people of all ages are increasingly glued to their devices.” The
tensions that arise between the museums’ goal to create more participatory experiences
and their goal to retain visitors and attract donation, between visitors’ appreciation of the
integration of emerging technologies with exhibition practices and other visitors’
58
hesitation to incorporated digital experiences into their viewing of the museum, and the
tensions, which I will highlight in the chapters that follow, between which visitors have
access, or do not, to particular experiences with the touchscreens studied all underlie the
findings and ultimate recommendations of this study.
59
Chapter 3
Yes, You May Touch the Art: Habits of Interaction and Participatory Experience
During an uncharacteristically quiet afternoon in the David M. Rubenstein
Gallery of the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C., a man approached the
17-foot touch-screen table located auspiciously in the center section of the gallery space.
There were a couple of visitors already using the table, so the man, who appeared to be in
his mid-forties, approached the closest unused station and touched the screen on the
image of a document that was displayed. The man proceeded to read through several
different chapters22 of the category he opened into, used the menu button to return to the
system’s main menu, used right and left-facing arrow symbols to navigate from one
document to the next, used the “X” symbol to close out of other documents, and used
both his fingers and his hands to zoom in and out of various images of documents and
photographs. He spent close to ten minutes like this, navigating through various chapters,
events, and documents. All in all, he used over a dozen different motions and actions to
interact with the touchscreen interface of the Touch Table. Yet, afterwards, when asked
in an interview how he used the Touch Table and what specific “actions and motions” he
employed during that use, the man replied:
The first thing was I saw the First Amendment so I wanted to learn about that.
Then, the second one was just going through the different parts of the First
Amendment and different...I guess you would say different positives and
negatives that people had back then about the First Amendment, so I was reading
about that. (NA Visitor)
22
Refer to Chapter 2 for description of the Touch Table interface, software, and display.
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This visitor’s response to my interview question focused on the content he saw himself as
engaging with, not on his physical interactions with the interface itself.
In a similar exchange at the Cleveland Museum of Art, in Cleveland, OH, I asked
another visitor the same question. When asked what specific actions or gestures he used
to manipulate the Collection Wall, the 40-foot MicroTile touch-screen that is the
centerpiece of Gallery One,23 this man replied, “I crossed through different regions and
different types of art. I particularly paid attention to the coins. The gold coins and also the
porcelains.” After spending nearly fifteen minutes browsing through digital images of
artworks on the screen using touch and swiping motions, this visitor saw himself as
primarily engaging with the content displayed, not the interface itself. His response also
suggests that what he encountered was the artworks themselves, not digital
representations or images of the artworks.
Both of these exchanges exemplify how the majority of museum visitors spoke
about their experiences using these touchscreen interfaces. Interaction with these
interfaces requires gesture, motion, and sensory engagement, a physical relationship with
the screen itself in order to manipulate the digital images displayed therein. Yet, when
asked what specific actions or motions they used in order to interact with the
touchscreens, the majority of interviewees focused their answers and narratives around
the content displayed by the touchscreens rather than on their individual physical
interactions with the touchscreens themselves. A number of interviewees went on to
cursorily describe those actions, but only when pressed further. At the National Archives
Museum, interviewees routinely answered by describing what topics they had focused on,
23
Refer to Chapter 2 for description of the Collection Wall, software, and display.
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ignoring discussion of the interface entirely, instead describing how they saw documents
they viewed as pertaining to their lived experiences.24 At the Cleveland Museum of Art,
many interviewees went so far as to describe themselves as actually being able to touch
and manipulate the art itself.
At first glance, this tendency for museum visitors to ignore the physicality of the
touchscreen interfaces in favor of the digital content they manipulate is not surprising; the
disappearance of the interface has been seen as a central tenet of emerging digital
technology since the early days of new media theory. In 2001, Lev Manovich predicted a
future rife with virtual reality (VR) technology. He contrasted virtual reality with the 2dimensional space of the screen, claiming that with virtual reality, “physical space is
totally disregarded, and all ‘real’ actions take place in virtual space” (p. 114). Bolter and
Grusin (2000) spoke of the desire for immediacy in technological interactions as
perpetuating a move towards “transparent interfaces” which exist with “no recognizable
electronic tools – no buttons, windows, scroll bars, or even icons as such” (p. 23).
Touchscreen interfaces exist and are interacted with in physical space, and thus do not
make possible the boundary-breaking experience of virtual reality as imagined by
Manovich, Bolter and Grusin. However, the museum visitors I interviewed described
their experiences in a way that affirms the potential for hybrid virtual/physical spaces to
enact such an erasure of the interface. For the majority of visitors interviewed, their
experiences with the touchscreen interfaces were similar to the way that Manovich (2001)
24
I discuss the implications of visitors’ focus on content and its relationship to their lived experience at
length in Chapter 4.
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described an experience with VR, “The screen disappeared because what was behind it
simply took over” (p. 114).25
The touchscreens that form the loci of this study are not virtual reality interfaces,
however; they are still very much screens. A screen, in Manovich’s (2001) basic
definition specifically describing new media technology, is “a rectangular surface that
frames a virtual world and that exists within the physical world of a viewer without
completely blocking her visual field” (p. 16). The touchscreen interfaces of the Collection
Wall, the Lenses, and the Touch Table all function according to the digital logic of the
personal computer, allowing visitors a limited range of available ways to interact with the
content therein. Yet, something inherent in the experience of interacting with the
touchscreen interfaces studied seems to enact the erasure of the interface that Bolter and
Grusin (2000) saw as a potential of the transparent interface, “so that the user is no longer
aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the
contents of that medium” (p. 24). What is it about these touchscreens, then, that
effectively makes them invisible to museum visitors, and inspires visitors to see
themselves as interacting directly with the physical texts and artworks remediated by
them?
In Chapter 2 I discussed the significance of visitors’ ability to touch objects in
museums. Here, I argue that it is a combination of the immediacy of touch and a visitor’s
25
The erasure of the interface that occurs in interaction with new media interfaces is reminiscent of
Heidegger’s concept of “ready-to-hand,” which is the idea that the objects we encounter and use in our
everyday environment tend do not usually garner our attention in their use. In other words, as Harrison Hall
(1993) explains, “in our ordinary dealings with things they hardly show up at all in the ordinary sense of
being explicitly noticed or perceived” (p. 126). Instead, our attention is focused on the action and the
intended results of this action. What is interesting in the case of touchscreen interfaces in museums, as I
will show, is that while visitors’ intended action might be to complete digitally mediated activities via use
of these “ready-to-hand” interfaces, because of the disappearance of the interface in this instance, they
perceive themselves to be interacting directly with the works of art displayed.
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existing digital literacies that make possible the erasure of the touchscreen interfaces in
these spaces, and that allow a visitor to see herself not as touching a screen but as actually
“touching the art.” Digital literacies, understood by Jones and Hafner (2012) as the
“practices of communicating, relating, thinking and ‘being’ associated with digital
media” (p. 13), are learned and embodied skills and social practices that direct an
individual’s interaction with digital interfaces and media (Jones and Hafner, 2012;
Knobel and Lankshear, 2007; Kress, 2003; Selfe, 1999). The touchscreen interfaces in the
Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Archives Museum can make possible a
variety of ways to interact with the digital content those screens display. Because
engagement with touchscreen technology requires a meeting of the physical body and the
computer interface, it creates an experience of “simultaneous exchange of information
between the user and the machine” (Hayward et. al 2004, p. 18). Museum visitors, then,
engage with the touchscreen interfaces observed in this study through embodied
interaction with the both the interface itself and the content it displays through touch, a
sensory experience and subject position not made available by traditional interpretive
media such as wall plaques and audio tours. Borrowing language from mobile interface
theorist Jason Farman (2012), who elucidates how embodied interaction with these
touchscreen interfaces can provoke unique habits on the part of users, I call the ways that
visitors interact with the touchscreens habits of interaction. In this chapter, I discuss six
particular habits of interaction – touching, swiping, zooming, hyperlink browsing,
creating with touch and motion, and favoriting and sharing – that are accomplished by
corresponding kinetic motions and visual recognition of words and symbols that indicate
possibilities for navigation. They also are borrowed habits of interaction that rely on
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visitors’ existing experience with touchscreen interfaces, such as tablets and mobile
phones, and with features that have become germane to Web 2.0, such as hyperlinks,
keyword tags, and social networking.
The habits of interaction with which visitors engage with the touchscreen
interfaces directly influence how visitors make sense of the digital content displayed by
these interfaces. In the hybrid physical/virtual spaces of the institutions studied, visitors
perceive certain habits of interaction afforded by the touchscreens therein, and through
interaction with those touchscreens using the habits of interaction they perceive being
made available to them, they see themselves as participating in a unique kind of museum
experience, one that is collaborative and creative, rather than just, as one visitor put it,
“walking around looking at the pictures and staring dumbly at it” (CMA Visitor). In other
words, the habits of interaction a visitor perceives the interfaces as affording allow them
to take part in a particular range of experiences that can shift the interpretive position of
the visitor, allowing the visitor to actively and publicly participate in types of activities
that in the past were exclusively undertaken privately by the institution. I will explore
these previously-intuitional activities and the rhetorical experiences that engender this
shift from visitor-as-spectator to visitor-as-co-producer further in Chapter 4.
In this chapter, I will introduce and analyze six key habits of interaction that
visitors can perceive as possible with these touchscreen interfaces. I will also show, and
analyze how visitors perceive, experience, and describe those habits of interaction.
Finally, I will show that it is a combination of the immediacy of touch and a visitor’s
existing digital literacies that make it possible for these interfaces to “disappear,” for the
content within to “take over,” and for the visitor to see herself in direct relationship, not
65
with what artifact the digital content displayed visually represents, but with the original,
physical artifact itself.
Gibson’s Affordances and User Interaction
Key to my analysis of the habits of interaction visitors use to engage with the
touchscreen interfaces at the center of this study is the notion of affordances, a term first
coined by psychologist James Gibson (1986). In The Ecological Approach to Visual
Perception, Gibson defines affordances as what an environment “offers the animal, what
it provides or furnishes” (p. 127). John Sanders (1999) extends this definition by noting
that affordances are “opportunities for action in the environment of an organism” (p.
129).
A complex concept, the term affordances has become commonly used in the field
of digital rhetoric as a way to discuss digital interfaces, and to identify what opportunities
for action, for communication and interpretation, various media technologies offer users
or render inaccessible or impossible to them. Gunther Kress and Leo van Leeuwen
(2001), introduced the term briefly in their discussion of modality and media in
communication in Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary
Communication, as a way to identify the possibilities of or constraints upon
communication and meaning-making inherent in particular modes of communication.
While they admitted the term warranted further exploration, their understanding of
affordances is tied closely to the material properties of media, the “material resources” (p.
66) we use to communicate, including the body and technological tools of production.
Following their example, many scholars (Bogost, 2007; Gurak, 2009; Jones & Hafner,
2012; Zappen, 2005), have come to use the term in ways that focus solely on the
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materiality of resources or the interface, and uphold affordances as qualities inherently
possessed by the object or interface itself. While the materiality of the object is an
important element of Gibson’s affordances, as Anne Wysocki (2005) and Carmen Lee
(2007) point out, such definitions ultimately fail to articulate the intertwined relationships
between material objects, affordances, and human interactions inherent in Gibson’s
original concept, and thus downplay the crucial role a user’s perception plays in
determining what affordances an object makes available to that user.
For Gibson (1986), an affordance is not an innate quality possessed by the
material object itself; the term refers, instead, to the “complementarity of the animal and
the environment” (p. 127). In Gibson’s theory, an environment is made up of both
animate and inanimate objects; the animate objects, or animals (including humans),
perceive the affordances made available by the materiality (i.e. objects, surfaces, and
other animals) of their environment. Affordances then directly influence animal behavior
by determining the means of action (or limitations to action) available to a particular
animal in a given physical space at a given time. Gibson stresses that the affordances an
object, surface or other animal might offer the acting animal are not self-contained,
universal properties possessed de facto by that object, surface, or other animal. Rather, as
affordances are perceived by the acting animal and thus are uniquely relative to that
animal (p. 135), they are entirely contingent upon that particular actor in that particular
space at that particular time. Sanders (1999) elaborates on this connection between the
object and the animal’s perceptions of affordances, stating that “things in our experience
are not just neutral lumps to which we cognitively attach meaning. The things we
experience ‘tell us what to do with them’” (p. 129). In this understanding, there is an
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active exchange between actor and object that dictates what a particular actor “can do”
(p. 135) in the world around them.
Ian Hutchby (2001), in his call to sociologists of technology to embrace Gibson’s
term as a theoretical paradigm, identifies this exchange between actor and object as the
relational nature of affordances, saying:
…affordances are not just functional but also relational aspects of an object’s
material presence in the world. Affordances are functional in the sense that they
are enabling, as well as constraining, factors in a given organism’s attempt to
engage in some activity…Certain objects, environments or artefacts have
affordances which enable a particular activity while others do not…the relational
aspect, however, draws our attention to the way that the affordances of an object
may be different for one species than for another (p. 448).
In other words, as Hutchby stresses, the affordances that any object might “offer” to a
particular actor are entirely contingent upon that actor’s perception of those affordances,
and therefore will vary from one perceiving actor to the next regardless of the stasis of
the object. An actor’s perception of affordances, in turn, is contingent upon that user’s
understanding of the materiality of a particular object and their potential bodily
interaction with that object. As T. Kenny Fountain (2014) explains, affordances are "the
mutual contact between the object-ness of the object and our bodily capacities" (p. 92).
Thus, one’s perception of available affordances is tied to both one’s observation of the
nature of the object itself and of one’s unique interpretation of the opportunities for action
made available by that object to his or her individual body.
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This relational aspect of affordances is what sets Gibson’s use of affordances
apart from Kress and van Leeuwen’s, which more closely resembles what Hutchby
(2001) calls “technicism, or the idea that technologies ultimately have features specific to
themselves” (p. 443). For digital rhetoricians, Gibson’s affordances offers a much richer
way to examine the relationship between actor and object, or user and interface.
Affordances, being the meeting of the user and interface and the relationship between the
physical properties of the interface and the user’s personal perception of the potential
actions that interface makes available to them, are opportunities not just for action, but
also, most importantly for my purposes here, for interaction. I will use Gibson’s term
thusly to examine the affordances, the opportunities for embodied interaction, that
museum visitors engaging with these technologies can potentially perceive them as
making available.
In the course of data collection, I found that museum visitors and I often had
slightly differing ideas of what “interaction” meant. Visitors at both sites of study
identified the touchscreen technology they engaged with as “interactive,” and when asked
if their experiences using the touchscreen technology in the exhibition spaces differed at
all from their expectations of those space coming in, their answers commonly focused on
the “interactive” nature of the interfaces. One visitor said, "Well, based on prior
experiences [with museums], this [Gallery One] is a lot more fun. This is a lot more
interactive” (CMA Visitor). Another visitor, described what was his first visit to the
museum saying, “It [the museum] wasn't what I thought it would be. It was completely
different and interactive and fun" (CMA Visitor). Yet another visitor contrasted his
experience with the Collection Wall with the experience of viewing the artwork
69
elsewhere in the museum, saying, “It [the Collection Wall] makes it [the museum] more
interactive rather than just walking around looking at the pictures and staring dumbly at
it" (CMA Visitor). In these responses, exemplary of dozens of others, visitors are
identifying the touchscreen interfaces as “interactive” as a contrast to their previous
experiences with, or expectations of, traditional interpretive technologies, such as wall
plaques and audio tours, and the museum in general.
Visitors’ emphasis on interaction when describing their experiences with these
pieces of technology is not surprising considering the type of interfaces they are, the
content they display, and the activities they make possible. As Teena Carnegie (2009)
succinctly explains, new media interfaces “work continually to engage the audience not
simply in action but in interaction” (p. 171). There are different ways to understand
interaction, however. Manovich (2001) claims that “to call computer media ‘interactive’
is meaningless – it simply means stating the most basic fact about computers” (p. 55),
which is that in order to use a computer or interface a user must physically interact with it
in someway. When I speak about visitors interacting with touchscreen interfaces, this is
the basic understanding of interaction that I am using. When visitors speak of their
experiences with the touchscreen interfaces, however, they are speaking of something
beyond simple physical interaction with an interface; they are speaking of something
more akin to participation. This becomes especially clear in interviewee statements that
make designations between different kinds of interaction they perceive the interfaces as
making available. One interviewee, when speaking about her daughter’s use of the
Lenses at the CMA said, "She stopped at pretty much all of them. The ones she lingered
at were really the ones that were really interactive" (CMA Visitor). For this visitor, the
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ones that “were really interactive” were the Lenses she perceived as affording
experiences of artistic creation – which I describe and analyze further in my discussion of
the habit of interaction of creating through touch – as opposed to experiences that
entailed primarily reading text. Similarly, another CMA visitor, when discussing his
experience with the Lenses said, "Some of them are fully interactive where you can
emulate what's happening, and then some of them are fully informational,” identifying
the same dichotomy.
Both the “fully interactive” and the “fully informational” experiences this visitor
spoke of are experienced, as I will show, through the same habits of interaction, namely
touching and swiping. However, visitors identify experiences that allow them to engage
in participatory, public experiences as “interactive” and contrast those experiences with
the solitary, private experience of reading. As one visitor in the National Archives
explained, "I think the interactive nature of it [the Touch Table] is good too because
people like to feel they're taking a role” (NA Visitor), again linking interaction with
participation. In the following chapters of this dissertation I will discuss the significance
of these participatory experiences in more detail. In this chapter I focus on the physical
interactions between visitor and interface that makes those experiences possible, using
“interaction” to mean the physical meeting of the visitor’s body and the technological
interface.
Habits of Interaction
The six habits of interaction that I discuss in this chapter can be understood as
some of the possible affordances that the touchscreen interfaces studied make available
for visitors using them. Affordances, as I have shown, are in highly subjective and
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personal opportunities for interaction, as the affordances a user may perceive an interface
as making available will vary from one user to the next base on their perception of that
interface. A museum visitor’s perception of a touchscreen interface’s affordances will
depend on that visitor’s perception of the possibility for physical interaction (both as a
result of the materiality of the interface and their own physical abilities) as well as their
understanding of the nature of the interface itself. A visitor’s ability to perceive an
interface’s affordances, then, are, as Hutchby (2001) explains, directly tied to their lived
experiences with similar interfaces (p. 452), or, in other words, a user’s previously
existing digital literacies. The various habits of interaction that the touchscreen interfaces
studied make available assume particular digital literacies of their audiences, namely
familiarity with other touchscreen interfaces and the actions of touching, swiping,
zooming, hyperlink browsing, favoriting, sharing, and creating with touch.
Because affordances are subjective, I use two approaches in this study to gain a
better understanding the kinds of affordances visitors perceive in their interaction with
the touchscreen interfaces at both museums: 1) First, I closely observe visitor interactions
with digital interfaces to identify common habits of interaction that I see arising, and then
2) I use these observations in combination with visitors’ first-hand accounts to better
understand how they view the experiences they are participating in. In the section that
follows, I describe and analyze the primary habits of interaction I have identified –
touching, swiping, zooming, hyperlink browsing, favoriting, sharing, and creating with
touch and motion – terms which themselves are borrowed from the language of personal
computing and touchscreen/mobile devices. I then show how the visitors I observed and
interviewed engaged in these habits of interaction, and what they viewed themselves to
72
be doing when they did. I demonstrate how the perception of these habits of interaction as
possible affordances relies on visitors’ previously existing digital literacies. And finally, I
explore how these habits of interaction make possible both the erasure of the interface,
and the reification of the digital image into a physical “object” in the participatory
experiences of museum visitors.
Habits of Interaction: Touching
In order to execute all of the habits of interaction analyzed here, visitors must first
use their fingers and/or hands to physically touch the surfaces of the touchscreen
interfaces in both sites of study. Because of this, I have identified touch as the primary
habit of interaction that visitors use to engage with the screens in question. The habit of
interaction of touching presents a sharp contrast to how visitors interact with other
traditional interpretive technologies within the museum, which they approach primarily
through the senses of sight or sound. As I discussed in Chapter 2, touch has been a highly
contested and politically charged topic of debate in the museum world for centuries, and
touching objects from the collection is generally frowned upon in most museum spaces.
As such, touch is also the pivotal affordance of these touchscreen interfaces that sets
them apart from other interpretive technologies used within the museum.
It is important to note that in order to perceive the other habits of interaction
explored here as being made available to them through contact with these touchscreens,
museum visitors must first and foremost perceive the affordance of touch in these
interfaces. In other words, in order to interact with the interfaces at all they must first
recognize them as material objects that are able to be touched. On one level, this may
seem straightforward. Touchscreens are central to today’s environment of what Jason
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Farman (2011) calls “pervasive computing,” which he says, “is characterized by the
ubiquity of digital technologies woven into the fabric of daily life” (p. 6). With the
prevalence of smart phones, tablets, smart boards in classrooms and workplaces, and
touchscreen displays used in public spaces such as parks and malls, interactive computing
devices permeate everyday life in many areas of the world. This ubiquity can be seen in
museum visitors’ interview responses; when visitors were asked how they knew how to
interact with the interfaces in question, nearly every interviewee cited previous
experience with other touchscreen interfaces such as mobile phones and tablets. Because
of this previous experience they were able to quickly and easily identify these displays as
something that invited engagement through touch.
However, despite this familiarity and recognition with the touchscreens of
pervasive computing, many visitors first responded to these screens with confusion,
hesitation, and even anxiety about whether or not their perception of them as touchable
objects was indeed correct. This hesitation I observed stems not from the materiality of
the screens themselves, but from the environment in which these interfaces are housed,
the museum.
As I discuss in Chapter 2, touching objects in museums has been, in contemporary
history, primarily seen as “taboo” (Pye, 2007, p. 16), a privilege reserved for the
institutional expert, the curator, and not appropriate for the untrained, lay public. Because
of this familiar social taboo of touching things in museums, many visitors were initially
hesitant to touch the touchscreen interfaces studied. Visitors expressed hesitation to touch
the screens even despite the obvious visual and spatial distinctions between the
touchscreens and the other artifacts displayed in the gallery spaces, and despite visitors’
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recognition of the screens as “touchscreens” thanks to their previously existing digital
literacies. A revealing example of this hesitation can be seen in one family’s exchange at
the Cleveland Museum of Art. One weekday afternoon, a woman walked in with two
young boys, both under the age of 10; all three approached the Collection Wall and stood
in front of it for about a minute just watching the display change. The woman, who the
boys called “Grandma,” turned to the CMA employee working at the ArtLens desk and
asked, "We can put our fingers on this, right?,” demonstrating a reluctance to touch the
screen without institutional permission from the museum staff. The museum employee
answered, “Yes, of course,” and only then did the woman touch the screen, talking with
the boys about how “cool” it was, and helping them to select different images. As the
three of them did this, a second woman, assumed to be the first woman’s daughter and
the boys’ mother, entered the Gallery One space and ran over to the Collection Wall
shouting and pushing the boys’ hands away. She said a couple of times, in a panicked
voice, "There's no touching!" expressing what seemed to be anxiety and embarrassment,
over her sons’ behavior within the museum space. The first woman turned to her
excitedly and replied, "No, you ARE allowed to touch this!” The second woman,
unconvinced, guided the whole group away from the Wall and out of Gallery One.
This family was not the only group of visitors that expressed confusion, hesitancy
or even anxiety about touching the technology in both locations. One CMA visitor
described his first reaction to the Collection Wall, saying, "Usually in art museums we
are supposed to be hands off everything, so we were not inclined to initiate touching until
someone told us" (CMA Visitor). In his and his son’s case, it was another visitor, rather
than a museum employee, who explained that they were allowed to touch the Wall. At
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the National Archives, yet another interviewee discussed being surprised that people were
touching the Table in a gallery space that was primarily full of paper documents
displayed on the wall. This visitor said he was initially confused, “because with
documents it's usually like, you know, in a display case, don't touch it, don't get near it,
just, you know, enjoy it from afar and that's about it" (NA Visitor). In each of these
examples, museum visitors were responding to institutional norms and taboos, learned
concepts of how they, lay people, are meant to act in the space of the museum. Asking for
permission and using words such as “allowed” suggests that visitors recognize a
hierarchical relationship between different ways to engage with museum collections
sensorially. While I will discuss this hierarchy of engagement further in Chapter 4, it is
important to establish here that, in addition to the materiality of the touchscreens and
visitor’s own previous experience, digital literacies, and physical abilities, environment
and social norms also play an integral role in the affordances that visitors perceive these
interfaces as making available. The inseparability of materiality and environment that
dictates visitors’ perception of these touchscreen interfaces is consistent with Gibson’s
concept of affordances, which sees affordances as a meeting of the animal, the object,
and the environment, and is crucial to a thorough examination of all of the habits of
interaction I explicate here.
Habits of Interaction: Swiping and Zooming
After museum visitors recognize one of the touchscreen interfaces as something
touchable, both as a physical object and as touchable within the environment of the
museum, they can interact with the interface through a number of actions, motions, and
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kinds of touches. Two of the primary habits of interaction I have identified are the
action/motions of swiping and zooming.
At the Cleveland Museum of Art, visitors interact with the Collection Wall
primarily through touching and swiping. As discussed in Chapter 2, the Collection Wall
at the CMA has two predominant display modes regardless of who is using the screen at
the time: small-image mosaic, and large-image curated category. These two modes
refresh alternatingly every 30-60 seconds. Shortly after the display of the Collection Wall
refreshes to the next mode, additional groupings of medium-sized images appear in
various locations on the screen, surrounded by whatever large or mosaic images the Wall
is displaying at that time. These groupings also appear when a visitor touches one of the
images on the screen, emerging at the point on the screen he or she touched. These
groupings resemble stacks of images, with labeling text above and below (see Figure 1).
The image at the front of the stack is labeled with a blue ribbon at the top that announces
one of the “Tours” that the image is included in. Underneath the image is white text that
states the name of the art piece, the year it was created, and the artist’s name, followed by
the words “On view in…” and the gallery number in which the visitor can find that piece.
Finally, centered underneath the attributional text sits a blue heart icon.
When these stacks of images first appear atop the larger background display, they
do so with an animation of a white hand using its pointed index finger to flip through the
stacks of images by swiping the top one to the right or the left. The moving white hand
then presses (with its pointed index finger) the blue heart icon underneath the image,
which causes the number to the right of the red heart icon at the bottom left corner of
every image (see Figure 2) to increase by one. This swiping, heart-clicking animation
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continues automatically until a visitor takes over the action themselves by touching the
screen and swiping the top image on the stack either to the right or the left.
The six Lenses in Gallery One proper also afford the habit of interaction of swiping. With
these interfaces, however, this habit of interaction serves a different purpose than it does
with the Wall. At the Lenses, instead of being a means of navigating through groups of
images, swiping allows visitors to rotate 360-degree digital images of the actual 3dimensional artworks (sculptures, vases, statues, etc.) each Lens highlights in order to get
a complete view of the entire piece. When a visitor touches the magnifying glass icon
displayed under an image on the home screen of one of the lenses, an information page
about that artwork opens, with an image of the piece displayed large on the screen and
five or six links to further information about that piece arranged down the left side of the
screen. Briefly superimposed over the image of the piece is an animation of a hand
showing different motions, and instructional text that reads, "Pinch to zoom” and “Swipe
to rotate.” A few of the artworks highlighted by different lenses are decorative plates;
over those, instead of “Swipe to rotate,” the text reads "Swipe to flip," and swiping
allows the visitor to view the underside of the plate displayed. When a visitor uses the
habit of interaction of swiping to either flip or rotate an image of the artwork, the visitor
can swipe right or left across the screen to rotate the image from one side to the other,
eventually turning the piece around in a full circle. The habit of interaction of swiping,
then, allows visitors to view angles and details of an artwork that they are otherwise
unable to see by manipulating digital images of the physical artwork displayed in front of
them.
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Figure 1: “Swipeable Image Stack”
Figure 2: “Number of Likes”
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In addition to using the habit of interaction of swiping to manipulate the digital
images of the physical artworks in the exhibition space, visitors can also use finger and/or
hand motions to “zoom in,” which enlarges the digital image and allows visitors to view
particular details such as brush strokes, grooves, colors, wear and tear, etc. close up.
Unlike swiping to rotate, which can only be done to the images of 3-dimensional objects,
all of the images of the displayed objects can be zoomed in on, including 2-dimensional
paintings and prints.
Zooming on the Lenses can be accomplished either with finger motions –
spreading the forefinger and thumb out from a closed to an open position to increase
detail and from an open to a closed position to return to a wider view of the image – or by
hand motions – moving both hands apart from each other or closer together to zoom in or
out respectively. All of these motions must be done while simultaneously touching the
screen.
Visitors at the National Archives can also interact with the Touch Table through
the habits of interaction of swiping and zooming. At the Touch Table, swiping is used to
navigate from one chapter to the next, and from one event in a chapter to the next. Unlike
with the Collection Wall, at which swiping is the only way to navigate through the stacks
of images, swiping is just one of several ways to perform the same navigational trajectory
through the sections and documents displayed by the Touch Table. For example, visitors
might swipe from one event in a chapter to the next, they may use the navigational bar
found at the bottom left of the chapter intro display to move quickly from one chapter to
the next (see Figure 3), or they may scroll through using right and left arrow buttons
found at the bottom right corner of the display (see Figure 3).
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Figure 3: “Multiple Ways of Navigation”
Figure 4: “Records Related to Event”
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Visitors using the Touch Table can also interact with the touchscreen through the
habit of interaction of zooming. With the Touch Table, as with the Lenses at the CMA,
zooming allows the visitor to take a closer look at the details of the digital image of the
artifact they are viewing, be it a document, photograph, video etc. When visitors use the
Touch Table to navigate through a chapter, if they selects one of the titled events, they
then bring up a new screen that shows, on the left, informational text detailing that event
and, on the right, a number of various artifacts related to that event (see Figure 4).
Selecting one of these artifacts brings up a new display that shows a larger image of that
artifact on the right, with informational text on the left. A gray text box with white text
reading "pinch to zoom” appears briefly, for three seconds, over the artifact image. No
motion, animated example, or further instruction accompanies the directive of “pinch to
zoom,” and it appears so briefly that it can easily missed if the visitor looks elsewhere
even for a moment. To zoom, visitors may use one or more fingers to enlarge or shrink
the image. Also, paradoxically, a “pinching” motion done with the fingers actually makes
the image smaller, not larger, which renders the brief directive of “pinch to zoom”
potentially confusing. In order to zoom into the image, visitors must move their fingers or
hands away from each other, virtually stretching the image to zoom in. “Zooming” in on
the image shows the text or image displayed in greater detail; the visitor may also use one
or more fingers to move the document up or down within its designated frame on the
screen.
While visitors can interact with all of the touchscreens studied through the habit
of interaction of swiping, each touchscreen communicates the availability of that habit of
interaction in different ways. On the Collection Wall, the swiping hand animation over
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the stacked clusters of images is the only instruction offered to visitors detailing how they
may interact with it. While the hand animation models how one might swipe through the
images presented, a visitor must first be at least cursorily familiar with other touchscreen
interfaces, such as smart phones or tablets, that allow for finger-controlled swiping
motions in order to recognize this animation as a call to action. Without prior experience
with touchscreen interfaces and their affordances, one might see the animation merely as
a moving image to watch, not as an example of an action to emulate. It is also not
apparent simply by watching this animation that a visitor can make their own stack of
images appear, with the same textual accompaniments, by touching any of the other
images displayed on the wall.
Similarly, even though the Lenses give cursory instructions such as “swipe to
rotate” and “pinch to zoom,” engaging in the full potential of those habits of interaction
requires that visitors understand those instructions as actions that are accomplished
through touch. The Touch Table at the National Archives Museum gives even less
instruction than the Wall and Lenses do. While visitors at the NAM are given the textual
instruction of “Pinch to Zoom,” it is both easily missed and misleading, and there is no
indication, verbal or visual, that visitors can use swiping to navigate between chapter
events.
Despite there being few overt indications that visitors can interact with these
interfaces through swiping or zooming, of all of the habits of interaction identified in this
study, “swiping” and “zooming” were the only ones that museum visitors specifically
named as such in interviews. As previously stated, when asked about what actions and
motions they used to interact with the screen, many interviewees’ initial reaction was to
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describe their experience with the digital content, the art or documents, and not the
interface itself. Many of these visitors, however, when pressed further went on to
describe their actions with the words “swiped,” “swiping,” “swipe motions,” “hand
swiping,” and “zooming.” Visitors’ ability to name these habits of interaction directly as
“swiping” and “zooming” is in part connected to the instructional clues that are
displayed, however sparse. One visitor explained that the Collection Wall, “Had a little
hand on it when we were swiping through stuff” (CMA Visitor). A National Archives
visitor explained that the Touch Table “said ‘Pinch to Zoom’” (NAM Visitor), so they
did, and yet another, when asked how he knew how to do the actions he did replied,
“Apple. There were instructions on the screen though” (NAM Visitor). While
demonstrating that the instructional animations and text allowed some visitors to identify
the actions they used to interact with the screens, these three instances were the only
times that visitors referred directly to the instructions they observed. No other visitor
attributed their recognition of these habits of interaction to guidance on the part of the
interface itself. Instead, the majority of visitors cited “cellphones,” “smartphones,”
“iPads,” “tablets,” “other touchscreens,” and “Apple,” as in the example above, as their
sources of knowledge for how to swipe and zoom.
Visitors’ ability to identify their actions as “swiping” and “zooming” and to note
the connection between these interfaces and others is a by-product of pervasive
computing and demonstrates the integral connection between visitors’ prior experience
with touchscreen interfaces and their perception of the affordances these touchscreens
make available to them. As previously mentioned, in order for visitors to perceive these
habits of interaction as being made available to them, they must first possess the digital
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literacies necessary to recognize the interfaces as 1) able to be touched, and 2) able to be
manipulated through habits of interaction they are already familiar with. These digital
literacies are acquired through prior experience with similar interfaces, which requires
access to those interfaces and the physical ability to interact with them. Jason Farman
(2011) stresses that digital literacies also include the socially constructed ways we learn
to understand and interact with our technology, writing, “the ways we currently inscribe
onto our devices (such as the pinch/pull zooming when using maps on a haptic interface)
are all culturally specific and do not translate globally” (p. 11).
Because of visitors’ common prior knowledge of swiping and zooming, two key
habits of interaction they perceive touchscreen interfaces as affording, they were able to
focus more on their engagement with the digital content displayed by the screen,
particularly when zooming, which several visitors identified as bringing them closer to
the art itself. As one visitor said, “I did zoom on a few. Zoom into the art pieces…I like
being able to pay attention to the details…So having this technology, I can just zoom in
all ‘Oh what is that?’...it allows you to get close up so your visual texture is more
accurate” (CMA Visitor).
In this example, the visitor is both using the language of touch-computing to
describe what she did – “zoom” – but talked about it as zooming into the art pieces, rather
than a digital image of the art. This example illustrates a tension that arose several times
throughout my analysis, namely that when asked what actions they used to interact with
the screens visitors most often responded by focusing on the digital content or the
physical artworks displayed by that content, but when asked how they knew how to do
the actions that they did, they most often used language that implied, or directly
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referenced, previous experience with touchscreen technology. This phenomenon is a
vivid illustration of how visitors’ perceptions of these touchscreen interfaces’ affordances
are directly related to their previously existing digital literacies, but through their
engagement with the interfaces as such, the interfaces fall away, allowing visitors to
focus on the artwork remediated therein.
Habits of Interaction: Hyperlink Browsing
Hyperlink Browsing at the CMA
Hyperlinking, or the networking of connections between different pages,
programs, or windows in a digital database, allows computer users to access media and
information through myriad paths of association. Hyperlinking is both the primary visual
and navigational logic for most personal computing devices and the operational paradigm
of the internet. As such, the act of following one hyperlink to the next to open up new
applications, texts, images, etc., has become routine, the primary way to navigate through
digital information. Hyperlinks also allow computer users to browse a database, or to
follow digital pathways through a number of available hyperlinks to any number of
possible destinations as determined by the database and linking algorithms. Browsing
through a database using hyperlinks is not the same as searching that database; whereas
browsing allows users to follow pre-determined paths from one piece of digital
information to the next, searching allows a user to specify, usually by typing text in a
“search bar” linked to a search command, what particular piece of information they
would like to access and to navigate directly to that information. With hyperlink
browsing, users must rely on the associations between different pieces of information that
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are predetermined by the entity or entities that programed the database and linking
algorithms.
With the Collection Wall at the CMA, visitors can browse with hyperlinked lines
of text that allow them to navigate through different associations to other categories of
images. These lines of hyperlinked text appear both above and below the swipeable
stacks of images previously discussed. Unlike the attributional text below the front image
of the stack, which is in white font, hyperlinked lines of text designating what gallery,
additional categories, or tours the artwork can be found in, are in blue font or highlighted
in blue. When clicked/touched, these lines of hyperlinked text (see Figure 1, “oil on
canvas,” “1960s,” “Tour: Line and Rhythm” and “Gallery 227”) open up different
swipeable, hyperlinked groupings of images within the Collection Wall’s database that
replace whatever current grouping the visitor was viewing. Following these linked
associations, the visitor can navigate through continued hyperlinks to see how each image
is connected with other artworks throughout the museum.
With extended browsing at the Collection Wall, one can follow fluid and
numerous connections between digital images of the artworks in the CMA’s permanent
collection. A visitor can follow a path from the category “American Painting in the
1960’s” to an image of a Baroque clock compiled under the hyperlink “Visitor Created
Tour: Random Tour with Cool Stuff.”26 The interface of the Wall does not, however,
afford touch-typing or other search capabilities; the database of images the Collection
Wall displays can only be navigated through the predetermined algorithms of these
browse-able, hyperlinked categories.
26
Visitors create tours on iPads with the ArtLens app. The ArtLens tour database is then synced with the
Collection Walls at regular intervals.
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Hyperlink Browsing at the NAM
Visitors using the Touch Table at the National Archives Museum can also interact
with the table using hyperlink browsing. In addition to using swiping, the navigation bar,
directional arrows, menus, and “back” buttons to navigate through chapters and events,
visitors can browse through documents in the archive thematically through keywords.
When a visitor opens a particular event, they will find under the informational text on the
left a number of text boxes with various thematic keywords such as “Women,” “14th
Amendment,” “Children,” etc. (Figure 4). When one of these keywords is
selected/touched, the display is replaced by a sitemap-like keyword tree (Figure 5) that
shows how that keyword is linked to events in all six overarching categories. Using these
keyword hyperlinks, visitors can browse to see where a particular keyword comes up in
all six categories (see "14th Amendment" example in Figure 5); they can then select
related events from other categories. Hyperlink browsing in this way allows visitors to
browse through the archive using thematic connections, rather than just following a linear
path through the separate categories separately.
Neither the Collection Wall nor the Touch Table give any direct notification of, or
instruction on, the habit of interaction of hyperlink browsing; instead, both interfaces
utilize visitors’ previously existing familiarity with the act of browsing in virtual spaces,
particularly the Internet. The Collection Wall echoes the browsing potential of Web 2.0
by presenting hyperlinks in blue text, the color currently used by Google and other
Internet search engines to designate live hyperlinks. The Touch Table in turn emulates
the common blog/web-text device of keyword tags; users familiar with reading digital
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Figure 5: “Keyword Link Tree”
genres such as blogs can deduce from previous familiarity with keywords and category
tags that these links lead to other related texts.
Unlike swiping and zooming with hand gestures, which require some prior
familiarity with other touchscreen interfaces specifically, browsing will be understood by
anyone who has used the internet. Similarly, hyperlinking will be a germane digital
literacy of anyone who has used a contemporary computer. Computer users today are
necessarily familiar with the act of clicking, with some sort of device, be it a mouse or
finger, existing text or images on a computer screen, in order to open new applications,
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move to new pages of information, bring up images, documents or websites, etc.
Pervasive computing functions on hyperlinking.
In the early days of the personal computer and Web 2.0, however,
hyperlinks/hypertext/hypermedia were seen by scholars as representative of the ways in
which interaction with digital technology and the world-wide-web differed from
engagement with other forms of 2-dimensional media such as film or the printed page.
The ability of readers to follow seemingly endless connections between information and
media was seen as an example of the variability and “branching (or menu)”
interactivity/participation inherent in new media (Bolter and Grusin, 2001, p. 40). Bolter
and Grusin (2001) claimed that navigating hyperlinks was an exercise in replacement,
saying:
When the user clicks on an underlined phrase or an iconic anchor on a web
page, a link is activated that calls up another page. The new material
usually appears in the original window and erases the previous text or
graphic, although the action of clicking may instead create a separate
frame within the same window or a new window laid over the first (p. 44).
Because of this immediate replacement, or the user-controlled erasure, of one text or
visual by another, some scholars were skeptical of hyperlinking’s influence on more
traditionally linear literacy and argumentation practices. Manovich (2001) went so far as
to deem hypertext distracting and potentially leading to the “decline of the field of
rhetoric in the modern era” (p. 77). Thankfully, his fatalistic prediction was not realized,
but, as Collin Brooke (2009) emphasized years later, rhetoricians do need to be cognizant
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of the ways that this integral practice of computing affects the ways that rhetorical
situations are composed and analyzed.
In the space of the museum, facilitated by touchscreen interfaces, hyperlink
browsing as a way of digitally navigating through virtual images of the objects in the
museum’s collection, is both spatially (within the walls of the museum itself) and
experientially/sensorially (touching as well as seeing) juxtaposed to physically
“browsing” the museum’s collection by walking through the museum proper. When
walking through the various galleries in both museums, visitors can view the art objects,
texts, and artifacts displayed at their leisure; they can move at their own pace, choose
which gallery to visit when, consult the museum map to determine where a particular
curatorial theme is located, and use audio tours and wall placards to orient themselves to
a work’s history or its curator’s interpretation. However, whereas an object in the
museum proper is displayed in a fixed location and viewed only in relation to the
institutionally curated works immediately surrounding it, the browsing and hyperlinking
capabilities made possible by both the Collection Wall and Touch Table allow for
broader view of how works can be seen and interpreted in relation to other works.
Both touchscreen interfaces also, most importantly, through the habit of
interaction of hyperlink browsing, provide visitors with a virtual space to navigate
through disparate categorical groupings of artifacts with the immediacy (Paterson 2007,
p. 3) of touch. I found in both observations and interview responses, that visitors who
perceived the habits of interaction of touch and hyperlink browsing as afforded by these
interfaces responded to this immediacy directly and explicitly. Although visitors in both
museums were browsing, which means they were following predetermined virtual
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pathways to a limited number of destinations, and although neither interface affords
search capabilities that allow visitors to choose their own particular routes to certain
information, visitors still saw the habit of interaction of hyperlink browsing as offering
them the freedom and capability to follow their own line of inquiry through the material
displayed. Almost every interviewee in both museums expressed a sense of appreciation
for the freedom the interfaces gave them to follow their “own interests.” At the Cleveland
Museum of Art, one visitor noted that being able to touch the Wall was key to her
experience of freedom of choice, saying, “So it was nice to touch, to be able to be around
different things that actually interest you and actually seeing different things that you
might have an interest in looking more into” (CMA Visitor). Another visitor, when asked
how she interacted with the Wall stated that after swiping through the stacks of images,
“then you pick out which picture we were interested in [sic]” (CMA Visitor). Both of
these visitors saw being able to chose what they were interested in by browsing as
different from the kinds of experiences they would be able to have in the museum proper,
not because they cannot choose to view what they like as they physically explore the
space, but because with the Collection Wall they can do so immediately, bypassing
objects they might have less interest in.
This sense of immediacy was expressly identified by a visitor at the National
Archives who explained that using the Touch Table was more engaging than viewing the
documents displayed on the wall because, “You can look at something that you want to
look at. If you're interested in it, you can find it almost immediately" (NA Visitor). Yet
another identified browsing as offering more viewing choices than the museum proper,
“Because you can choose what you're interested in and what you're looking for” (NA
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Visitor). Visitors also contrasted the experience of browsing the museum’s collection
with the Touch Table with the experience of using other interpretive technologies in the
museum. For example, one visitor explained, “I definitely feel like audio tours, it's more
of The Man taking you through and telling you what this is, and why this is important.
Whereas I feel like this [the Touch Table] is more, of like, you know it's all important,
have a look at what you'd like to look at, and experience it on your time and at your
interest level” (NAM visitor).
In all of the examples, visitors emphasized the ability to follow ones’ own
interests, to chose what one wanted to look at, and to explore further. Two things are
particularly interesting about this. First, visitors’ identification of a freedom to “choose
what you're interested in and what you're looking for” is not entirely an accurate
representation of what is happening in those moments. With the Touch Table in
particular, visitors are only given access to approximately 300 artifacts in the museum’s
archive, an almost imperceptible fraction of the archive’s actual holdings.27 Additionally,
those 300 artifacts are institutionally organized into six very specific categories.
However, despite these limitations, every visitor interviewed at the NMW suggested that
they were choosing their own interests when using the Touch Table. They did this either
by saying so explicitly as in the examples above, or by ignoring the interface entirely and
discussing instead the content that they were able to explore. One couple, when asked
what actions they used to interact with the Table replied:
27
According to the National Archives’ website, “In Washington alone these records total approximately 10
billion pieces of paper and 25 million still pictures and graphics; 300,000 reels of motion picture film and
400,000 sound and video recordings; 12 million maps, charts, and architectural and engineering plans; and
24 million aerial photographs.”
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Well, our son is recently involved and living on an American Indian
reservation in North Dakota. He tells us that there's quite a bit of
resentment and animosity towards the white man. Being a white man, he
has experienced it firsthand, and we went up there last year and
experienced it also. I guess we, as other Americans from Europe, never
realized how potent that animosity is (NA Visitors).
This couple went on from here to discuss for several minutes what they had read at the
Table and how it related to their son’s experience. When asked whether their experience
using the table differed from their expectations coming in, the man replied, “I think it's a
really good part of the museum. I think instead of walking around and getting kind of
bored, you can look at something that you want to look at.” For this couple, the interface
itself was unimportant; the touchscreen fell away, and rather than seeing themselves as
interacting with an interface, with particular limitations, they saw themselves as engaging
with content of their own choosing. Additionally, visitors who, using the habit of
interaction of browsing, saw themselves as exercising a freedom of choice also identified
themselves as taking part in the work of the museum. I will explore this connection
between visitors’ habits of interactions and the roles that they take up through them at
length in Chapter 4.
Habits of Interaction: Creating with Touch and Motion
In Gallery One of the CMA, in addition to accessing educational/informational
material about the physical artworks in their closest proximity and zooming in on and
manipulating digital images of the works of art, visitors can also interact with four of the
six the Lenses by “independently” creating works of art, which I call the habit of
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Figure 6: “Story Lens”
interaction of creating with touch and motion. At the Stories Lens, visitors can “Tell a
Story” in two different ways (Figure 6). In one activity, they can “Make a Comic,” by
organizing different visual scenes and text bubbles to create a comic strip based on one of
the three stories displayed (Perseus, Bacchus, or Adam and Eve), or they can make a
movie “trailer” by dragging five scenes and accompanying text bubbles onto a virtual
“film” strip at the bottom of the screen, choosing a style of soundtrack (such as suspense
or action), and “showing” it in video form. At the Art and Trade Lens, visitors can
“Custom Order a Vase” by selecting a kind of pottery material, shape, style, and type of
paint or decoration, and combining the different options into a unique finished product;
they are then given the option to “Make Another Vase” upon completion, which again
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gives them the creative agency of having “made” their custom vase. In addition to these
activities, there are three primary examples of the habit of interaction of creating with
touch and motion that I am going to discuss in greater detail here. The first two, “Remix
Picasso” and “Make Your Mark” are done on the Painting Lens. The third, “Build with
Clay,” is done on the Bodies Lens.
The Painting Lens stands centered several feet in front of a large painting by
Picasso, Still Life with Biscuits (1924), allowing visitors both to interact with the Lens
itself and to step around it to view the physical painting behind it. The home-screen of the
Painting Lens is set by default to a home-page that offers the user a choice of five
different activities titled as follows: Choose a Reason, Make Your Mark, Remix Picasso,
Change Perspective, and Discover Tempura. When a visitor chooses to “Remix Picasso,”
by touching the coordinating icon on the screen, she is guided through a brief
introduction that features scrolling close-up digital images of the Picasso painting
displayed in front of the station, along with two accompanying quotes that appear and
dissolve in and out of view in concert with the scrolling image. There is no further
reference to these quotes throughout the activity or interpretation of how they are
significant to the activity. The visitor has the option to watch this introduction unfold,
which takes approximately 60 seconds, or skip it by touching a “skip” icon in the top
right corner of the screen.
Once the introduction is completed or skipped, the visitor sees a digital image of
the painting in front of the station, with an icon stating simply “Remix the Picasso” and
an arrow pointing right (Figure 7). Upon pressing the directional icon, the visitor watches
as a digital image of the painting displayed in front of her is broken up into seventeen
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Figure 7: “Remix the Picasso”
Figure 8: “Drag Each Piece”
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distinct pieces and separated, revealing a blank, white, digital canvas in the center, with
another directive icon reading “Drag each piece onto the canvas” (Figure 8) that
disappears when the visitor touches the first piece. Each piece can be rotated and made
smaller by using stretching, pinching, and twisting hand motions while touching the piece
on the screen.
When the visitor is satisfied with the work they have done, they have the option
either to return to the “home” screen (which icon is always at the bottom center of the
screen) or click “Email my Painting,” which I will discuss further as a distinct habit of
interaction. Choosing “Email my Painting” brings the visitor to a touch-screen keyboard
that allows them to type in the email address of their choosing and send their work. In
their email inbox then they receive an email from the CMA saying “you have remixed
Picasso at the Cleveland museum of art!” along with the newly created image that is
tagged with the CMA logo and available for download onto their device (see Figure 9).
A visitor can have a similar experience by participating in another activity on the
Painting Lens, “Make Your Mark,” and an activity on the Bodies Lens, “Build with
Clay.” When a visitor chooses “Make Your Mark,” after watching or skipping the
introduction, they are presented with a new screen that shows several different artworks
from the museum’s collection in three different abstract painting techniques, drip, pour,
and gesture (Figure 10). A circle with instructional text saying “Select an Abstract
Painting Technique” appears briefly and then disappears. The visitor can click through
two examples each of the three possible techniques using right and left arrow icons.
When she chooses a technique, she is then brought to a blank canvas with a text circle
that says simply “Make your own painting by swiping the canvas” and then disappears
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Figure 9: “Email”
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Figure 10: “Select a Technique”
Figure 11: “Make Your Own Painting”
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(Figure 11). In the top right corner of the screen is a small button that says “Color”
above a button that says “undo.”
When the visitor touches the “color” button a small “palate” of a select few colors
appears across the top of the screen (Figure 12). The visitor can change the color they
use by touching one of the colored circles in the palate. They then use their fingers or
hands to tap or swipe across the screen. The strength of the “paint” strokes changes based
on how wide a hand surface they are using and how long they keep their hand placed on
the screen. When they are done with the painting, the visitor is given two options,
displayed on the right of the screen, “Email Painting” and “Done.” Touching “Done”
brings her to an image of a gallery with her painting displayed, label with an assigned
name underneath (Figure 13) and an arrow pointing left that allows her to browse through
a selection of past visitors’ paintings. If she touches “Email Painting” the same process
described earlier ensues.
At the Bodies Lens, visitors can choose to “Build with Clay.” This activity directs
the visitor through seven different steps involved in sculpting a Haniwa statue. When a
visitor chooses “Build with Clay,” after the option to watch or skip the introduction, she
is brought to the opening page that displays an image of the finished sculpture and directs
her to “Start Sculpting” (Figure 14). This activity includes a great deal more instruction
than the Remix Picasso and Make Your Mark activities, and each of the seven steps
involved in creating the sculpture – Knead, Roll, Assemble, Smooth the Surface, Make a
Face for your Haniwa, Trace to Cut out Shapes, and Drag to Attach the Slabs – features
explanatory text and a short video in the upper right hand corner of the screen describing
what goes into that particular step (Figure 15). Each step is done by touching the screen
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Figure 12: “Palate”
Figure 13: “Finished Painting”
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and emulating the motions asked for in the imperative instruction or demonstrated in the
video, motions such as kneading, rolling, or tracing shapes in the clay.
While this activity is longer in duration and requires more tasks to complete than
those on the Painting Lens, Build with Clay is highly automated. A visitor can choose to
go through each of the seven steps to complete the sculpture; alternatively, she has the
option, as displayed in the upper right hand corner of the screen, to “Skip this Step”
(Figure 15), in which case the animation is sped up and that phase is completed by the
computer program while the visitor watches. Even the most personalized step of “Make a
Face for your Haniwa,” which uses the Kinect® camera atop the Lens to take a picture of
the visitor’s face as inspiration for the face of the Haniwa, can be automated, as the final
face is the same regardless of the picture the visitor takes. Whether or not a visitor
completes each phase through touch, or skips each phase, watching the sculpture come
together automatically, she still has the option to email her Haniwa when it is complete,
similar to both activities described earlier.
To complete any of these three activities through the habit of interaction of
creating through touch and motion, visitors must first perceive both touch and
swiping/pinching/zooming motions to be afforded by the touchscreen interfaces, as the
experience of creating is manifested by these fundamental actions and gestures. As with
the previous habits of interaction, in order to perceive them as possible, visitors must
possess a range of digital literacies and familiarity with the norms of pervasive
computing. Using the Painting Lens as an example, in order for the visitor to interact with
the interface at all, she would, as I have previously discussed, have to first recognize the
Lens as something that can be touched. She would then have to be familiar with current
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Figure 14: “Start Sculpting”
Figure 15: “Video and Skip”
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visual trends in touchscreen and mobile computing to know that buttons on the home
screen were touchable hyperlinks that would bring her to different pages of content. Once
she had chosen to “Remix Picasso,” she would have to assume that the text “drag” was an
instruction to “drag” with her hands. The completely unannounced or demonstrated
options to enlarge, shrink or rotate the individual pieces again assume knowledge of
current touchscreen technology such as tablets and smart phones. Finally, in order to be
able to participate fully in the experience by saving the work she created, she would have
to have an email address, or have memorized the address of someone who did, as well as
be familiar with the English alphabet, the QWERTY keyboard, and the language and
symbols associated with the technology of email such as “@” and “send.”
The “Remix Picasso” icon functions as both the activity’s title and the single
opening instruction. Remixing, which Jones and Hafner (2012) define as, “technically
editing and modifying [digital texts] in order to produce a new creative work” (p. 198) is
a type of digital literacy in and of itself, and is at the core of what Lev Manovich (2007)
calls “remix culture.” Remixing as a practice challenges institutional notions of the purity
of the work of art, of authorship, and of access to artistic critique and production. By
offering museum visitors a chance to “Remix Picasso,” the CMA is merging "official
museum [language] and the cultural literacy of everyday visitors" (Samis, 2012, p. 307).
However, the habit of interaction of creating a new work through touch and motion in
this case, requires that the visitor be familiar with the cultural practice of remixing media.
If the visitor is not familiar with the practice of remixing, the immediate dissolution of
the digital image and the instruction to “drag the pieces onto the canvas,” could be
understood as a direction to attempt to put the pieces back into their proper order, like a
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puzzle. It is only through familiarity with the cultural term “remix,” that the user will
know that the directive to “Remix Picasso” means she is now allowed to create
something new out of those pieces.
A visitor engaging in the deconstructing and remixing a “master’s” work of art
within the space of the museum is indicative of the “paradigm shift” that Anderson et. al
(2012) posit is enacted by new exhibition practices. Nina Simon (2012) claims that
“Supporting participation means trusting visitors' abilities as creators, remixers, and
redistributors of content” (p. 331). Directly asking the visitor to remix a digital version of
a prominent piece in the museum’s collection and save the “new” work they create as
their own, invites the visitor to participate in their own production of creative work
within the museum space. Additionally, by then tagging that new work with the
museum’s logo, the CMA seems to be suggesting that they are, in effect, incorporating
visitor’s work into the work of the museum itself.28
Visitors who spoke about interacting with the Lenses through the habit of
interaction of creating with touch and motion did see themselves as engaging in artistic
production, and were excited about that capability. One visitor, a man of approximately
40, got so excited he shouted across the gallery to his friends, two other men about the
same age, saying, “Did you see this guys? You can paint on this one! You can actually
paint and it shows up!” (CMA Visitor). Significantly, as this visitor’s exclamation
exemplifies, visitors saw themselves as creating with the materials represented by the
virtual experiences, in this man’s case “actually paint,” not with the interfaces
28
I see a problematic tension here between the suggestion that the visitor is given creative autonomy, and
the immediate “branding” of the visitors work as a product of the institution. In an effort to not derail my
discussion of habits of interaction in this chapter, I will return to this tension in more depth in my
conclusion.
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themselves. An even more salient example of this can be seen in the following exchange
between myself and three interviewees, a woman and two men all in their mid-20s:
Me:
Can you walk me through a little bit what you did
with them [the interfaces]? What were certain
actions, or motions, you used if you can remember,
like, specifics?
Interviewee #1:
He made stories [pointing at another in the group].
Interviewee #2:
He [pointing at Interviewee #3] made a painting
over here.
Interviewee #3:
Yeah, I did a painting.
Me:
You made a painting?
Interviewee #2:
Would you call it abstract work? (laughs) We call it
J. Pollock style.
Me:
Can you describe how you did that?
Interviewee #3:
Just based off what I had in previous experience.
Interviewee #2:
From the fifth grade (laughs, others in the group
giggle and comment on his art).
Interviewee #3:
Yeah. I was making a table with different solids and
colors…Then I kind of did an abstract report card.
Me:
Okay, you did it by?
Interviewee #2:
Swiping your hands.
Interviewee #3:
Just by the hands, yeah.
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Interviewee #2:
I kind of played with it too, with him. Thought it
was cool how the longer you held your hand there,
the bigger the drop got…You could really vary it
up. If you wanted a little line, you could just hold it
really quickly. If you wanted a big glob, you could
really just hold your hand there.
In this exchange, the first interviewees described their friends, not as having used certain
devices, but as having “made” something, implying independent creation. The first
interviewee to respond spoke of the activity I briefly described at the beginning of this
section, “Tell a Story,” saying her friend “made” stories. The second interviewee also
identified one of his friends as having created something, saying he “made a painting,”
referring to his interaction with the activity titled “Make Your Mark.” They continued the
discussion of his creation by referencing grade-school art classes, saying his previous
experience was from the fifth grade; again, the focus here is on the painting and the art,
not physical interaction with the interface itself. When they do start talking about how he
created the painting, they do briefly mention engagement with the interface, “swiping,”
as the physical motion that he did, and then moved quickly to talking about the “paint” in
words that refer to physical, liquid paint such as “drop” and “glob.” In this case, as in
others, the interface falls away, and visitors focus on the content they see themselves as
interacting with and the results of that interaction, which these visitors saw as
independent artistic creation.
This equation of interaction with a digital interface and creation of independent
artistic content occurs in differing degrees with the different activities described here,
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however. In the case of the activity “Build with Clay,” one visitor saw this activity as
“fully interactive” because her daughter could “emulate what’s happening” (CMA
Visitor). Being able to emulate what is happening on the screen, or the kneading, rolling,
and building of a clay figure, is not the same as being able to build that clay figure
yourself. It is not surprising that this visitor identified her daughter’s actions as
“emulating” rather than making, as, as I have shown, the “Build with Clay” activity is
much more directed and automated than the other two. However, this visitor and her
partner also noted that this “fully interactive” activity was important for their daughter
because:
Interviewee #1: “...kids always want to touch. They want to...”
Interviewee #2: “They want to feel the textures and things like that.”
These visitors’ description, which they repeated several times, of being able to see and
feel texture even though what they were actually touching was the uniform surface of the
touchscreen, is exemplary of the interface falling away and the reification of the digital
object into the physical object occurring through their use of the interface. The
disappearance of the interface here is made possible by the habit of interaction of creating
with touch and motion as visitors see themselves as engaging not with the screens
themselves, but with the physical materials of creation – paint and clay –and as making
new works of art or emulating those who do. In Chapter 4, I discuss the rhetorical
implications of this phenomenon, and how this experience persuades visitors to take up
particular roles in the museum.
Habits of Interaction: Favoriting and Sharing
Favoriting with the Collection Wall
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The final habits of interaction I will discuss are favoriting and sharing. At the
CMA, visitors can interact with the Collection Wall by favoriting an image in one of the
swipeable stacks and with the lenses by emailing the results of one of their creations
(sharing). At the NAM, visitors can interact with the Touch Table by “sharing a reaction”
to one of the documents or images they see.
At the Collection Wall, visitors may “favorite” an image of an artwork by clicking
the blue heart icon displayed underneath that image. When a visitor favorites an image,
the red heart in the bottom left corner of that image is animated briefly with a new heart
and a “+1” sign. The red heart icon then returns to resting and the number to its right (see
Figure 6) will increase by one. When a visitor is interacting with the Wall on their own,
without the aid of an RFID-tagged mobile device on which the ArtLens app has been
previously downloaded, touching the heart symbol increases the number of the hearts in
this way and the word “Favorited” appears briefly across that section of the screen.
However, if a visitor has docked an RFID-tagged device in the closest one of eight docks,
has the ArtLens app open on that device, when he or she clicks the heart symbol,
additional text saying “Saved to Favorites” accompanies an animation of a heart traveling
to the docked iPad. That image and all of its related additional education material
contained in the ArtLens app is then saved in that visitor’s personal collection of favorites
and can be used to discover more about the work or add it to that visitor’s own tour.
In addition to favoriting images at the Collection Wall, CMA visitors can use the
lenses to email themselves the digital artifacts created through the habit of interaction of
creation through touch and motion, such as images of the paintings they create in “Remix
Picasso” and “Make Your Mark” and their Haniwa sculpture from “Build with Clay.”
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The option to email is usually given at the end of the activity, along with the option to do
the activity again; as pictured in Figure 16, visitors can either choose “Email Your Vase,”
“Make Another Vase,” or click the “Home” button which brings them back to the home
screen display of the lens (See Figure 16).
Figure 16: “Email Your Vase”
At the National Archives Museum, visitors cannot email from the Touch Table,
but they can share their responses to the archival texts displayed. Underneath the
informational text of a document, in the lower left corner, a block of text reading “What
is Your Reaction?” is followed by the directive to “React and Share” with a right-facing
arrow indicating continuation to another step (see Figure 17). When visitors click “React
and Share,” they are brought to a new window that shows that document surrounded by
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twenty different emotion/feeling keyword tags that are color-coded into three categories
(see Figure 18). According to the Touch Table’s curator, Alice Kamps, the possible
reactions are divided into three categories: the “neutral" emotion words, coded in blue
text boxes, are Touching, Confusing, Surprising, and Powerful; the negative emotion
words, in red text boxes, are Heartbreaking, Shameful, Shocking, Disgusting, Typical,
Maddening, Tragic, and Frightening; and the positive emotion words, in purple text
boxes, are Amusing, Joyful, Admirable, Eye-opening, Fascinating, Beautiful, Hopeful,
and Inspiring. As indicated by the instructional text to “Tap up to three reaction words to
assign them to the image,” visitors may select between 0 and 3 of these emotion words to
attach to the artifact. After choosing their reaction words, visitors are then shown an
animation of a small white hand dragging the document to the circle displayed above the
document that reads. “Share Your Reaction.” Once a visitor does this, every other station
on the Table, whether it is being used by another visitor or not, is lit up by the appearance
of a textbox in the top right corner of that station’s visual field that reads “Someone
shared a document” along with whatever reaction tags that visitor assigned to it. This
textbox is a hyperlink that when clicked will bring the new visitor directly to the
document that the first visitor shared, regardless of what event or category they had been
reading in.
The habits of interaction of favoriting and sharing differ from the habits of
touching, swiping, zooming, browsing, and creating with touch and motion29 in that they
29
The one exception to this is in the “Make Your Mark” activity in which visitors’ paintings are
“displayed” in a digital gallery when they are completed. However, this display is not permanent, as the
“gallery” only shows a randomized handful of visitors’ paintings at any time, and once the visitor returns
“home” they most likely will not be able to see their last painting again unless they had emailed it.
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Figure 17: “React and Share”
Figure 18: “Assign Reaction Words”
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are public actions, they extend the visitor’s participation in certain activities through
interaction with that interface to include others, either those sharing their immediate
space with them, or those outside the museum (through email). Unlike the other habits of
interaction, visitors very rarely spoke of sharing or favoriting directly to me. One visitor
at the CMA, when speaking of the activity Build With Clay said, “I like that you can email them. That's really helpful” (CMA Visitor), but did not elaborate on why she felt
emailing was helpful. Instead, what I found, is that visitors openly and frequently
discussed these habits of interaction, particularly sharing (meaning emailing at the CMA
and sharing a reaction at the NA) with each other, so much so that these habits of
interaction were most often executed by groups of visitors rather than individuals. This
finding, and the practice of public negotiation of response that visitors took part in,
warrants its own attention, and I will return to it in more detail in Chapter 4.
The habits of interaction of favoriting and sharing borrow from visitors’ previous
experience with aspects of the participatory web practices of social media, another kind
of digital literacy. Favoriting is a prime example of how crucial a visitor’s digital
literacies are to their experience of perceiving a certain habit of interaction as being
afforded by the touchscreen interfaces.
At the Collection Wall, favoriting visibly increases the number of hearts attributed
to a particular work and adds visitor choices to the larger categories displayed by the
Wall, particularly in “Visitor Favorites” and “Top 50 Faves.” Like the other habits of
interaction, favoriting on the Collection Wall directly engages a visitor’s existing digital
literacies (or lack thereof). No text introduces “favoriting” as an available habit of
interaction anywhere on or around the wall; in fact, the word “favorite” as an imperative
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is never used. It is only after the visitor touches a blue heart that the word “Favorited” is
displayed. The heart symbol, however, as an indication to “like” an image, is seen widely
across image-centric social media sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. A
visitor who is familiar with these sites and thus with the visual discourse of the heart
symbol meaning to “like” an image, will immediately be able to view the heart as a call
to action. Without that prior knowledge, however, a visitor would not necessarily make
that connection.
Several visitors, in fact, did express confusion over this habit of interaction. One
group of three women in particular expressed their confusion quite clearly. This group of
women approached the Collection Wall one morning and, being the only ones at the wall
at that time, stood watching for a while before one of them touched one of the smaller
mosaic images and brought up a new swipeable stack of images. The same woman
touched the heart underneath the image, and as the word appeared on the screen the
woman beside her read aloud, “Favorited?” She continued by saying again, “Favorited?
Is that a word? That's not a word." The third woman turned to the employee sitting at the
information desk and asked, "Is favorited a word?" The employ nodded and said, "It’s the
past tense of ‘favorite,’ like if you favorite something." The first woman, still
unconvinced, said, “Oh…favorite as a verb…I've never heard of that,” and turned back to
face the Wall. The employee came around from behind then desk and showed them how
to swipe through the stacks of images, then clicked the heart icon, saying “Then you click
here to favorite an image.” The third woman asked, “And what does that mean, to
favorite?" to which the employee responded, "It means to favorite something, or say you
like it."
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This exchange illustrates a divide between the three women, who were not at all
familiar with the social networking vocabulary of “favorite” and “like,” and the museum
employee who repeats the same vocabulary in an attempt to help clarify the habit of
interaction for them. It is hard to determine exactly where this divide originates from. The
women were all in their mid-late 60s, and the museum employee appeared to be in his
late 30s/early 40s, so it is possible that the misunderstanding stemmed from an agerelated difference in digital literacies and knowledge of the vocabulary of social
networking. Unfortunately, as no specific personal details such as age or prior ownership
of digital devices were collected in this study, this conjecture is unverifiable at this time.
What this divide does demonstrate, however, is that whether the barrier to digital
literacies be age, physical ability, access to personal/mobile computing devices, etc., a
disparity in existing digital literacies can and will result in visitors perceiving different
affordances as being made available to them.
Conclusion
Visitors interact with the touchscreen interfaces studied, the Collection Wall and
Lenses at the CMA and the Touch Table at the National Archives Museum, through six
primary habits of interaction, habits that they perceive as being afforded by these
interfaces because of their previously existing digital literacies. In engaging in certain
activities through these habits of interaction, visitors often see themselves as engaging
directly with the art object, rather than a digital representation of the object mediated by
the interface. The disappearance of the interface that occurs in visitors’ interactions with
the touchscreen interfaces is, in and of itself, not surprising. As Jason Farman (2011)
notes, this disappearance of the interface is a common result of an environment of
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pervasive computing. He says, “Instead of the excessive visibility of our systems,
ubiquitous or pervasive computing often seeks to create an environment in which the
technologies remain invisible” (p. 7). With a proliferation of mobile, touchscreen and
other personal computing devices, such screens become so much a part of our everyday
life that they inevitably become “invisible,” routine elements of daily experience.
However, the erasure of the interface that I observed taking place within these
museums is different from the invisibility germane to ubiquitous computing. First, though
many museums do employ touchscreen kiosks and other kinds of touchscreen interfaces
in their gallery spaces, institutionally provided touchscreen interfaces are still not
ubiquitous. Visitors, even those who told me that they frequent museums, often initially
approached the touchscreen interfaces with hesitation; their first concern was determining
whether or not it was something that could be touched.30 It was only upon interaction
with the interface, particularly through the habits of interaction discussed here, that the
interface fell away, allowing visitors to focus on the content displayed within, and
allowing them to view the digital image as a reification of the physical art object.
However, not all visitors engaged with the interfaces through the habits of interaction
discussed in the same manner. Visitors were only able to perceive these habits of
interaction as afforded by the touchscreen interfaces as a result of their previously
existing digital literacies, including prior experience with touchscreen devices such as
30
This phenomenon is again reminiscent of Heidegger’s concept of “ready-to-hand,” or, more specifically,
its corollary “present-at-hand.” While the objects we use in our environments, in their ordinary use, may
become transparent, or “ready-to-hand,” there are instances where “break-down” occurs and the object
reclaims our attention and becomes “present-to-hand,” “that is nontransparent to the user” (Zahorik and
Jenison, 1998, p. 84). In the case of the touchscreen interfaces, in their use they became “ready-to-hand,”
that is, they became invisible to their users, allowing visitors to focus on the content displayed by them.
However, when visitors were puzzled about their touch-ability, or their seamless use was not apparent too
them due to lack of necessarily digital literacies, “break-down” occurred and the interfaces because
“present-at-hand,” or glaringly obvious objects in the users’ environment.
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tables and mobile phones, familiarity with web and social media conventions, and
socially constructed understandings of the work of the museum. In instances in which a
visitor did not have the digital literacies necessary to perceive a particular habit of
interaction as being afforded by the interface, that visitor also did not experience the
erasure of the interface. These visitors did not see themselves as touching the art. Instead,
they attended to their use of, and the challenges they experienced with, the interface
itself. For the handful of visitors (who I discussed briefly in Chapter 2) who I observed
and interviewed who did not immediately recognize the interfaces as being touchable, or
who did not perceive the affordances that other visitors did, the interfaces became front
and center, objects to be learned and reckoned with. Rather than seeing themselves as
“getting closer to the art” or participating in creative activity, these visitors instead saw
the interfaces as objects that potentially detracted from their museum experience.
Because of the primacy of the interface, these visitors did not see themselves, as many
others did, as engaging with the actual artifacts of the museum.
While there were a handful of visitors for whom the interfaces remained
prominent and problematic, for the majority of visitors I observed and interviewed, the
interfaces did fall away in their use. These visitors not only saw themselves as having a
closer relationship with the physical artifacts represented, but also as participating in the
work of the museum by creating, critiquing, and being able to manipulate objects in the
collection. Many visitors identified their participation as a different kind of experience
that the one they normally associated with a visit to a museum. One exchange I had with
visitors exemplifies this well:
Interviewee #1:
It’s [Gallery One] more complex [than the usual
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museum]…so it made…
Interviewee #2:
(Interrupting)…Yeah. It's a lot more than just “look at
this dot.”
Interviewee #3:
It got people more involved than just walking through and
looking at something for fifteen seconds.
Interviewee #2:
Move the dot. Spin the dot. Be the dot.
These visitors, like many others, recognized the experience offered by interaction with
the touchscreen interfaces as different from the experience of interacting only visually
with works in the museum. Their response shows that they saw that difference not only as
being able to manipulate the artwork – move and spin the dot – instead of just look at it,
but also as engaging in a fully immersive participatory experience – actually BEING the
dot.
In Chapter 4, I will show that touch is crucial to this experience of embodied
participation. I will show that the experiences visitors perceive as afforded through the
habits of interaction explored in this Chapter do rhetorical work. These rhetorical
experiences persuade visitors to take on certain roles traditionally seen as belonging to
the “expert.” By taking on these roles, performing “institutional” tasks such as research,
instruction, and critique, visitors see themselves as “participants” in a democratic cultural
conversation. Rather than identifying as outside viewers of a private collection, visitors
see themselves as participating in the cultural work of the museum. I argue that the
experience of taking up these roles has rhetorical affects, changing visitors’ subjective
positions within and attitudes toward the museum.
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Chapter 4
This is How You Touch the Art: Rhetorical Experience and the Visitor as Expert
One weekday morning, two women and a young girl around the age of twelve
entered Gallery One at the CMA, stopping at the Collection Wall for approximately ten
minutes before moving into the larger gallery space. Over the next hour, the three
discussed the art objects displayed in the gallery, interacted with all six lenses,
participated in a number of different activities on each lens, emailed the results of their
work when the activity included sharing via email as an option, and occasionally returned
to a lens after first leaving it to explore another. When I interviewed them, nearly an hour
after they arrived in the gallery, the three expressed delight over being able to use the
technology to access more information about the art, being able to draw “circles, lines,
zigzags curves, etc.,” and with those drawings create their own work, and being able to
save their work by emailing it to themselves, which one of the women described as “very
helpful.” The women said that one of the major strengths of the touchscreen interfaces in
Gallery One was that they helped them “get closer” to the art objects displayed. They
both agreed that the experience of interacting with the lenses made the art objects “more
alive” than they would have been had they simply read the information on the wall
plaques in the room.
For these women, the primary difference between their experiences interacting
with the lenses and reading traditional wall plaques was their ability, with the lenses, to
touch the screens of the interfaces. As the four of us were discussing what they felt they
took away from their experience with the technology, we had the following exchange:
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Woman #1:
Instead of standing in front of a piece of art and kind of squinting,
'cause you're reading the cards, you learn a little bit more
information. Like the line one over here [points]; you go to the
interactive screen, and it tells you "Okay, this guy went here, he
actually did this for many, many hours before he came up with
this." It's like a line, and I'm like "Really?"
Me:
All the information that goes into it...
Woman #1:
Yeah, so it makes you care about it.
Me:
Okay…
Woman #1:
Because it's giving you the background, it's not just "This is a piece
of sculpture, don't touch it."
Me:
Okay.
Woman #2:
Especially for kids, I think, kids always want to touch. They want
to ...
Woman 1:
They want to feel the textures and things like that. You want to
touch this stuff. You want to get a feel for it.
Woman 2:
Right. I think the technology allows that. The technology really
does.
Here, the two women refer to “texture” and “feel,” suggesting that the technology allows
them to feel the sensations involved in touching the object, when in fact they are only
physically interacting with the smooth surface of the screen.
This exchange exemplifies two common responses I received from visitors at the
Cleveland Museum of Art that point to how interaction with these interfaces are shaping
visitors’ experiences of the museum. First, at some point in their interactions with the
touchscreens, visitors begin to see the digital images displayed as stand-ins for the
physical art object, and to see themselves as being able to touch the actual art object
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represented by that digital image. Second, because of this ability to touch, visitors see the
act of interacting with the technology as offering an experience that is different from, and
more fulfilling than, the experience of engaging with more traditional interpretive
technologies such as wall plaques. Visitors often expressed this difference explicitly,
claiming that their experience within the museum using these interfaces was different
from their expectations of that experience had been when they first entered. As one man
claimed, “I [was] sure that it [the museum] would show the background of the artist or
give you a brief overview of what it was based on, but it [pointing to the Collection Wall]
wasn't what I thought it would be. It was completely different and interactive and fun”
(CMA Visitor).
Visitors explained that the “different” experiences they saw themselves engaging
in were directly related to their ability to interact with things in the gallery spaces through
touch. As one of the women previously introduced elaborated, “Museums are usually
like, ‘don’t get too close, [daughter’s name] I don’t think you should be touching that,
don’t breathe too hard” (CMA Visitor), setting up a contrast between the experience she
expected to have and the one she did. Similarly, at the National Archives Museum, a
visitor expressed gratitude for the experience of interacting with the touch table because,
“with documents it's usually like, you know, in a display case, don't touch it, don't get
near it, just you know, enjoy it from afar and that's about it” (NAM Visitor), but with the
touch table he could manipulate the documents himself. Visitors’ interactions with the
touchscreen interfaces made them feel “closer to the art” (CMA visitor) at the CMA,
more connected to the content displayed at both institutions, and less removed from the
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museum itself because they felt they were able to “have a role” (NAM visitor) in the
work of that museum.
Thus, visitors, by their own testimony, felt more connected to and involved in the
work of the museum after participating in experiences mediated by the touchscreens.
Additionally, visitors who participated in those experiences took on roles traditionally
reserved for the “expert” and the institution. For example, many visitors who interacted
with these interfaces then took on the role of instructor, turning to advise other visitors
how to engage with the technology. Still others took on the role of critic, leading fellow
visitors in collaborative critique of the artifacts the interfaces digitally displayed.
Museum visitors who took up these roles recognized themselves as also taking up a
different subject position and a different relationship with the museum itself. These
visitors described, or seemed to understand, their engagement with the interfaces and
artifacts displayed as being a type of “conversation” (CMA Visitor) with the museum.
That is, for these visitors, the interfaces and the experiences afforded by them seemed to
allow the opportunity to participate in a cultural conversation that they viewed as
previously accessible only to a cultural elite.
Visitors by and large identified the availability for interaction (by which, as I
explain in Chapter 3, they mean participation) as something inherently offered by the
technology itself. Indeed, much of New Exhibition Studies sees the adoption of digital
technology as the common denominator in progressive participatory experiences within
museums. However, not all digitally-mediated participatory experiences are created
equal. As Zimmer et. al. (2008) claim, “the experience afforded by digital technologies is
usually at least as sensually and socially impoverished as it is for unmediated museum
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and gallery visits” (p. 152). Most digital interfaces within museums simply reify
institutional hierarchies of the institution educating the lay visitor with linear and topdown information. In the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Archives Museum,
however, I see something different occurring in visitors’ use of the touchscreen interfaces
within these spaces that is ultimately shifting visitors’ attitudes towards, and interpretive
positions relative to, the artefact and the museum. I argue that it is through the
experiences that visitors are engaging in that this shift occurs. By experiences, I mean not
the habits of interaction that visitors are using to interact with the interfaces or the
activities they complete with those habits on their own right, but the roles that visitors are
taking up through these actions. In other words, museum visitors interacting with these
interfaces are participating in experiences that persuade them to take up particular roles
and interpretive positions. These experiences, then, do rhetorical work by shifting
visitors’ identities within and attitudes towards the museum.
To better explore and analyze this phenomenon, I turn to Gregory Clark’s (2010)
concept of rhetorical experience introduced previously in Chapter 1. Experience in
Clark’s understanding is neither a passive nor a solitary occurrence. Instead, Clark
emphasizes, experience always enacts some sort of change in attitudes, what Kenneth
Burke (1969) identifies as deeply held thoughts and convictions, on the part of the
individual. As such, experience always produces results that translate into action, and
those results always have social ramifications.
To further highlight the connection between experience, attitudes, and
identification, Clark says that Burke believes that aesthetic experiences do rhetorical
work by shaping individual attitudes, or deeply held thoughts and convictions, on the part
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of the viewer/reader/experiencer. These attitudes prompt the individual to action, and the
resulting action manifests the formation of public identities, or as Clark (2010) defines
identities, “set[s] of attitudes held in common with others” (p. 118). For Burke (1969),
the desire to influence an audience to identification is the motive of rhetoric (p. 24), and
the act of identification itself is both rhetorical and public in nature (p. 28). Clark stresses
the importance of this transition from individual attitude to public identification, saying
that for both Dewey and Burke, “individualized and self-sufficient” (p. 116) rhetorical
experiences “become civic in their consequences when those attitudes affect identities”
(p. 118).
In Chapter 3, I introduced the habits of interaction that visitors use to engage with
the touchscreen interfaces in the CMA and the National Archives Museum, and showed
how those habits of interaction served to enact an erasure of the interfaces, which in turn
caused visitors to see themselves as actually touching the art. In this chapter, I will show
that through the use of touchscreen interfaces, particularly through the habits of
interaction discussed in Chapter 3, museum visitors take up certain roles traditionally
reserved for the “expert” in the museum. By taking on these roles, performing
“institutional” tasks such as research, instruction, and critique, visitors see themselves as
“participants” in a shared cultural conversation. Rather than identifying as outside
viewers of a private collection, visitors see themselves as participating in the cultural
work of the museum. I show that the experience of taking up these roles has rhetorical
effects, changing visitors’ subjective positions within and attitudes toward the museum.
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The Taboo of Touch
To understand why it is important that visitors are being persuaded by
participatory experiences mediated by touch technology to take on these more democratic
roles, we must first understand why these roles are more democratic in the first place. As
discussed in Chapter 3, in order for visitors to perceive the habits of interaction identified
as being afforded by the touchscreen interfaces at the center of this study, they must first
identify the interfaces as touchable. While visitors are approaching these interfaces with a
host of digital literacies acquired through their experience with mobile technology (or
lack thereof), they are also, importantly, seeing the interfaces within the space of the
museums that they are located in. As such, while visitors may recognize the interfaces as
touchscreen technologies to be interacted with, they still often exhibit reluctance to
actually touch them. At the CMA, for every group of visitors I tracked as they interacted
with the Collection Wall and Lenses there were many others who traveled through the
Gallery One space without interacting with a single piece of technology. Visitors of all
ages perused the gallery space following the perimeter of the room, viewing the art
objects, and avoiding the Lenses and Wall completely. The visitors who did, in the end,
interact with the technology often did so first exhibiting reluctance to touch. As an
example, one mother, as her young son began to run towards the Painting Lens, yelled in
a panicked tone, “No! Don’t run! Don’t touch!” The pair left the gallery and touched
nothing. Still others expressed hesitation or reluctance to each other, asking their fellow
visitors questions such as, “Do I just touch it?”, “You just touch it, right?”, and “We can
put our fingers on this, right?” (CMA visitors). Similarly, many visitors who approached
the Touch Table at the National Archives, if there were no visitors already interacting
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with the table, would stand and read from the table with their arms folded or with their
hands in their pockets, and leave without touching.
Additionally, while the feeling of being allowed to get “closer to the art” and of
being able to touch the art expressed by the two women and young girl discussed at the
start of this chapter were exemplary of many other visitors’ reactions to their experiences
within the Gallery One space, these women’s experiences almost did not take place at all.
The two women and the young girl they brought to the museum as part of a field trip
supplement to her homeschool education were initially not going to enter Gallery One at
all. When I asked them why their first impulse was not to enter the gallery, they
responded:
Woman 1:
I don't even know what this space was, I actually thought it was
something you had to pay for.
Woman 2:
[crosstalk] It's kind of like closed…an exclusive area. When you
look in from the outside, you can't see in. Until you get in, I didn't
realize there were so many people in here. Until you come in and
come around the corner, all I saw was one of the employees
standing and I was like, "Okay maybe I'm not comfortable coming
into this part." It appeals, but it wasn't inviting, because you
wanted to go in…
Woman 1:
You wanted to, but it was like, "Is this ... Can I do that?"
Woman 2:
I'm like, reading all the signs around the door, like "How much
does this cost?"
That the women brought the young student to the museum “hoping they would have
something hands on” but initially were concerned that the area that allowed hands-on
interaction was “exclusive” or would cost a special fee is not an unusual reaction. As
discussed in Chapter 2, access to interaction with a museum’s collection through touch
has a complicated history in contemporary museum history. According to Fiona Candlin
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(2008), early museums welcomed the handling of objects, but, “by the mid-nineteenth
century, the acceptance of tactile experience had disappeared” (p. 11). Interaction through
touch did not disappear for every visitor, however. Instead, there was a shift in the way
that museums managed their collections, visiting hours, and approaches to access, so that
certain visitors were given an opportunity to handle objects in the collection, while others
were actively barred from those opportunities. Candlin (2008), building upon the work of
Classen and Howes (2006), identifies this divide as being strongly rooted in class politics,
saying that, “restricted opening hours, public and private days as well as the private
nature of most collections meant that the working classes, and to some extent, even the
middle classes, did not gain access [to touch] anywhere near as easily as the elite” (p. 13).
Rather, she, says, “Both the possibility of touching objects and the recognition that touch
could contribute to learning, pleasure and subjectivity all depended on who touched” (p.
13).
The class divide that Candlin critiques evolved over the years, as the role of
museums in society began to shift from that of collection and display to that of driving
“advances in social thought,” as Theodore Low urged in his 1942 white paper “Museums
as a Social Instrument,” taking up the yoke of “education in all its varied aspects from the
most scholarly research, to the simple arousing of curiosity” (p. 21). However, the
entrenched notions of an institutional divide between the “public,” whose untrained
and/or contaminated touch could potentially damage the artifacts in an institution’s
collection, and the “expert,” whose touch is necessary for the preservation of those
artifacts, still underlies the relationship between contemporary museums and their
visitors. In the words of Zimmer et. al (2008):
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museum access is almost entirely visual and solitary. Museums are thus
thought of as sterile places in which artefacts are approached as nearly
sacred objects of passive veneration, and in which visitors only interact
with each other in hushed whispers (p. 151).
This sterility was, and still often is, connected to the unspoken or spoken understanding
that lay visitors, the untrained public, can damage the objects in a museum’s collection
and thus should be discouraged and/or barred from touching them. Even in Gallery One,
the CMA expressly prohibits touching the artwork displayed (Figure 1), citing
preservation of the art as the impetus for this directive.
Figure 1: “Please Do Not Touch sign at the CMA”
While conservation of fragile cultural artifacts is an important part of many
museums’ missions and work, much of the stigma surrounding “corrupting” touch is
situated in a long and complicated history of class politics, a social history the remnants
of which can be heard in visitors’ general attitudes towards museums. Many visitors,
when asked what their attitudes were towards museums prior to their visit, said they view
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museums to be “exclusive,” “antiquated,” “boring,” “tedious,” and “elite” or “elitist.”
Many visitors said they made their decision to visit because they were convinced by
someone else, or made the decision despite these sentiments, not expecting them to
change. One young man, who studied art in college and was a repeat visitor of the CMA,
said the five friends who were traveling almost didn’t agree to visit with him that day
because “They think art and museums are for a select few.” While the majority of
visitors, on the day I interviewed them, did choose to visit the museum (as opposed to
being brought by family members, friends, or parents), these visitors still ultimately
understood their role as museum visitor to be that of silent observation and private
interpretation, not physical interaction or participation.
Visitors’ attitudes towards museums as elitist and inaccessible are directly related
to this understanding of their role as silent, lay observer, and it is exactly this institutional
hierarchy that new exhibition practices seek to push against (Anderson, 2012; Barrett,
2012; Parry, 2007; Simon, 2012; Zimmer et. Al., 2008). Two innovations in interpretive
technologies and exhibition practices that challenged the hierarchy of the “expert”
institution vs. the lay public occurred in the 1980s and 90s, predating and then
overlapping current developments in digital technology. Peter Samis (2012) explains:
The first innovation was philosophical: the master narrative as
promulgated by a single authoritative museum voice gave way to a
polyphony of voices, and with them the admission of more than one
perspective in evoking the value and meanings of a works of art. The
second innovation was digital, the ability to randomly access as much or
as little information as you wanted about an object in the gallery, and to
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pick and choose your way through an exhibition without the museum
determining your course…Taken together, these changes were big: The
monopoly of the expert was challenged (p. 305).
The ability of interpretive technologies to challenge the “monopoly of the expert,” to
essentially redefine the social contract between museum and visitor that positions the
visitor as an “empty vessel” to be educated is a powerful theoretical notion. When I
embarked on this project I sought to undercover whether or not this was actually
occurring. What I found is 1) not only is Samis’ claim true, but 2) visitors clearly see, and
can articulate, a closing of the gap between institution/expert and themselves as visitor.
When asked if his attitude towards the museum had changed after their interaction with
the Touch Table, one National Archives visitor said, “It [the museum] just doesn't feel so
elitist and intellectual, this idea of museums and archives, is that its like temple of
knowledge. It's very intimidating for people to go into. This [the Touch Table] just sort of
puts it on a level playing field” (NAM Visitor). This visitor saw the experiences afforded
by the Touch Table as pushing against the idea of the “elitist” museum, bringing him, the
visitor to a more equal standing with the institution. Yet another visitor answered the
same question by saying:
Well, to that, I definitely, this is my own little opinion, but you can keep
going. But, I definitely feel like with audio tours, it's more of ‘the man’
[gesturing air quotes] taking you through and telling you what this is, and
why this is important. Whereas I feel like this [Touch Table] is more of
like, you know it's all important, have a look at what you'd like to look at,
and experience it on your time and at your interest level (NAM Visitor).
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For this visitor, the distinction between the imposition of the institution dictating
meaning-making and interpretation, telling the visitor why a particular artifact is
important, is challenged by the personal freedom of, as Samis suggested, being able to
experience the collection on one’s own time, and with one’s own interests in mind.
In addition to visitors who interacted with the touchscreen interfaces through the
habits of interaction discussed in Chapter 3, recognizing more freedom and control of
their interpretive experience in the museum, I observed visitors “taking on” roles
traditionally reserved for experts in the institution. Specifically, I saw visitors performing
“expertise” by engaging in tasks germane to that class of museum expert, namely
educating, critiquing, and researching. Upon first reflection, I wanted to say that through
the participatory experiences they perceive afforded by the touchscreen interfaces,
visitors were actually gaining expertise. As T. Kenny Fountain (2014) says, “expertise
involves more than learning the knowledge of a group; it involves learning to perform
tasks as a member of that group as well as gaining the social role that allows one to
perform those tasks” (p. 5). In the case of visitors acting as instructor or researcher within
the museum, they appeared to be gaining, or more accurately claiming, the social role
involved in those tasks.
But as I further analyzed my data, specifically visitors’ performances of this
“expertise,” it was difficult to determine what kind of expertise, if any, they possessed.
Visitors interacting with touch technology do not quite fully possess what Harry Collins
(2016) calls “interactional expertise,” in which the actor does not possess the tools to act
within the discourse community “but acquires only the spoken discourse of the domain”
(p. 6), because, as I will show, the language with which they talked about researching or
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with which they instructed others, much more closely resembled “referred expertise,” or
what Collins and Evans (2007) define as “expertise taken from one field and applied to
another” (p. 64). As an example, when asked how he knew how to interact with the
Touch Table the way he did, and how to teach his wife, one man responded, “I’m an
engineer” (NA Visitor). This man saw his expertise as an engineer as giving him the
ability, not only to use the Touch Table to follow his own research interests, but to teach
his wife how to navigate with the Table and what elements he thought were important
(When asked if they shared a reaction to any of the documents, he said, “No, I didn’t
teach her that”).
At the same time, visitors did not quite exhibit “contributory expertise” either, or
the kind of expertise, as Collins (2016) says, that “we normally mean when we talk of
experts—these are people who exercise their expertise by contributing to their specialist
domain (p. 6). Even though visitors saw themselves as contributing to the work of the
museum by being able to “have a role,” their contribution to that domain would not
continue after their visit was complete.
Therefore, upon further analysis of my data, I contend that what is occurring in
these instances is that visitors are temporarily stepping into the “role” of the expert with
what I refer to as “situational expertise.” That is, rather than achieving a broad subjectmatter or professional expertise themselves, visitors seem to enacting a kind of “in the
moment” expertise that is situation dependent. To illustrate this situational expertise in
action, I identified, using visitors’ language three primary roles that experts within the
museum hold, and thus three primary roles in which visitors acted as situational experts:
The expert as the person who teaches (instructor), the expert as the person with
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knowledge (researcher), and the expert as the person who guides interpretation (critic). I
will first show these three roles in action, and then reflect on the rhetorical effects the
rhetorical experiences of taking on these roles produce.
The Visitor as Person Who Teaches (Instructor)
The phenomenon of visitors taking on the role of instructor, and teaching other
visitors either about the content displayed by the interfaces (as described above) or how
to use the interfaces was one of the first patterns I began to notice in visitor behavior in
the hybrid gallery spaces where I conducted my observations. I made a note of this in my
first field note in the Cleveland Museum of Art as I watched a group of four adults
interacting with the Collection Wall taking turns teaching each other how to complete
various actions with the interface. I observed another early exemplary instance of visitorto-visitor instruction when a group of four adults, three men and one woman, all
appearing to be in their late 30s/early 40s, approached the Collection Wall, and all stood
watching it for a short while. After watching the hand animation showing the swiping and
favoriting actions, the woman asked, “Is it only the hearts you can touch on?” One of the
men answered, “No, you can touch anywhere you want. Watch.” The other two men
began to touch the screen, and the first man directed the others in possibilities for
interaction saying, “You can touch on a picture, like this” (demonstrating how to click
from one of the larger displayed images, and then swiping through the stack of images
displayed). For the next few minutes, each of them interacted with the Wall in different
places, stopping to show the others different actions they discovered, such as browsing
with the gallery locator hypertext, switching categories of images, and swiping from both
left to right and right to left). All four did this using demonstrative and imperative phrases
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of instruction such as, “Look,” “Like this,” “If you touch here, you can...,” and “Watch.”
For this group, while one man initially stepped up to instruct the others in how to interact
with the Wall, the longer they used it the more each member of the group began to
instruct the others as well.
Often, visitors stepped into the role of instructor in response to other visitors’
questions, anxieties, or hesitations about interacting with the technology. For example,
two young women in their early 20s approached the Collection Wall together, one of
them immediately touching one of the displayed images on the Wall, the second standing
back with her hands in her pockets watching both the Wall and her friend for several
minutes before saying, “It stresses me out.” The woman who had been interacting with
the Wall responded to her friend by turning, and proceeding to demonstrate to her friend
how to use the Wall, using specific language and explaining how the hyperlinks worked
and what different categories she could browse to. This woman showed her friend how to
select an image from the mosaic display, explained that that image was then displayed in
a category, showed her how to swipe through the category, and moved through different
hyperlinks saying, “See, I can then learn more about it here [pointing to the category title]
and here [pointing to the tour locator].” The second woman, after being shown by the
first, then interacted with the Wall herself for several more minutes before they both left.
These examples are only a small sampling of instances where visitors in Gallery
One turned to instruct each other on how to use the technology. Occasionally visitors’
information was incorrect, like when one man, gesturing towards the Collection Wall said
to the man who came up behind him, “Everything the museum owns, and what can be
found in the galleries and stuff is on here.” Technically, the Collection Wall only displays
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what is on view in the CMA proper, a fraction of total acquisitions in the CMA’s full
collection.31 Visitors who held slightly inaccurate information about the museum or
misinterpreted information given to them by museum employees, in taking on the role of
instructor passed that misinformation on to others.32 Primarily, however, visitor-to-visitor
instruction was not only accurate, but detailed. Visitors used technical terms such as
“swipe,” “browse,” “zoom,” and “favorite,” in their instruction of other visitors that they
did not repeat in interviews with me. Additionally, most visitors’ instructions were
accurate and clear enough that not only could the other visitors, whether part of their
group or strangers, understand and repeat the instructions, they could then communicate
them to visitors who came along after them.
Visitors at the National Archives also used detailed and technical language in
their instruction of other visitors, using detailed corrections such as, “That's ‘pinching.’
That's not” (NA Visitor), when teaching another the habit of interaction of “pinch to
zoom.” At both sites of study, it was not just adults who took on the role of instructor;
many children turned to teach other children or adults (either adults in their group or
strangers who they felt were confused about the interfaces) how to interact with them33.
As an example, one afternoon a teenage girl and a young boy approached the Touch
31
The CMA’s full collection consists of approximately 46,000 artifacts and artworks. At any given time,
only 3-4,000 of these items is on display in the museum. So the Collection Wall, as the museum proper,
only displays about 6-8% of the museum’s total collection at any given time (CMA Employee in
interview).
32
One may be tempted to suggest that visitors spreading misinformation is an example of why the museum,
the institution, should solely hold, as it has traditionally, the role of educator. However, in each of the few
instances I did observe of museum employees instructing visitors in Gallery One, the museum employee
also gave visitors misleading or incorrect information in their instruction. There was no difference in the
accuracy or caliber of visitor-to-visitor instruction vs. institution-to-visitor instruction that I observed.
33
There were, of course a number of instances of adult to child instruction as parents directed their children
through the museum. Parent-child interaction in the museum is itself a vibrant subject of study (Fasoli,
2104) and a relationship that has a different set of implications than peer-to-peer interactions. As such, for
the purposes of this study, I am focusing on peer to peer instruction here.
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Table. The girl went to the closest open station and quickly started navigating by swiping
through the open chapters. She read for approximately five minutes, reading through all
the documents in one event before switching to another. After these five minutes, a
woman, perhaps the teen’s mother, came over and stood close to the girl not touching the
table. The girl pointed at an open document saying, “This is interesting,” and described to
the woman the history and content of the document she had been reading. She then
showed the woman how to navigate through the chapters, saying, “There's different ways
to get around,” explained the functions of the back arrow buttons, how to swipe, and how
to navigate with the menu and the keyword tree. She then left the Table, and the woman
proceeded to stand reading for a few minutes before touching the table herself. The
woman then read for quite some time, using the actions that the girl had explained to her.
As another example, a young boy engaged in the “Global Influences” activity on the
“How Are Art and Trade Connected” Lens in Gallery One, was approached by another
boy about his age who had entered the gallery with a different school group. The first boy
then asked, “Do you want to try?” and explained in detail to the second boy how to
complete the activity, a matching game, and then how to navigate out of it to other parts
of the Lens. He then left to his own group, and the second boy stayed at the Lens for
another 6 minutes before rejoining his group.
In all of the instances I observed of visitor-to-visitor instruction, visitors used two
primary methods of instruction in their conversations with other visitors, instructional
language and gesture/demonstration. I observed that as visitors took on the role of
instructor, they used specific language to get and focus the attention of those around
them. Firstly, they used imperative statements such as “Look,” “Watch,” and “Try this”
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to explicitly instruct their fellow visitors. They also made mention of specific habits of
interaction, saying, for example, “You can touch the picture like this,” “You can swipe,”
or “You can take your picture and email it to whoever you want.” They also used
corrective language, instructing others how to best interact with the interfaces with
phrases such as “You have to stand over there [at the Bodies Lens]” (CMA Visitor) or
“No, do it this way” (NA Visitor). Visitors also instructed others using demonstrative
language such as, “Like this,” “Here,” “That,” “This way,” accompanied by gestures,
both demonstrations of how to do a certain action and pointing. Pointing, which is often
used with demonstrative language to establish joint attention (Deissel, 2012, p. 2418) is
an important part of instruction. As Cristina Grasseni (2004) says, “the necessary training
of the eye…consists in repeated and integrated acts of pointing, an indexical activity that
orients, structures and organizes the visual field for the apprentice, by way of repetition,
authority and comparison” (p. 49). In other words, pointing, along with demonstrative
language, both directs the pupil’s attention to the object at hand and establishes the
authority of the one doing the pointing, situating the pointer as the instructor.
I observed visitors taking on the role of the instructor through the use of
imperative, corrective, and demonstrative language accompanied by gesture and pointing.
Visitors use of language and action in this way, placed that visitor in, to borrow a phrase
from discourse analysis (Gee, 2011), the “socially situated identity” of an instructor (p.
30). By this I mean that by using language generally used in teaching moments, visitors
took on the role of an instructor. They also clearly recognized the role that they were
taking up. For example, when one woman tried to describe how she was able to use the
painting lens at the CMA, her friend interrupted her by saying, “That's because I had to
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show her [how to use it]” (CMA Visitor). Similarly, when I asked a woman at the
National Archives how she knew how to interact with the touch table in the way that she
did, her husband interrupted to explain that he “taught her the features” (NA Visitor). The
instructing visitor’s socially situated identify as instructor was then confirmed by other
visitors’ responses to them as they spoke in that role. As visitors received instruction
from their fellow visitors, they responded to them in the same ways visitors responded to
museum employees, using nods, expressions, questions such as “like this?”, “right
here?”, and “with my fingers?” and affirmative phrases such as, “yes,” “interesting,”
“wow,” “cool,” and “thank you.” These visitors also actively pointed to other visitors as
their source of instruction. For instance, many visitors in both sites of study, when
pressed as to how they knew how to interact with the interfaces the ways that they did
responded that “someone else” had showed them how. Visitors who took on the role of
the instructor did not just instruct their own friends and family either; the “someone else”
that visitors spoke about as having instructed them was just as often a stranger as it was
someone in their own party. As such, the socially situated role of the instructor that some
visitors took up was also one that other visitors both acknowledged and respected.
The Visitor as Person with Knowledge (Researcher)
As discussed in Chapter 3, a key element of visitors’ experiences with the
touchscreens in both sites of study is their perception of being able to pursue their own
interests through interaction with the technology (through the habit of interaction of
browsing). In every interview I conducted at the NAM, and in most of the interviews I
conducted at the CMA, visitors used some cognate of the word “interest” when
discussing their use of the technology. Visitors noted a sense of appreciation for and
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autonomy in being able to “pursue [their] own interests” (NA Visitor). They also often
credited the ability to touch as increasing their interest. As one visitor said, “But now that
there's all this kind of stuff that we can touch and get our hands on, it makes it a lot more
interesting” (CMA Visitor). Yet another, planning a future trip to the NAM with her
nephew said that she was more excited about his potential experience because with the
Touch Table, “he can actually do the touching, and he can make stuff bigger, and he can
pick what he wants” (NAM Visitor). Visitors expressed that this freedom to be able to
follow and attend to their own interests was different from what they expected before
their museum visit, based on their prior knowledge of, and attitudes towards, museums.
As one man said, when asked “What were some of the actions or the motions that you did
[with the touch table]?”:
Visitor:
Well, picking out what I was interested in in the title. Then going
from page to page ... ‘this one's very cool’…‘I love this’…
Me:
Did your experience using this technology in this space differ at all
from your expectations coming into this exhibit?
Visitor:
Yes, this is awesome. I never even expected something like this.
Me:
What about it didn't you expect?
Visitor:
Well, I didn't expect to be able to just pick what I wanted like that.
Again, in this answer, this visitor’s experience in the museum space was different than he
expected due to the ability, through the habit of interaction of browsing which he
perceived as afforded to him by the interface, to pursue his own interests through the
content displayed by the interface.
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This same visitor, when asked what his attitude was towards the museum or
museums in general, responded:
First that it's ... you need to as a person, you need to learn about history
and about how things have come about. To me it's all about people and
how there's good and bad in everybody. Different people are ... some
people are bad. Some people are good. These are some things that are
terrible that have happened in our life but we keep changing and growing
and hopefully getting better. More tolerant.
When asked if this had changed at all from before his time interacting with the Touch
Table, he responded, “Yes, it’s changed,” and later, “It's more in-depth [after interacting
with the Touch Table] than what I...I'm not a real big history buff, so...” This exchange
illustrates a common progression that I observed in visitors’ accounts of their
participation. First, the visitor recognizes a freedom to pursue their own interests separate
from the suggested linear stream of information given to them by the museum. Second,
they exhibit a change in attitude and identity within the museum as a result of this
experience. Now, here, as with most other cases, the visitor did not expressly articulate
that he felt his attitude towards the museum had changed. Instead, he acted on that
change by assuming the role of a person with knowledge, and speaking with authority as
to how he felt it was important that others should act (“…you need to learn about
history”). He then downplayed his own relationship to history as a field of study (“I’m
not a history buff”). His response suggests that his authority in that moment, his
situational expertise, was something that came about due to his experiences with the
technology, and being able to pick and choose through his own interests (through the
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habit of interaction of browsing), rather than authority he came to via field-specific
training or possession of contributory expertise.
This example raises the question of why interacting with the technology resulted
in this man’s shift from lay visitor outside the field of practice of history to speaking to
me with authority as to why the practice of history was important. What I found is that in
the ability to pursue one’s own interests through interaction with the technology visitors
saw their role not as a a viewer, but as a researcher, and it was their experience in this
role that resulted in that shift. One woman expressed the connection between following a
chosen line of inquiry and conducting research succinctly saying, “Whereas I feel you
actually do get more of an archive feeling, like you're researching, when you're actually
going through like that. Because you can choose what you're interested in and what
you're looking for, and you can get it as big to read the text as you want” (NAM Visitor).
Another man additionally expressed a sense of freedom in that ability to research, saying,
“I was reading about that [topic], and that touch screen computer is very interactive and
very helpful because it allowed me to navigate without having to research them all” (NA
Visitor).
The visitor stepping into the role of the researcher was something I observed
primarily at the National Archives Museum. It was also at the NAM that visitors spoke
the most about being able to follow their own interests. This is not at all surprising given
the nature of the Touch Table interface; visitors who perceive hyperlink browsing as
afforded by the Touch Table can use that habit of interaction to follow a logical path
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through organized information at their own discretion.34 Visitors’ perception, at the
NAM, of being able to pursue their own interests is also a consequence of the nature of
the museum itself, its collection, and visitors’ understandings of what the mission and
work of the museum is. Seeing the archive as a place for “history” and “research,”
visitors identify with these roles within that space.35 What is interesting about visitors in
the National Archives Museum taking on the role of researcher is that the experience of
following one’s own interests through engagement with the Touch Table is in no way an
unrestricted or independent experience. The Touch Table allows access to just over 300
digital documents and images, a fraction of the National Archives’ collection, and those
document represent a curated sampling of the archive meant to illustrate the history of six
very specific snapshots of American history. When visitors are “following their own
interests,” they really are only “researching” what interests them in the small collection of
artifacts that they are given access to. And yet, not a single visitor I spoke with
acknowledged or seemed to recognize the boundaries within which they were working.
The difference between visitors’ expectations of their role as a passive viewer, or as one
man explained, “just looking at a picture on a wall” and, as the same man said, being
“able to interact with it [a document] and pick what you wanted, what you choose to see
instead of everything at once” (NA Visitor) was so great for the visitors that I interviewed
that even within the structured network of digital content they were given access too, they
34
The habit of interaction of browsing is manifested in the Touch Table by software design that echoes
James Zappen’s (2013) claim that designers of web-based user experiences “need to acknowledge user
control and facilitate user freedom of choice and freedom of movement” (p. 61).
35
In the same vein, visitors view art museums as a place for creation and/or the viewing of art. Thus, when
visitors used the habit of interaction of browsing afforded by the Collection Wall, they did not view that as
“research,” but as akin to being able to view the museum’s collection in their own way, and immediately.
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saw their ability to research as actively participating in the work of the museum, an
experience that they see as not available to them in other museum spaces.
Visitors who take on the role of researcher, or the person with knowledge, demonstrate
their situational expertise speaking with authority on a topic. They also seem to see their
referred expertise and lived experience as directly applicable to this situational expertise.
For example, I had the following exchange with a couple (which I discussed briefly in
Chapter 3) after they had been at the Touch Table for several minutes:
Me:
Walk me through how you used this touch table. What
were some of the actions that you did?
Woman:
Well, our son is recently involved and living on an
American Indian reservation in North Dakota. He tells us
that there's quite a bit of resentment and animosity towards
the white man. Being a white man, he has experienced it
firsthand, and we went up there last year and experienced it
also. I guess we, as other Americans from Europe, never
realized how potent that animosity is. But again, it's like
anything else. With the one-on-one experience, somebody
tells you or he tells us how it is, then you realize, “Oh, it's
pretty bad.”
This couple’s responses, both initially and on further pressing, were centered around a
seamless mixture of what knowledge they had of Native American rights due to their
second-hand expertise from experiences told to them by their son, and bits of information
they had learned by browsing with the Touch Table. Not only was this couple’s first
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impulse when asked about how they interacted with the physical interface of the touch
table to focus on the content, not the interface itself, as discussed in Chapter 3, but it was
to speak with authority on the topic by combining what they already knew from
experience with what they had learned during browsing.
In another example, I had the following exchange with a woman who had spent
several minutes reading through “Rights of the Accused” and a short while through
“Equal Rights.” When I asked her if her attitude toward the museum had changed after
her interaction with the Touch Table, she replied:
Woman:
I think the attitude of learning more about the rights of Americans,
that pretty much is what elevated me, pretty much the attitude of
being grateful, and appreciative of freedom. I've always had that
attitude.
Me:
Okay.
Woman:
I just think this [Touch Table] is a much easier way. Particularly
with the digital technology to get younger people get more of their
attention. Get them more interested in it.
Me:
Mm-hmm.
Woman:
I'm still pretty young, and a lot of people I tell that I went to
segregated schools, they don't believe that. Because, I'm like 50
years old. And so, ‘you went to segregated schools!?’ ‘Yeah, I
did.’ So that's why I appreciate having the rights, the freedoms,
particularly the ones built about schools.
Me:
Okay.
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Woman:
Because I didn't get to go to a school that was integrated until I
was a little bit older. Me and my brothers. My uncle and my
cousin…I was 14. I was part of maybe, my brother was probably
ten, and my husband was probably ten, I was probably 8 years old.
And my girlfriend, she come from Delaware, they didn't integrate
schools until '78, she was 14.
Me:
Delaware?
Woman:
Yeah.
Me:
Oh, wow.
Woman:
Delaware.
Me:
Oh, I had no idea.
Woman:
Because it's considered a southern state, so...A lot of people don't
know that. That's why, when I see a lot of things like this about
freedom, rights…because I experienced them.
In yet another example, I had the following exchange with a woman who had spent close
to 10 minutes reading across different categories at the Touch Table:
Me:
What did you take away from your experience with this piece of
technology.
Woman:
Wow. I learned a lot more than I knew before. There were things
that were familiar and reinforced that history for me.
Me:
Lastly, briefly describe for me what you view your personal
attitude to be towards the material in this exhibit or this museum in
general?
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Woman:
My personal attitude? Actually, there is one thing that happened
was that I realized I never realized that we were a new country, and
so we kind of like, there were so many….We were creating a
country. We stole it from someone, but we decided that once we
got those guys out of the way, but we created a country. This is
kind of how we did it with lots of rules and regulations which I
guess they all do that. I just thought the United States would be a
little cooler about the whole thing. We came here punished, and we
left Europe because we were oppressed, or we were looking to
make money. There's all those money people like "yeah!", and then
there's other people that were very much into making sure that
your rights were being taken care of because that was their biggest
deal. Rights and money is really what this country is built on. We
just, the rights thing, that's where we're screwing it up really badly.
In all three of the interviews presented above, the visitors answered my questions, not
with technical responses to those questions, but instead with commentary that focused on
the content of what they had been “researching” combined with what they already knew
about that content from their own lives and experiences. These visitors spoke with
authority, putting information they had learned during their time at the Touch Table into
conversation with their own lived experience or expertise. These visitors, in a sense, were
looking through the interface, and, in these cases, through the digital documents and
images displayed, and instead were focusing on the ideas presented therein. This focusing
on ideas is, of course, a common occurrence in a historical museum; the artifacts bring to
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life ideas and histories and experiences of others, and we experience those ideas and
histories through the exhibits and displays. However, this phenomenon holds particular
weight in this case because it demonstrates a distinction between the institutional roles of
instructor and researcher. When visitors took up the role of instructor, they did so using
imperative, corrective, and demonstrative language and gesture, focusing on guiding
other visitors on use of the interfaces. The instructor, in this case, instructed visitors in
how to physically interact with the space of the museum, and how to access what the
museum was working to display. Visitors taking on the role of the researcher, by contrast,
performed that expertise by integrating the content displayed via the interfaces with their
lived experience.
The Visitor as Person Who Guides Interpretation (Critic)
Not all of visitor-to-visitor instruction or guidance focused on how to use the
touchscreen interfaces. Many visitors who took on the role of instructor also began to
lead others in response to, or critique of, the content displayed, the interfaces themselves,
and the museums they are housed in. As I saw visitors’ performance of situational
expertise in the role of the person who guides interpretation, I struggled with what
succinct title to classify this role as it took several distinct, but related, forms. After
describing these different forms I will explain why I am identifying this role as the role of
the critic.
At the CMA, I observed visitors taking on the role of art critic by making
judgment statements to those around them about work that other visitors had created with
the habit of interaction of creating with gesture with the “Make Your Mark” and “Make a
Face” activity at the Painting and Bodies Lenses respectively. Judgment statements
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visitors made ranged from simple reaction statements such as “creepy” to suggestions for
improvement such as, “try it again this way.”36 Some visitors made curatorial judgments
about content and classification of visitor-created tours37 either by praising the other
visitor’s decisions to include certain works of art in their tour or by critically expressing
dismay at the visitor’s choices. One woman, for example, on swiping through a visitorcreated tour (I think titled “Finally”; I was not close enough to read the text for certain)
turned to her friend and the 6 other visitors around her saying, “Interesting kind of tour.
Not sure what they were thinking about with this,” and continuing to describe to those
visitors why she thought certain artworks should not have been included in the tour. Still
other visitors focused their critiques on others’ reactions to the content displayed, making
judgments on what were and what were not appropriate ways for others to interpret
and/or respond to that content, guiding other visitors in their responses or negotiating
“appropriate” responses with them. At the NAM specifically, visitors’ interacting with
the Touch Table through the habit of interaction of sharing (“React and Share”) often
shared vocal judgments about how others should or should not react to the documents
displayed. Visitors taking on the role of critic and engaging others in sometimes heated
conversations about how one should respond to certain documents. For example, I
36
I will come back to this, but I think it’s important to note here that visitors made these statements and
suggestions to strangers as well as the people they came in with. However, I never observed visitors
discussing the actual art object with strangers, only their immediate parties.
37
In Chapters 1, 2, and 3, I discuss the ability of CMA visitors to use the ArtLens app in conjunction with
the habit of interaction of “favoriting” at the Collection Wall to curate their own tours, and the significance
of this within the museum space. However, while visitors did recognize the ability to engage in curation, a
key task of the expert in the museum, as a possibility and as a “cool” or “amazing” affordance, not a single
person of the 350 people that I observed or interviewed in the CMA actually created their own tour with the
ArtLens app. Many visitors obviously do, because it is possible for other visitors to follow them both from
the app and by swiping at the Collection Wall, but as it is not something I ever observed, I cannot speak
about it in detail in this iteration of this project. Visitors did however speak about, follow, and critique other
visitors’ tours.
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observed the following exchange between a group of visitors, two who had arrived
together and the third (visitor 3) who was unrelated to them and had been using the
Touch Table prior to their arrival
Visitor 1: “What should I put as a reaction? Eye-opening, shameful…”
Visitor 2: [Instructing] “You can put three.”
Visitor 1: “Disgusting?”
Visitor 3: [Having been looking over their shoulder] “No, it's not.”
Visitor 1: “Shocking…?”
Visitor 3: “Is it surprising?”
Visitor 1: “Yes.”
In this example, visitor 3 stopped his own reading to observe the actions of the visitors
who came to use the Touch Table after him. He then interrupted their discussion about
their own reactions to the document with a definitive statement of judgment about how
they should respond, “No, it’s not [disgusting].” This exchange is exemplary of dozens of
others, illustrating a common occurrence at the Touch Table. This kind of exchange, this
negotiated response between visitors about how one should or should not respond,
occurred in almost every instance in which I observed visitors interacting with the Touch
Table through the habit of interaction of sharing (with “React and Share”) unless the
visitor reacting was alone at the Table.38
38
In an interview, curator Alice Kamps mentioned that the original intention of the museum was to allow
visitors even more autonomy with their responses. She said, “We knew that many of the records would
elicit strong emotion. There's some really upsetting stuff in there. We wanted to give people an outlet to
express how they felt. Originally, I really hoped to allow people to comment, but that wasn't a direction that
our coach wanted to go because they were very concerned about people putting up offensive things. So this
is what we came up with as kind of a compromise.”
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In the examples shown above, visitors took on the role of someone seeking to
influence and/or guide others’ interpretations of both the interfaces and the content
displayed. Even though the manifestations of the role I observed visitors taking up, and
the kinds of judgments – whether aesthetic judgments about digital content, curatorial
judgments, or evaluations of others responses – visitors made varied, I see visitors in all
of these instances performing a kind of critique within the museum space. I call this role
that visitors take, the role of the person/expert seeking to guide interpretation, that of the
critic. Critics hold a unique relationship to museums, in that they exist both inside and,
necessarily, outside of, the institutional structure of the museum. In institutions such as
the CMA and the NAM, curators and historians often function in the role of the critic,
making and presenting institutionally-sanctioned judgments on the art objects or artifacts
in the museums’ collections, including judgments of aesthetic and cultural value. These
institutional critics, the experts, are the same Museum-capital-M, or “the man” as one
visitor put it, that visitors identify as traditionally monopolizing discussions of
interpretation or how one should and should not respond to works of art or artifacts. As
one visitor described his attitudes towards art museums prior to the use of the Touch
Technology, “Usually you just get these signs and pamphlets telling you what to think.”
For visitors to take on the role of the critic, both of the content of the museum’s
collection and of the museum itself, is not in itself a new phenomenon. Art critics’ work
often includes value judgments on an exhibit’s curation and the institution in addition to
the art object. Similarly, vernacular criticism, or the public critique of museums and their
collections by non-experts through non-traditional channels such as Yelp (Droitcour,
2014) and other social media sites, has received increased attention over the past few
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years as a destabilizing new form of aesthetic and social critique. However, that visitors
are taking on this role, and performing this role with the recognition and validation of the
other visitors within the museum spaces is significant.
The role of the expert as critic/curator within the museum is a highly rhetorical
one, as these figures, in determining both the content and arrangement of display and the
kinds of information the museum communicates to visitors about that display, shape the
potential possibilities for meaning-making that visitors will encounter. As Lawrence
Prelli (2006) stresses, displays “make manifest or appear the culmination of selective
processes that constrain the range of possible meanings available to those who encounter
them” (p. 2). Visitors in this study recognized the selective processes that constrain the
range of possible meanings of a display are as the realm of the critic/curator, the expert,
and the institution. As such, when they themselves took on those roles, they saw
themselves as participating in the cultural work of the museum. The Rhetorical Experience of Situated Expertise
Visitors who, through interaction with the touchscreen interfaces, took up the
situated roles of instructor, research, and critic, spoke about themselves as participating in
the work of the museum. They also exhibited or described a change in attitude or
identification owing to their experience of the roles they saw themselves as taking up. For
these visitors, a gap between the institution and themselves as the lay visitor was closed,
allowing them to act in role that they had previously viewed the purview of the museum.
As one visitor explained, “It just doesn't feel so elitist and intellectual now, this idea of
museums and archives, is that like temple of knowledge. It's very intimidating for people
to go into. This [the Touch Table] just sort of puts it all on a level playing field (NAM
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Visitor). For this visitor, the leveling of that playing field, or her position in that “temple
of knowledge” was not due to a simplification of the museum’s content or display, but
because of her ability, as a visitor to “research” via interaction with the Touch Table.
Thus her taking up the role of the researcher through the habit of interaction of browsing
changed both her view of herself in relationship to the museum and her attitude towards
the museum in general. In other words, this visitor’s experience had rhetorical effects,
persuading her to take on a role that resulted in a change of identification from that of a
person removed from the “elitist” work of the museum to one participating directly in
that work.
It is in visitors’ accounts of the shift in their relationship to the museum that the
effects of the rhetorical experiences visitors are experiencing in these museums can be
seen. As I discussed in Chapter 3, visitors spoke often about how the “interactive” (by
which they mean participatory) nature of the experiences they encountered was different
from what they had expected to experience in museums. Visitors identified a stark
difference between their ability to participate in the work of the museum through
creation, response, critique, research, etc. and their understandings of museums as
“elitist,” “boring,” “for a select few,” and obstructionist, not allowing them to approach
or interact with the art. Because of the experiences that visitors had, and specifically
through the roles they took up, visitors saw themselves as more included in the museum’s
work, as “having a conversation” with the institution, and as being able to “get closer to
the art.”
The rhetorical experiences that visitors are taking part in in these spaces are
manifested by their interaction with the touchscreen interfaces there. In “Interface as
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Exordium: The Rhetoric of Interactivity,” Teena Carnegie (2009) examines the interface
itself as a locus of relational activity that does rhetorical (persuasive) work. The interface,
for Carnegie, is crucially a point of dynamic interaction that “becomes central to building
and determining relationships” between user and interface, user and user, and user and
content (or entity managing said content). These relationships ultimately effect what one
is persuaded to do, and how, by that interaction (p. 165). Although Clark (2010) looks
more broadly at exhibition media and spaces rather than at particular interfaces in his
discussion of rhetorical experience, the perceived relationships that the exhibits at the
National Jazz Museum in Harlem create are the foundation for his understanding of
rhetorical experience as “civic,” or immersive and public, in nature (p. 129). In this way,
relationships are key to understanding the rhetorical experience of interactivity with an
interface, and how that experience might position the user/visitor within the larger civic
climate in which they participate.
Situational expertise and roles that visitors take up in interaction with these
touchscreen interfaces counter the traditional assumption that one must attain an ideal
level of expertise or knowledge in order to instruct other visitors, make value judgments
about a particular piece, or publicly question another visitor’s response to items in the
museum’s collection. The “leveling of the playing field” so to speak that visitors are
responding to in their experience of these roles is often reified by the content and display
of the interfaces themselves. For example, the hyperlinked browsing afforded by the
Collection Wall makes no indication of a hierarchy of possible tour experiences that one
may browse through; “Visitor Created Tour” and “Tour” are represented the same way
visually and afford the same habits of interaction of swiping and browsing. This equality
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of participation capabilities implies that the experience of following a tour created by a
visitor is just as important as that of following one compiled by the museum. Likewise,
this participatory experience communicates to visitors that they, too, have the opportunity
to interpret the collection through the act of putting together, naming, and sharing their
own tour alongside those created by professional curators. Similarly, when a visitor saves
her work done in “Remix Picasso,” it is saved with the logo of the CMA, suggesting that
the institution recognizes the value of that work by “claiming” it as part of their
collection. In other words, the roles that visitors take up through interaction with these
touchscreen interfaces are rhetorical in that they persuade the visitor to identify, not as
merely a lay spectator of a private collection, but as an active, and valid, participant in the
cultural work of the institution.
The implications of this relational shift from visitor-as-spectator to visitor-as-cocurator/co-producer are salient, and their impact on the futures of both the museum and
of emerging technologies in spaces of exhibition and display deserves further
investigation by rhetoricians. As I have shown here, the rhetorical experiences that are
driving this relational shift are made possible by the habits of interaction that visitors
perceive as afforded by these interfaces. As I have also shown in Chapter 3, a visitor’s
ability to perceive a habit of interaction as being afforded by any of these interfaces is
determined largely by that visitor’s previously existing digital literacies. Thus, not all
visitors have equal access to the rhetorical experiences afforded here.
In addition to disparities in digital literacies resulting in an inequity of rhetorical
experiences available to visitors, which I will discuss further in Chapter 6, visitors also,
and very clearly, identified a specific divide in who did and did not have access to the
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experiences described here. You may note, that all of the examples I have given in this
chapter are examples of adults interacting with the touchscreen technology. That is not
because children did not take on these roles – in fact, many children took on the roles of
instructor and critic specifically – but rather because visitors recognition of the validity of
those roles and the identity shift from visitor-as-spectator to visitor-as-co-producer only
occurred in their discussions of adults’ use of the technology. In contrast, when children
were involved, the interfaces were seen as “fun,” as “games,” as “cool,” and great for
kids. The visitors who recognized their ability to take on the previously institutional roles
of researcher or critic were “surprised” by such “adult technology.” In multiple passes of
coding, the distinction visitors made between the experiences of kids in museums versus
those of adults were salient, and suggestive of an attitude that only visitors who
participate the in “adult” activities afforded by these interfaces are doing real work within
the museum. In Chapter 5, I will explore the distinction visitors see between experiences
for adults and children in museums, how it is primarily in the “serious,” “adult” activities
that the disappearance of the interface is taking place, and discuss what questions these
findings raise, not only about visitors’ perceptions of the artwork and the historical
artifact, but also about their understanding of the work of the museum and who has
access to participate in it.
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Chapter 5
I’ll do Research, but Play is for Kids:
Visitor Participation in the Work of the Museum
On my last day of data collection at the National Archives Museum, I observed a
young girl approach the Touch Table and begin to read the image of a document that was
open at the station closest to her. The girl was followed by her grandmother, who, reading
over the girl’s shoulder, exclaimed, “Ooooo, what’s this?” The grandmother watched the
young girl briefly, then left the Table and walked around the perimeter of the gallery
space looking at the documents encased and displayed on the wall. After several minutes,
the woman rejoined her granddaughter, this time moving from watching the young girl to
interacting with the Table at her own station. She spent about ten minutes navigating to
and reading events in several different categories of rights, and eventually shared a
reaction to one of the documents. Her granddaughter, meanwhile, continued to navigate
and read on her own.
When they began to leave the area, I approached the woman asking if she would
be interested in participating in my study as an interviewee. As we spoke, the young girl
went back to interacting with the Table and was not involved in our conversation. When I
asked the woman if her experience using the Touch Table differed from the expectations
she had of the museum and the gallery space before she came in, she answered:
I didn't know that this [the Touch Table] was in here. I knew there would
be some things for kids, so this was really…in fact, I kind of went off and
did the wall stuff thinking that this was more like a kid thing, and then she
[granddaughter] brought me over and she was showing me. My
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expectation was…I didn't expect an adult touch screen thing (NAM
Visitor).
This particular woman did not elaborate on what, specifically, about the Touch Table
inspired her to identify it as “adult.” Instead, she spent the next few minutes explaining to
me the origins of the United States and how “We were creating a country. We stole it
from some one, but we decided that once we got those guys out of the way…but we
created a country.” Her mention, however, of the Touch Table being “adult,” echoes
sentiments expressed by several other visitors at both sites. One elderly couple at the
Cleveland Museum of Art expressed surprise that the Collection Wall and Lenses, which
they assumed “would be interesting for kids,” were really interesting for them as adults;
many others expressed this view as well.
Visitors’ comments associating the touchscreens in these exhibition spaces as
being “for kids” are reflective of a popular social belief that children and young adults
have a different relationship to technology than those older than them, which I will
discuss in more detail later in this chapter. Despite the fact that the visitors who interacted
with the touchscreen interfaces were themselves, for the most part, very familiar with
technology, visitors still continued to express an assumption that the touchscreen
technology in these spaces was intended primarily for use by children. Upon further
analysis, I began to realize that the distinction they were making, while on a surface level
touched on the somewhat fraught cultural assumption that kids are just better with
technology, was actually about something much more complicated than that. The
distinction visitors made between technology intended for kids and the “adult
touchscreens” they found in these spaces was a distinction between experiences, not
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between interfaces themselves. For many museum visitors, ludic, or playful, experiences
stand in contrast to the more “serious” tasks of the museum, such as research, education,
and conservation. In other words, while visitors of all ages interact with the touchscreen
interfaces with the same habits of interaction, museum visitors view “fun” and “games”
as being “for kids” and the more “serious” (NAM Visitor) activities of research, creation,
and pursuing one’s own interests as “adult.”
Visitors’ assumptions that playful experiences in museums are specifically geared
towards children arise out of familiarity with contemporary museums’ approaches to
young audiences (Monk, 2013; Parish, 2010; Shaffer, 2015; Waterfall and Grusin, 1989)
and out of a popular social approach to play, fun, and ludic spaces that prioritizes
children’s experiences of play over adults’ (Blatner and Blatner, 1997; Grenier, 2010;
Huizinga, 1950; Kolb and Kolb, 2010; Monk, 2013; Shaffer, 2015). Visitors’
assumptions are also grounded in the cultural narrative that contrasts “digital natives”
with “digital immigrants” (Prensky, 2001). The biases with which visitors view these
experiences directly affect the rhetorical nature of those experiences. For example,
visitors make a distinction between experiences that are “fun” and those that are “work.”
It is only in the more “serious” experiences of research, creation, and critical response
that the erasure of the interface and the physicalization of the digital image occurs in
visitor accounts, and in which a change in attitude and identity occurs in which visitors
see themselves as contributing to the cultural work of the museum.
A visitor’s prior digital literacies affect what affordances they see the touchscreen
interfaces as making available, which in turn affects that visitor’s participation in
rhetorical experiences through interaction with those interfaces. What is more, I
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discussed the traditionally institutional roles of instructor, researcher, and critic that
visitors take up through interaction with the touchscreen interfaces and through habits of
interaction. The rhetorical experiences of participating in these roles persuade visitors to
see themselves as participating in the work of the museum. In this chapter, I show that
rhetorical experiences are shaped not just by participation in a particular experience or
role, but by pre-existing biases one holds prior to that experience. I will do this by
showing how three particular biases that underlie visitors’ approaches to the touchscreen
interfaces studied affect their perception of and response to the experiences made
available by those interfaces. These biases are 1) that children have a more natural
connection to emerging technology than adults, 2) that play and work are diametrically
opposed concepts, and 3) that digitally mediated experiences in museums are usually
directed towards children (being ludic rather than serious). Through an in-depth
examination of Kenneth Burke’s discussion of persuasion and identification, I show that
the ability of museum visitors to identify themselves as participating in the cultural work
of the museum relies not only on their previously existing digital literacies and on their
perception of the affordances of the touchscreen interfaces, but also on the prior attitudes
they hold and value judgments they make about the kinds of activities that they can and
do take part in with those interfaces. The three biases I examine in this chapter function
as topoi, or commonplaces, which are previously held beliefs that shape how an audience
is able to be persuaded in a particular rhetorical situation. These topoi frame visitors’
experiences with the touchscreen interfaces, thus shaping the identifications that visitors
take up through their use. While I use these three biases listed above as a focused
example of these value judgments and their effect on visitors’ rhetorical experiences, this
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finding also raises salient questions about visitors’ relationship to the work of the
museum and who is and is not afforded access to participation in it.
Kenneth Burke, Identification, and Rhetoric
Gregory Clark, in his essay, “Rhetorical Experience and the National Jazz
Museum,” argues that experiences – particularly the aesthetic experiences composed by
various spaces and media of exhibition and display – can and should be approached as
objects of rhetorical study. Clark grounds his theory largely in the work of Kenneth
Burke (1969), who, citing Cicero, Aristotle, and Quintilian, defines rhetoric as “the art of
persuasion, or a study of the means of persuasion available for any given situation” (p.
46). Burke elaborates on the art of persuasion by claiming that the “basic function of
rhetoric” is “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in
other human agents” (p. 41). The ability of rhetoric to form attitudes, or deeply held
thoughts and convictions, on the part of an audience is key to Clark’s discussion of
rhetorical experience, particularly in rhetoric’s power to motivate an audience to
identification, or as Clark (2010) explains, “a set of attitudes held in common with
others” (p. 118).
Because Burke’s discussion of identification is so central to Clark’s theory of
rhetorical experience, I want to unpack it further here. Burke posits that the attitudes or
actions that an audience is persuaded to take up in a rhetorical situation result in that
audience “identifying” with a certain set of beliefs, symbols, and/or commonly held
attitudes. Another way of saying this is that an effect of rhetoric is that the audience sees
themselves as “belonging” (p. 28) to a particular way of thought or category of agents.
Identification is not the same as persuasion; it occurs whether or not an audience is
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persuaded by the message being communicated. This means that even if an audience fails
to be persuaded to take up a particular attitude that is being promoted by a message, they
may still identify with, or see themselves as belonging to, a certain set of attitudes.
Identification with one set of attitudes necessitates the identification against another set;
people who see themselves as belonging in a certain category view that category in terms
of difference from other categories. Thus, Burke says, the power for rhetoric to result in
identification hinges on an understanding of difference and division. In fact, Burke says,
“Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division.
Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there
would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity” (p. 22). Division, then is
necessary for effective identification, for rhetoric to form attitudes and induce action.
While Burke does not put forth a theory of rhetorical experience as Clark later
does, he does acknowledge that the actions an audience is persuaded to take up directly
affect that audience’s identifications. He says, “We are clearly in the region of rhetoric
when considering the identifications whereby a specialized activity makes one a
particular participant in some social or economic class” (p. 27-28). In other words, Burke
claims, the effect of participating in certain activities that one sees as situating oneself in
some category is ultimately identification with that category. We can see this in effect by
observing visitors who participated in the types of activities that they viewed as generally
belonging to the purview of the institution, such as instruction, research, and critique, in
turn identified with the institution, viewing themselves as active participants in the work
of the museum.
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In museum visitors’ identifications, and the actions and attitudes that informed
those identifications, we can see the corollaries to the identifications they are making as
well, in keeping with Burke’s claim that identification and division are inseparable.
Visitors who saw themselves as participating in the work of the museum identified as
such largely based on prior notions of the museum being “elitist,” exclusionary, and
intimidating.39 In contrast, by using the touchscreen interfaces to participate in the
activities of instruction, research, creation, and critique, visitors saw themselves as being,
as one visitors said, “on a more level playing field” (NAM Visitor) with the institution,
or, as another visitor said, “having a role” (NAM Visitor) in the work of the museum.
Another one of the distinctions that underlie visitors’ identifications as participants in the
work of the museum is the distinction visitors make between the kinds of activities
available to them. Visitors identified some activities, namely “games,” as being “for
kids,” and other activities as being “adult.” It is in a large part visitors’ designation as
certain activities as “adult” within these museum spaces that contributes to their
identification with the museum through participation in those activities.
In Burke’s (1969) discussion of just how identification manifests in rhetorical
situations he points to Aristotle’s “commonplaces” or “topics,” which Burke calls a
“quick survey of ‘opinion’” (p. 56). Describing Aristotle’s commonplace topics (or
koinoi topoi), 40 Burke says:
39
Hershey and Branch (2011), claim that Burke’s understanding of rhetoric has useful implications for the
study of marketing, saying that his rhetoric and notions of identification help us understand “the rich
context of how marketer-controlled activities might be used to play upon the a priori experiences and
expectations of the consumer, in order to heighten the efficacy of these activities” (p. 180). It is exactly this
principle that I am discussing here, the “a priori experiences and expectations” of the museum visitor.
40
Aristotle’s definition of topoi is murky, and has been debated by scholars since then. Edward Corbett
(1986) claims for Aristotle “and his contemporaries, the topoi were devices enabling the speaker to find
those arguments that would be most persuasive in a given situation” (p. 45). This idea evolved over the
years in one, arising from Cicero that koinoi topoi, or loci commonplaces, are “are finished products that
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Aristotle reviews the purposes, acts, things, conditions, states of mind,
personal characteristics, and the like, which people consider promising or
formidable, good or evil, useful or dangerous, admirable or loathsome, and
so on. All these opinions or assumptions (perhaps today they would be
treated under the head of “attitudes” or “values”) are catalogued as
available means of persuasion (p. 56).
In other words, Burke equates Aristotle’s topoi with previously existing attitudes
(assumptions, biases, values, and, I would add, designations of difference) held by an
audience that influence that audience’s ability to be persuaded towards action and
identification.
To show how the existing attitudes and biases that visitors hold can result in
visitors’ identifications as participants within the museum in action, I will use the
following example. One visitor to the National Archives Museum, who was familiar both
with museums and with digital exhibition displays in general, when asked whether her
attitude towards the museum had changed after interacting with the Touch Table, said,
“usually, a lot of the things that are supposed to be interactive, are more geared towards
children. So if you don't have children, which we don't, it can seem a bit juvenile when
you're trying to play with stuff.” In her response we can see three primary assumptions
and biases that informed this visitor’s attitude, namely, 1) that museums will have
interactive (meaning participatory) displays, 2) when they do, those displays are usually
integrate logical argument, emotional appeal, and style into a single structure” (p. 448), which Michael Leff
(1996) in his claim that the topoi are more fluid and complex then finished arguments. As Carolyn Miller
(2000) says, “Since Aristotle, topics have been conceived alternatively as pigeonholes for locating already
existing ideas and as generative patterns of thoughts or methods of analysis” (p. 132). For the purposes of
my argument here, I am going to focus on Burke’s interpretation of the topics, which coincides is most
similar to Corbett’s interpretation of Aristotle and sees the topoi as already existing ideas that can be used
to help persuade an audience.
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geared towards children and 3) that the “juvenile” aspects of the participatory displays in
museums that are directed towards children are connected to a preexisting bias about the
nature of “play.” This visitor went on to say, “and then you would like a more adult
experience, you usually can't find that,” expressing excitement that the Touch Table
provided a more adult experience. She then equated that adult experience with the work
of the museum saying “you actually do get more of an archive feeling, like you're
researching, when you're actually going through like that. Because you can choose what
you're interested in and what you're looking for.” In her response, this visitor made a
distinction between the juvenile experience of “play” and the adult experience of
“research.” Here we see what Burke was identifying as the importance of difference in
identification. For this visitor, it was not just the experience of researching that persuaded
her to see herself as participating in the work of the museum, but the fact that that
experience was different from experiences normally provided for children. Research was
adult in part because it was not play.
Kenneth Burke’s discussion of identification and rhetoric thus gives us a way to
examine and understand what is occurring in rhetorical experiences with touchscreen
interfaces in museums. In what follows, I will examine three primary existing biases
(functioning as commonplace topics) that shape visitor’s rhetorical experiences with
these interfaces, namely the beliefs that 1) children have a more natural connection to
emerging technology than adults, that 2) play and work are opposing concepts, and that
3) digitally mediated experiences in museums are usually directed towards children
(being ludic rather than productive). I will first situate these three biases that visitors have
within larger conversations about young audiences in museums and social attitudes
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towards play. I will then show how these biases shape visitors perceptions of the
experiences they are afforded access to through interaction with these touchscreen
interfaces, and how their perceptions, in turn, affect the identifications they make.
Bias 1: Children Have a More Natural Connection to Emerging Technology Than
Adults
In both sites of study, visitors often expressed the importance of the touchscreen
technology for young visitors, saying things such as, “The screens are good for children”
(CMA Visitor) and “That’s great for kids” (CMA Visitor). Visitors gave several
explanations for why they viewed the touchscreens as beneficial for young audiences. For
one, visitors seemed to believe that digital technology can hold children’s attention better
than traditional displays and interpretive technologies. One woman, comparing the Touch
Table in the National Archives museum to the documents displayed in cases on the wall
said, “I just think this [the Table] is a much easier way [to visit the museum]. Particularly
with the digital technology to get younger people get more of their attention, get them
more interested in it” (NAM Visitor). Another woman at the Cleveland Museum of Art
said, “I think it [the Collection Wall] will involve kids more. I think the kids that walk
through will like it a lot more instead of just standing in front of a picture” (CMA
Visitor). Additionally, visitors expressed a view that digital technologies are better suited
to children’s education than linear technologies are. As one visitor claimed, “I do think
that it [Gallery One] will get some more motivation to children to learn about art and
have fun with it” (CMA Visitor). Yet another responded, “Well, I just thought they were
excellent learning tools for young people, that didn't have much of an idea about art”
(CMA Visitor).
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All of these explanations that visitors presented for why they see the touchscreen
interfaces as particularly beneficial for children are connected to an underlying notion
that young visitors are automatically more drawn to and more adept at using technology
than their older counterparts. The idea, coined by education consultant Marc Prensky
(2001), that young people are “digital natives” while adults are “digital immigrants”
underlies a popular attitude concerning the primary audiences of emerging technologies.
A presumed division between those who are “born digital” (Palfrey and Gasser, 2008)
and those who are not has circulated for close to two decades now, and functions
rhetorically in a number of arenas to position various groups’ differences in access to
digital literacies as primarily a difference in age (Prensky, 2001; Palfrey and Gasser,
2008; Boyd, 2014).41
Danah Boyd (2014) points out that the tendency for one generation both to be
suspicious of new technological advancements and to see their rise and adoption as the
realm of a younger generation is not new. Instead, she says, “Any new technology that
captures widespread attention is likely to provoke serious hand wringing, if not fullblown panic” (p. 14), followed by concern about how children and teens will take up
emerging technologies. Both Prenksy’s (2001) “Digital Natives: Digital Immigrants” and
Palfrey and Gasser’s (2008) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital
Natives present digital natives as approaching the world, seeking and absorbing
41
Now, in 2017, however, nearly 20 years after Prensky identified the unique educational needs of a
generation of children who were born and raised with technology, that age gap has closed quite a bit.
Today’s digital natives of 2001 are themselves adults. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, when pressed, nearly
all visitors interviewed attributed past experience with touchscreens as one of the ways they know how to
interact with the touchscreens studied.
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information, communicating, and learning fundamentally differently from the lessdigitally-flush generations before them.
There is truth to Prensky’s concept of the digital native. Indeed, much of the field
of new literacy studies, including discussions of convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006) and
digital literacies, focuses on how digital technologies, Web 2.0, social media, and other
recent digital advancements affect how users, and young people in particular, make
meaning through digital experiences (Knobel and Lankshear, 2009). At the same time,
however, the division between the terms “digital native” vs. “digital immigrant” is
problematic and does not take into account the complex collection of literacies that one
must develop to engage in different digitally mediated experiences. As Danah Boyd
(2014) says of the term “digital native,” “Not only is it fraught, but it obscures the uneven
distribution of technological skills and media literacy across the youth population,
presenting an inaccurate portrait of young people as uniformly prepared for the digital era
and ignoring the assumed level of privilege required to be ‘native’” (p. 179-180). In other
words, the assumption that young people are digital natives is problematic in that it sets
up a reductive difference based on age but fails to account for the fact that access to
technology and the development of digital literacies is primarily not an issue of age, but
of access. I will discuss this tension further in the conclusion of this dissertation.
Despite the problematic nature of the term digital native, the underlying principle
it sets up, that young people are more proficient with and more attracted to technology
than their adult counterparts, is still a pervasive attitude that can be seen in visitors’
assumptions about technology in museums and young audiences. One mother lauded the
effectiveness of the Collection Wall and Lenses in Gallery One by pointing out that the
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presence of the touchscreens lessened any anxiety she might have had both about her
daughter’s desire to touch the art and the museum being able to keep her daughter’s
attention. She said:
We didn't really have to [crosstalk – possibly “worry”] with the screens,
they're so far from the actual piece of art, that she has no reason ... it’s the
first thing that is going to drawn in, as a child. She's going to go to ... even
in there [Lenses], I noticed it's more her speed. Even out there [Collection
Wall], as a child she is going to go to the screen before she is going go see
what's on the wall. Which I think is amazing. It's good for them [Lenses]
to be there (CMA Visitor).
This visitor did not elaborate on why her daughter would be drawn first to “the screen”
rather than the art on the wall, but from her answer we can see that her statement that her
daughter would notice and approach the screen first was not a statement about her
daughter specifically. She says twice in the answer above that “as a child” her daughter
would be more interested in the screen, implying an opinion that children are
automatically drawn to technology over more traditional displays.
The biases visitors exhibit that see children as more attracted to digital technology
than traditional exhibition and display practices, as exemplified by the visitor above, and
as having a closer connection with technology than adults do are connected to their biases
about the nature of the experiences afforded by technology. Prensky (2001) offers this
description of the needs and expectations of young people who have grown up with
constant access to technology:
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Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to
parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text
rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They
function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and
frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work (p. 2).
The distinction Prensky makes here between games and work originates with the belief,
as I explained, that digital natives both take in and communicate information
fundamentally differently from digital immigrants. At the same time, the distinction that
Prensky makes between “games and ‘serious’ work” echoes the second of three common
biases I identified that shape visitors’ rhetorical experiences with the touchscreen
interfaces, namely that young people prefer games, and that games and work are
opposing experiences.
Bias 2: Play and Work Are Opposing Concepts
In visitors’ discussions about the touchscreen interfaces studied, they often make
a clear distinction between fun and function. In the Cleveland Museum of Art, visitors
described or identified the activities they participated in through interaction with the
lenses as “games” eleven different times and as “play” ten times. Between both sites of
study, visitors mentioned that they viewed either the interfaces or their experience with
them as “fun” fourteen different times. Six visitors went a step further, saying that the
touchscreen interfaces were “more fun” than their previous experiences with traditional
interpretive technologies. At the same time, most of the instances in which visitors
described the interfaces as “fun” or referred to “games” and “play” were connected to
their discussion of the importance of the technology for children. The two instances in
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which adults identified their own experiences as “fun” were in connection with the
interactive (meaning participatory, as I discussed in Chapter 3) experience afforded by
the interfaces. However, when visitors spoke about their own experiences with the
interfaces they described the interfaces as “interesting” and “helpful” and highlighted the
experience or the role they say themselves as able to participate in through interaction
with them, such as “researcher.”
The opposition seen in visitors’ responses between play and work was not
relegated to the opinions of museum visitors specifically. Scholars who study play,
games, and their function in society have long addressed “our culture’s traditional way of
viewing play and work as separate activities that are polar opposites” (Bowman, 1987, p.
61). In his seminal work on play, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture,
Johan Huizinga (1950) addressed a common cultural bias towards play, saying, “To our
way of thinking, play is the direct opposite of seriousness” (p. 5). He goes on to challenge
this bias, explaining that play can be incredibly serious, and that “all play has its rules”
(p. 11). Indeed, a game, at its heart, is a localized instance of, as Ellington et. al. (1998)
say, “overt competition” (p. 1) with a set of rules designed to govern the interactions,
choices and risks players may take.42 These rules support potential results and rewards,
while the process of working toward those goals can inculcate valuable skills and habits
42
Many visitors referred to some of the activities made available by the Lenses at the CMA as games,
particularly those activities that had a “win factor” or demonstrated the possibility for competition. One
example of this are “Strike a Pose” on the Bodies Lens which asks visitors to use their bodies to match the
pose of a sculpture displayed on the screen and allows them to complete this task to a certain percentage.
Visitors who were frustrated at getting a “lower” percentage repeated the activity several times. Another
example is “Global Influences” at the How Are Art and Trade Connected Lens; this activity is a virtual
version of the classic Memory game which asks visitors to guess at matches of images that are revealed
upon selection. Visitors did not, however, ever use the word “game” or its cognates to refer to the
Collection Wall or the Touch Table. They did, however, use the word “play” when referring to the Wall,
but not the Table.
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and even enable players to form significant relationships with others. Yet despite the
ordered structure of play and games, they are still seen as “child’s play” both colloquially
and in scholarship (Piaget, 1962; Henderson and Atencio, 2007, or as Henderson and
Atencio call play, “children’s work” (p. 246).
The distinctions between the “children’s work” of play and serious, adult work,
are rooted in two sets of binaries, namely reality vs. imagination (Huizinga, 1950) and
seriousness vs. fun (Henderson and Atencio, 2007). Much work on play concludes that,
as Shaffer (2015) says, “Play is a means by which children make sense of their world and
affords opportunities for physical, cognitive, and social development while setting the
stage for collaboration and problem-solving” (p. 59). More recently, scholars are
examining the importance of playful experiences in adult learning and adults’ lives, but
what work there is on adults and play often begins at the point childhood (Blatner and
Blatner, 1997; Grenier, 2010; Parrish, 2010). As Grenier (2010) says, “Despite the
importance of games and play in fostering adult learning, this area is largely absent from
adult education discourse” (p. 82). What we see happening, then, is that the cultural
biases that visitors hold, namely that play and work are distinct practices, opposed to one
another, and that play is largely the domain of children and adult, is beginning to be
challenged by scholarship on play, but only cursorily due to the pervasiveness of the bias.
Sometimes the distinction between play and work was subtle in visitor responses.
An example of this subtle distinction can be seen in the following exchange:
Me:
Okay, did you use all of them [touchscreens]?
Visitor #1:
No.
Visitor #2:
Most of them.
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Me:
Did you do this (Collection Wall)?
Visitor #2:
No.
Visitor #1:
I was looking at it earlier. Saw some girl playing with it.
Me:
Okay. Can you walk me through a little bit what you did with
them? What were certain actions, or motions, if you can remember
sort of like specifics?
Visitor #2:
We did poses and then making faces.
Me:
Okay.
Visitor #2:
He made stories.
Visitor #1:
He made a painting over here.
In this exchange, visitor #1, a young man in his mid-20s, stated that he did not
interact with the Collection Wall. Instead, he looked at it but “saw some girl playing with
it.” As he said this, he shook his head, with a slight grimace of the face and shrugged his
shoulders, brushing the idea off as unimportant. Implied in his response was the sense
that it was less important to use than the others because he saw a young girl, a child,
“playing” with it. In contrast, he and his friends “made” things; they engaged in acts of
creation, of newness, of work. Like these visitors, many not only saw a difference
between fun and function, play and “helpfulness,” or play and “work” (such as research),
they also largely associated play with kids and work, or creation, research, or “taking a
role” (NAM Visitor) in the museum, with adults.
Bias 3: Digitally Mediated Experiences in Museums Are Usually Directed Towards
Children
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Many visitors’ comments echoed either an explicit or implicit understanding that
in museums, as one visitor articulated, “a lot of the things that are supposed to be
interactive are more geared towards children” (NAM Visitor). Even though most of the
visitors I interviewed were first-time visitors to the museums I interviewed them in, all of
them had previously visited a museum and had some idea of what to expect. For instance,
one mother, describing anticipating her visit to the CMA with her daughter said, “I was
hopeful that was going to be an area where she [daughter] could [touch stuff], mainly
because, for her…I was like ‘Oh I can't wait until we go and I hope they have something
hands-on’” (CMA Visitor). Like this visitor, others saw experiences for children in the
museum as responding to children’s desire to physically handle objects with statements
such as, “Especially for kids, I think, kids always want to touch” (CMA Visitor). Visitor
responses suggest that visitors both expect the museum to have some kind of space or
experience tailored to young audiences, and also that they expect those experiences to
include technology and/or the ability to touch. Many visitors like them immediately
associated technology in museums with being for or more applicable to children. While
their assumption is rooted in the two biases I have already discussed, it also stems from a
familiarity with museums in general, how museums use technology, and how museums
market (because, as I discussed in Chapter 2, the implementation of “cool” new
technology is largely tied to visitor attraction and retention) to young audiences.43
43
At the time of data collection for this project, the Cleveland Museum of Art had, adjacent to but
separated from Gallery One proper, a smaller room with a couple additional touchscreen interfaces, and
some non-digital, tactile learning experiences set up such as felt-board easels with felt shapes that children
could arrange in different designs, and a space for building blocks where children could use the blocks to
build their own structures. This space, called Studio Play, was specifically designed for families with young
children, even to the point of including child-sized furniture. I did not include this space in my observations
or interviews, in part because during data collection it was closed and renovated by the museum. What was
Studio Play is now an extension of Gallery One. While Studio Play is no more, it shows how pervasive the
cultural narrative is that play is for kids, as the museum set up a separate space, identified as a space for
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It was not until the turn of the twentieth century that museums began to make
strides towards recognizing and addressing young audiences. At first, the idea of a
museum space welcoming young audiences was primarily relegated to museums
dedicated specifically to children. The Brooklyn’s Children’s Museum opened in 1899,
giving children access to a targeted collection and opportunities for touch and tactile
learning. Shortly thereafter, the Smithsonian Institution opened The Children’s Room.
The Children’s Room, an annex designed for young audiences with the goal of promoting
“inspiration, rather than instruction” (Shaffer, 2015, p. 31), pioneered museums’
inclusion of playful experiences tailored to young visitors.
These early examples sought to reach children with separate spaces and with
designated collections and activities, delineating boundaries between the museum proper
and spaces created for young audiences. Library and museum director John Dana (1917)
challenged this, accusing museums of being “gloomy,” monolithic institutions that often
failed to make themselves relevant to the very public whose patronage they relied on to
keep them open. Dana challenged museums to rethink the very idea of what a museum is
and how it communicates with its visitors, writing:
Museums of the future will not only teach at home, they will travel abroad
through their photographs, their textbooks, and their periodicals. Books,
leaflets, and journals – which will assist and supplement the work of
teachers and will accompany, explain, and amplify the exhibits which art
museums will send out – all help to make museum expenditures seem
worthwhile (p. 30).
play, tailored it for children and positioned it as different from and separate from the experience offered by
Gallery One.
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Dana’s vision of a global-reaching museum emphasized the partnership that museums
can hold with “teachers” in the education of young audiences both in and outside of
museum walls. In 1942, Theodore Low also stressed that museums needed to reexamine
their approach to education, stressing the role they should play in education “in all its
varied aspects from the most scholarly research, to the simple arousing of curiosity” (p.
21). Low, too, included young audiences in his visions for the museums of the future.
Also during this formative time in museum history, museums’ understanding of who their
young audiences were evolved as child labor laws changed and as the “image of
childhood was no longer associated solely with the first six or seven years of life, but
extended well beyond the teen years” (Shaffer, 2015, p. 33).
Despite the developments museums underwent in the twentieth century, however,
it was not until the last few decades that a substantial body of research has been dedicated
to examining the relationship between museums and their young audiences. Work that
has been done in this vein has ranged from tutorials for both parents and museum
professionals wishing to maximize children’s museum experiences (Waterfall and
Grusin, 1989) to research on the important connections between play, interaction, early
education, and museums (Henderson and Atencio, 2007; Fasoli, 2014; Shaffer, 2015).
The increased attention given to young audiences and early learning by museums and
museums studies (Shaffer, pg. 18) coincides with discussions about touch and object
handling in museums. Many agree that hands-on, participatory experiences are important
in museums. At the same time, these discussions tend to focus on the experiences of
young audiences (Henderson and Atencio, 2007) and seek to address the tensions that
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arise between children’s desire for tactile experiences and the conservational work of the
museum.
As discussed previously throughout this dissertation, visitors often expressed an
initial hesitation to touch the touchscreen interfaces in these gallery spaces due to a
cultural understanding of how one should behave in museums. The visitors I observed
and spoke with who expressed or displayed this hesitation were largely adults who were
accompanying young visitors. The tension between the underlying assumption that
children will automatically want to touch objects in the museum and the taboo of touch in
the museum is such that is underlies much of the work done in museums studies on the
experiences of young audiences. As Shaffer (2015) says:
For many adults, an art museum visit is the supreme test of a child’s
behavior. These adults are constantly worried that the accompanying child
will touch or harm valuable art objects or embarrass the family in some
way with inappropriate behavior (p. 54).
Many visitors’ excitement about the presence of the touchscreens in the exhibition spaces
was related to an association of the exhibition technology as somehow responding
directly to this tension. As one visitor said, “So I feel like something like this would
actually be more fun for him [nephew] because we can read the documents with him and
to him, but he can actually do the touching” (NAM Visitor). We can see underlying this
visitors’ response hints of all three of the biases that I have discussed here, namely, that
as a child her nephew would be more attentive to the technology, that there is an element
of play, of fun, associated with his experience as a child, and that the experience that
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technology offers is somehow intended for him as a child and satisfies the need to touch
that he has as a young visitor.
Identification and Rhetorical Experience
Museum visitors approach both the touchscreen interfaces studied and the
museum spaces they are housed in with a number of pre-existing biases, opinions, and
beliefs about museums in general, the role of the museum, and their place as a visitor in
it. Throughout this dissertation I have identified many of those opinions. Many visitors
initially see museums as “elitist,” “boring,” or “tedious.” Some see art as being “for a
select few” or see the archive as an inaccessible “temple of knowledge.” Some are
familiar with art or history from their own education and interests, others are much less
familiar with the content of the museums’ collections. All of visitors’ existing attitudes
towards museums and their role in those museums shape the experiences they have with
the touchscreen interfaces. For example, as I have shown in Chapter 4, a visitor’s opinion
that museums are usually elitist “temples of knowledge” directly affected her reaction to
the participatory experiences she engaged in through interaction with the Touch Table.
Because she saw museums as usually precluding her ability to follow her own interests,
she saw the “research” aspect of the Touch Table as allowing her to participate in the
work of the museum. As another example, a group of young adults at the CMA who
normally viewed art and art museums as “boring,” “elitist” and “for a select few” found
those opinions through participation in activities such as “Make Your Mark” on the
painting lens. They saw themselves as being able to create new work and touch the
existing work in the museum, which was a totally different experience from the one they
had expected. Indeed, all of museum visitors’ previously existing attitudes towards the
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museum will affect any change in attitude and identification that occurs through the
rhetorical experiences they participate in.
In this chapter, I have analyzed three commonly held biases that I saw as shaping
visitors’ rhetorical experiences with the touchscreen interfaces at these sites of study.
These three biases are: 1) that children have a more natural connection to emerging
technology than adults, 2) that play and work are diametrically opposed concepts, and 3)
that digitally mediated experiences in museums are usually directed towards children
(being ludic rather than serious). All three of these biases have a strong basis not only in
cultural narratives (such as the idea that children, or digital natives, are better able to
adapt to new technology than adults, or digital immigrants), but also in scholarship and in
museum exhibition practices. What I mean by this is that visitors hold these biases
because they are largely reified by the museums themselves. These biases in turn, operate
as “commonplace topics” or as Kenneth Burke sees them, pre-existing attitudes that make
persuasion possible.
In this way, Kenneth Burke gives us a way to interrogate what is occurring in
rhetorical experiences. First, if we are seeking to analyze a rhetorical experience, we can
first identify what topoi are at play and what existing attitudes are affecting an audience’s
ability to be persuaded. Second, we can then examine what identification or change in
attitude is taking place. Museum visitors who generally see engagement with touchscreen
interfaces in museums as the realm of children based on these three biases were surprised
when their experience with the technology was not what they expected. They were
surprised when, instead of “games” they were allowed to “follow [their own interests]” or
create, email, and respond. It is precisely this difference between expectation (games for
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kids) and experience (research and creation) that visitors responded to – visitors were
persuaded to experience their participation as taking a role in the work of the museum in
part because their participation was one of adult “work” and not of “play.” What I mean
by this is that visitors’ ability to identify, or as Burke (1969) says, to see themselves as
“belonging” as an active participant in the work of the museum is dependent, not just on
their previously existing ideas about what the work of the museum is, but on previously
existing ideas of what the work of the museum is not and who does and does not have a
role in it.
While museum studies can find these findings useful, as they provide insight into
the creation of effective and persuasive participatory experiences for adult visitors, I am
more concerned with the rhetorical implications presented here. Owing to both previously
existing biases and attitudes towards the museum (or topoi), visitors see certain
experiences as affording a participatory role in the work of the museums that others do
not. Additionally, visitors see certain persons are as having or being given access to those
experiences, and others are not. In the examples presented in this chapter, visitors see
“adult” experiences as having a role in the museum. However, I present this case as an
example of how visitors perceive access to the rhetorical experiences afforded by these
interfaces and how identification occurs within those rhetorical experiences. This
example has greater implications for both rhetoricians’ approach to rhetorical experiences
and for the implementation of digitally mediated experiences within museums. The
findings of this study demonstrate that powerful rhetorical experiences are indeed being
enacted through museum visitors’ interactions with new media interfaces. When we
examine the habits of interaction those technologies afford, we realize that there are
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particular users and bodies that perceive access to these experiences and others who may
be precluded from interaction altogether. This exclusion of certain persons and particular
bodies from participatory experiences in the museum sits in sharp contrast to the potential
for the democratization of cultural experience that museologists see resulting from these
technologies. In following chapter, I will summarize the findings of this study and
challenge the uncritical adoption of new media interfaces within museums by arguing
that the rhetorical experiences that make this shift possible can result in new disparities in
access, interaction, and participation.
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Chapter 6: Conclusion
One afternoon in mid-September, two women, probably in their mid-50s, spent
close to 45 minutes in Gallery One at the Cleveland Museum of Art, interacting with the
Collection Wall and several of the Lenses. For one of the women, that afternoon was her
first time visiting the CMA; the other had been to the museum before but close to a
decade prior to this particular visit. Both women expressed surprise and delight over
Gallery One and the touchscreens there, saying that the exhibition space was completely
unexpected. After I confirmed with the women which of the interfaces they had touched,
I had the following exchange with them.
Me:
Okay. If you were to describe to me what you did with them…If
you were to name or describe the actual actions that you used when
you were interacting with any of them, whether it was just the
pictures or the strike a pose, how you do that? How would you
describe that?
Woman #1:
... nice.
Me:
Well, I mean actually physically what you did.
Woman #1:
Oh, actions, physically.
Me:
Yeah.
Woman #2:
The touching. The moving.
Woman #1:
Being able to move all around and see what every piece is and
where it came from, how it came about.
Me:
The piece of art itself?
Woman #1:
Yeah.
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Me:
Okay. By touching and…?
Woman #2:
Feeling. You know? The movement, being able to move it.
In their response, both of the above women equated touching the touchscreen interfaces
with actually touching the art. Their equation was not a superficial one either; several
times they not only discussed being able to touch the art, but also to “move it,”
suggesting an even greater element of control. While I did not do it in most of the
interviews, in this exchange I pushed back against the visitors’ responses slightly, asking
in clarification, “the piece of art itself?”, to which one woman nodded and the other
responded affirmatively with “yeah.”
These women, like many other visitors, viewed their interactions with the
touchscreen interfaces as being able, instead, to actually touch the art. It is this
phenomenon, the disappearance of the interface and the reification of the digital image
into a stand-in for the physical object, that is at the center of this study’s findings. As I
have shown, visitors’ perceptions of being able to touch the art at the CMA and archival
materials at the National Archives Museum resulted in visitors perceiving access to the
collections and work of those museums in ways they had previously viewed as
impossible. Because they were “able to touch the art,” visitors saw their relationship with
the previously “elitist,” “boring,” and “tedious,” museum change. They saw themselves
on a “more level playing field” (NAM Visitor) with the museum, and as being able to
“have a role” (NAM Visitor) in the work of the museum.
The experiences visitors participate in through interaction with the touchscreens
ultimately shift visitors’ interpretive positions by persuading them to take up the
traditionally institutional roles of instructor, researcher, and critic. Combined with the
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perception of the ability to touch the objects displayed by the touchscreens, participation
in roles of instructor, researcher and critic persuades visitors to see themselves as active
participants in the work of the museum. At the same time, visitors do not see all
experiences afforded by the touchscreens as equally important. In addition to their
previously existing digital literacies, museum visitors bring a number of biases, or
previously existing attitudes, to their engagement with the touchscreen interfaces. These
biases, particularly the beliefs that digital experiences are intended more for children than
adults, and that play and work are diametrically opposed activities, directly influence how
visitors respond to the experiences they participate in. It is only in the more “serious”
experiences of research, creation, and critical response that the erasure of the interface
and the physicalization of the digital image occur in visitor accounts, and in which
visitors see themselves as contributing to the cultural work of the museum. Visitors’
ability to identify, or as Kenneth Burke (1969) says, to see themselves as “belonging,” as
an active participant in the work of the museum is dependent, not just on their previously
existing ideas about what the work of the museum is, but on their previously existing
ideas of what the work of the museum is not and who does and does not have a role in it.
Ultimately, the findings of this study demonstrate that powerful rhetorical
experiences are indeed being enacted through museum visitors’ interactions with new
media interfaces. In other words, when we examine the “paradigm shift” that museum
studies scholars claim is occurring through new exhibition practices, we can see that there
is indeed a rhetorical shift in attitude and identification taking place in certain digitallymediated experiences. At the same time, not all digitally-mediated experiences within
museums do the same kind of rhetorical work. When we examine the habits of interaction
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visitors perceive as afforded by the touchscreen interfaces studied, the role that visitors’
previously existing digital literacies play in shaping their experiences with those
interfaces, and the existing biases that influence visitors’ ability to be persuaded, we
realize that there are particular users and bodies that perceive access to certain
experiences and others who may be precluded from interaction with the interfaces
altogether. This exclusion of certain persons and particular bodies from participatory
experiences in the museum sits in sharp contrast to the potential for the democratization
of cultural experience that museologists see resulting from these technologies.
In the remainder of this chapter, I respond to each of my research questions,
before challenging the uncritical adoption of new media interfaces within museums by
arguing that the rhetorical experiences that make this shift possible can result in new
disparities in access, interaction, and participation.
Dissertation Research Questions
In this study, I sought to answer four research questions directly related to my
analysis of the experiences visitors participate in through interaction with touchscreen
interfaces in spaces of exhibition and display and the rhetorical work those experiences
enact. I will use my discussions throughout this dissertation to directly respond to each
question.
1) What types of interactions and experiences do institutions hope to foster with
touchscreen interfaces?
As discussed in Chapter 2, museum officials at both the Cleveland Museum of Art
and the National Archives Museum sought to use the exhibition spaces and technology to
create experiences that would “bring visitors closer to the art” (Alexander, Interview) and
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allow them to “pursue their own interests” with less direct oversight from the museum
(Kamps, Interview). At the CMA, “Team members wanted to convey information in
ways that felt like experiences rather than didactic lessons, allowing visitors to drive their
own encounters with works of art and share their results with each other” (Alexander,
2014, p. 350). As Alice Kamps said, “the sort of Holy Grail of museums is to get people
to interact with each other” (Interview). So both of these institutions worked to create
experiences in which visitors not only engaged with the permanent collection, but with
each other as well.
In part, both of these institutions were responding to developments in the museum
sector that emphasize visitor engagement and museum expansions based on audience
research and visitor feedback. At the CMA, the team that originally proposed and worked
to develop Gallery One wanted to create a space with exciting technology that would
draw in new visitors, both Cleveland locals and tourists.44 At the National Archives, the
curatorial team wanted to give visitors access to more materials from the archives than
was possible to display on the gallery walls (Kamps, Interview). While the experiences
that are afforded by both exhibition spaces and the touchscreens housed therein do, in
fact, achieve what the museums’ intended – namely, visitors are interacting with each
other and feel as if they are following their own lines of inquiry and able to get closer to
the art – it is important to remember that the touchscreens, and the portions of the
museums’ collection that are accessible through them, are still highly curated. Just as
visitors see themselves as actually touching the art when they are in fact touching the
44
This particular bit of information was gleaned from an interview with someone on the initial Gallery One
committee. The person in question no longer works for the CMA and preferred to remain anonymous.
However, it is important to mention that visitor attraction was one of the museums’ initial motivations for
creating the space.
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smooth screen of a touchscreen interface, the illusion of freedom of movement through
the collection or archive is still very much that – an illusion. At the same time, visitors
see the experiences afforded by these spaces and interfaces as so unique, largely, as I
have shown, due to the ability to touch, that they are still rhetorically powerful in shifting
visitors’ interpretive positions in the museum.
2) How do visitors in these spaces engage with these particular touchscreen interfaces?
Chapter 3 of this dissertation answers this research question directly. Visitors in
both the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Archives Museums interact with the
touchscreen interfaces studied through six primary habits of interaction – touching,
swiping, zooming, hyperlink browsing, favoriting, sharing, and creating with touch and
motion. These habits of interaction are accomplished by corresponding kinetic motions
and visual recognition of words and symbols that indicate possibilities for navigation.
They are borrowed habits of interaction that rely on visitors’ existing experience with
touchscreen interfaces, such as tablets and mobile phones, and with features that have
become germane to Web 2.0, such as hyperlinks, keyword tags, and social networking. In
other words, a visitor’s ability to interact with the touchscreen interfaces through the
habits of interaction I identify depends largely on that visitor’s previously existing digital
literacies.
The habits of interaction with which visitors engage with the touchscreen
interfaces directly influence how visitors make sense of the digital content displayed by
these interfaces. In the hybrid physical/virtual spaces of the institutions studied, the habits
of interaction a visitor perceives the interfaces as affording allow that visitor to take part
in a particular range of experiences that can shift the interpretive position of the visitor,
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allowing the visitor to participate actively and publicly in types of activities that in the
past were undertaken privately by the institution.
At the same time, as I discussed in Chapter 2, there were many visitors who did
not interact with the touchscreen interfaces in these gallery spaces. Many visitors perused
the galleries without ever touching the touchscreens. Some did so out of a dislike for the
scope of the technology, claiming it made them “dizzy” or “stressed out.” Others did so
due to a hesitation to touch that stems from an entrenched intuitional taboo against
visitors touching objects in the museum. Still others did so because they preferred to view
the artworks without the “distracting” aid of the digital screens. The habits of interaction
I identified through observation, analysis, and visitor interviews pertain only to those
visitors who actually physically interacted with the touchscreens.
3) What experiences are afforded by these interfaces in these spaces?
One of the most pervasive and significant findings of this study, as I mentioned at
the start of this chapter, is that visitors interacting with the touchscreen interfaces often
view themselves as interacting with – touching, feeling, and moving – the actual art. I
show in Chapter 3 that through a combination of the immediacy of touch and a visitor’s
previously existing digital literacies, interaction with the touchscreen interfaces can enact
an erasure of the interface. The interfaces, for many visitors, “disappear” or fall away,
and visitors then see themselves in direct relationships, not with the artifact that the
digital content displayed represents, but with the original, physical artifact itself. In other
words, museum visitors interacting with these touchscreen interfaces see themselves as
actually “able to touch the art” and thus as active participants in the work of the museum.
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In addition to seeing themselves as touching the art and archival documents
digitally displayed by the touchscreen interfaces, museum visitors take up certain roles
traditionally reserved for the “expert” in the museum. As I show in Chapter 4, visitors
take situational expertise, performing the roles of instructor, researcher, and critic
temporarily in the museum spaces. In the role of instructor, visitors teach other visitors,
both those they know and strangers, how to use the technology at hand, guiding other
visitors’ use of the touchscreens, providing formative instruction and corrective feedback.
In the role of researcher, visitors see themselves as “having a role” in the work of the
museum and perform that role, by demonstrating their expertise, both situational and
referred, of the subject matter, the content they have researched. In the role of the critic,
museum visitors not only seek to critique the content displayed by the touchscreens, but
other visitors’ responses and interpretation of that content. Visitors taking on the role of
critic openly interrogated other visitors’ responses to the collection and archive, and
engaged in publicly negotiated response to the works of art or archival documents
displayed.
4) Do these interfaces shape a visitor’s interpretive position in relation to the work of
art or text, and/or to the museum itself? If so, how?
As I have shown throughout this dissertation, the answer to this research question
is yes, these interfaces do shape a visitor’s interpretive position in relation to the work of
art or text. In the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Archives Museum, it is
through the experiences that visitors are engaging in that this shift occurs. By
experiences, I mean not the habits of interaction that visitors are using to interact with the
interfaces or the activities they complete with those habits on their own right, but the
189
roles that visitors are taking up through these actions. In other words, museum visitors
interacting with these interfaces are participating in experiences that persuade them to
take up particular roles and interpretive positions. These experiences, then, do rhetorical
work by shifting visitors’ identities within and attitudes towards the museum.
The work of Kenneth Burke (1969) gives us a way to examine how these
experiences do rhetorical work, or, in other words, why we can consider them rhetorical
experiences. While Burke does not specifically put forth a theory of rhetorical experience
as Clark later does, he does acknowledge that the actions an audience is persuaded to take
up directly affect that audience’s identifications. Burke claims that the effect of
participating in certain activities that one sees as situating oneself in some particular
category is ultimately identification with that category. In Chapter 4, I showed that
visitors who participated in the types of activities that they viewed as generally belonging
to the purview of the institution, such as instruction, research, and critique, in turn
identified with the institution, viewing themselves as active participants in the work of
the museum.
Conclusion and Looking Forward
The findings of this study have important implications for both digital rhetoric
and museum studies. This dissertation offers a model of how ethnographic, qualitative
research methods can be used by digital rhetoricians to explore the rhetorical implications
of emerging new media interfaces at the point of user interaction. Additionally, the term
habits of interaction as I have used it here, grounded in Gibson’s theory of affordances,
provides a useful vocabulary with which to describe and analyze user interaction with
emerging technologies. Most importantly, by examining experience as rhetorical,
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particularly with a focus on attitude and identification, rhetoricians can better understand
and operationalize the rhetorical work that occurs through interaction with new media
interfaces and the participatory experiences mediated by them.
The findings of this study also have exciting implications for museum studies.
New media technologies, particularly touchscreen interfaces such as those studied, are
playing a growing role in new exhibition practices within museums. Many museum
studies scholars see the participatory experiences mediated by such emerging
technologies as potentially redefining relationships between the institution and the public
by allowing museum visitors access to roles and discourses traditionally reserved for a
cultural elite. I have shown that digitally-mediated experiences, particularly those
facilitated by touch induce actions on the part of the visitor that shift their engagement in
the museum from the private, solitary practices of viewing and interpretation, to the
documented, public roles of instructor, researcher, and critic. The rhetorical approach of
this study, which is different from the visitor-analysis studies generally undertaken by the
museum, can give museum officials insight into why the exhibits and experiences they
curate have the kinds of affects that they do.
Ultimately, I have shown that experiences can and do accomplish rhetorical work.
In the case of digitally-mediated experiences visitors participate in through interaction
with touchscreen exhibition technology, those rhetorical experiences affect a change in
attitude and identity on the part of the visitor, causing a shift from visitor-as-spectator to
visitor-as-co-producer. The implications of this relational shift from visitor-as-spectator
to visitor-as-co-curator/co-producer are salient, and their impact on the futures of both the
191
museum and of emerging technologies in spaces of exhibition and display deserves
further investigation by rhetoricians.
Parry (2007), Anderson (2011), Shaffer (2015), and other museologists who see
the move towards participation in new exhibition practices as ultimately “culture
shifting,” make a strong case for the potential of such experiences to enact a
“democratization” of cultural education, interpretation, and response. New exhibition
studies scholar Jennifer Barrett (2012) pushes against this idea a little, pointing out that,
“inclusion, however, does not ensure equality” (p. 22). Upon completion of this study, I
argue that Barrett is right to make the distinction between inclusion, the offering up of
participatory experiences, and equality, a sense of equity in who has access to those
experiences. As I show throughout this study, a visitor’s rhetorical experience with the
touchscreen interfaces is shaped first and foremost by her previously existing digital
literacies. That experience is also shaped by a familiarity with the work of the museum
and by previously existing biases concerning the nature of that work (Chapters 4 and 5).
A closer look at the dependency of such rhetorical experiences on the habits of
interaction visitors perceive as afforded by the touchscreen interfaces shows us that the
“paradigm shift” of visitor-as-spectator to visitor-as-co-producer does not come without
its own set of potential roadblocks to access and cultural equity.
As I have shown in Chapter 3, one’s ability to perceive the affordances, or
opportunities for interaction, made possible by a particular piece of technology is another
way of understanding one’s digital literacies. According to Gibson (1986), the
affordances of a particular object are connected both to a person’s knowledge of what an
object is, and that person’s physical relationship with the object itself. Digital literacies
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are, as Lauren Bowen (2011) says, highly personal, “embodied experiences” (p. 589), that
are dependent on an understanding of what a particular interface is and how it is possible
to use it. When interacting with digital technology, users will experience different types
and levels of engagement due to disparities in age, physical ability, socio-economic
status, access to personal technology, and other factors that can affect one’s acquisition of
digital literacies (Selfe, 1999; Walters, 2014).
As visitors interacted with the touchscreen interfaces via the habits of interaction I
identified, the interfaces, for many visitors, fell away, and visitors saw themselves as able
to interact directly with the art or artifact. Additionally, visitors, through touch, were
persuaded to take up the traditionally institutional roles of instructor, researcher, and
critic. These visitors, in turn, saw themselves as participating in the work of the museum.
However, the foundation piece of visitors’ interactions with these interfaces, the habits of
interaction they used to engage with them, are entirely dependent on whether or not the
visitor possesses the digital literacies necessary to perceive those habits as afforded by the
touchscreens. Thus, the potential rhetorical experiences a visitor may or may not
participate in through interaction with digital interpretive technologies rely on that
visitor’s previously existing digital literacies and physical ability.
To illustrate why I see a potential problem in a visitor’s potential rhetorical
experiences being dependent on their digital literacies and physical abilities I offer the
following example – the Collection Wall at the CMA. The habit of interaction of touch
requires certain bodily actions on the part of the visitor. When approaching the Collection
Wall, a visitor must first recognize it as a touchscreen rather than a screen such as
television that is simply meant to be viewed. Many visitors did not, in fact, recognize it as
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something to be touched. They instead stood or sat in front of it and watched it. For those
who did recognize it as touchable, in order to interact with it they must first have been
able to touch it. During my observations I observed four visitors in wheelchairs approach
the wall. Not a single one of the four interacted with it. These visitors could have reached
the bottom section of the Wall, and I am unsure exactly why they did not interact with it.
But the animated hand swiping through the stack of images was always displayed much
higher than would have been in these visitors’ reach; it is possible they did not think they
were able to interact with it. Thus, some visitors may be, for a variety of reasons,
physically unable to engage in the habits of interaction others perceive the Collection
Wall as affording, and thus some visitors will not have access to the same rhetorical
experiences as others.
Second, in order for a visitor to be able to navigate through the stacks of images
or utilize the full capacity of the Wall as a tool to locate items in the collection elsewhere
in the museum, they must be familiar with the touchscreen convention of swiping and the
internet convention of hyperlink browsing. Similarly, as was the case with the visitors I
discussed in Chapter 3, if a visitor is unfamiliar with the popular social networking genre
conventions employed by the Wall’s content, such as hearts and “favorites,” he or she
may not interpret favoriting as social or participatory action at all. Thus, if a visitor is
unfamiliar with the habits of browsing, swiping, and hyperlinking – habits of interaction
afforded by other popular touchscreen devices – that visitor’s potential to view and
interpret art through the more vernacular categorizations and relationships the Wall
makes possible will be less than that of a visitor who is. 194
Exciting rhetorical experiences are indeed being made possible through
interaction with touchscreen interfaces in spaces of exhibition and display. At the same
time, when we examine the habits of interaction those technologies afford more closely,
we see that there are particular users and bodies that, as Shannon Walters (2014) says, are
“assumed ideal for haptic interaction” (p. 176) and others that may be precluded from
interaction altogether. This exclusion of certain persons and particular bodies from
participatory/rhetorical experiences in the museum sits in sharp contrast to the lauded
potential for the “democratization” of cultural experience that museologists see resulting
from these experiences. While interactive technologies can be used, and are being used,
to break down traditional barriers between the cultural elite of the institution and the lay
visitor, they can, at the same time, create a new divide between those with the digital
literacies and physical ability needed to transcend those bounds through participation in
certain rhetorical experiences and those without those literacies and abilities. This potential division in access and cultural equity resulting from differences in
digital literacies or physical ability is in no way deliberate on the part of the Cleveland
Museum of Art or the National Archives Museum. On the contrary, as public institutions
with free and open admission and a carefully designed set of tours and assistive
technology devices for visitors who are visually impaired or hard of hearing, both
museums work diligently to provide broad and accessible engagement with their
collection. Indeed, many visitors viewed the touchscreens studied as providing greater
access than traditional interpretive technologies. One visitor said about the Collection
Wall, "For me, I liked the fact that the information could come to you. We spend a lot of
time reading captions which are often times very small, so I liked the idea that you could
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touch and the information comes up and it's typically bigger, and easier to see for older
eyes” (CMA Visitor). Another visitor claimed that the Touch Table at the NAM was ideal
for her autistic nephew because he could access information from a number of different
avenues and “make stuff bigger” (NAM Visitor).
At the same time, as emerging technologies, particularly touchscreen interfaces,
become ubiquitous in our society, it can be easy to focus on the benefits seen in new and
exciting uses of those interfaces and less on the interfaces themselves. Cynthia Selfe
(1999) warned, in some of the first salient discussions of critical digital literacy,
“Technologies may be the most profound when they disappear. But when this happens
they also develop the most potential for being dangerous” (p. 160). The potential for
touchscreen interfaces and other emerging technologies used in new exhibition practices
to result in disparities of access, interaction, and participation, reifies the necessity for
continued examination into the habits of interaction visitors perceive as afforded by these
technologies in spaces of cultural exhibition and display. As interactive interpretive
technologies both evolve and become more commonplace, we must pay close attention
not only to the identifications and interpretive positions visitors take up through rhetorical
experiences but also to who does and who does not perceive access to those rhetorical
experiences and why.
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APPENDIX A: DATA COLLECTED
Ø Observations and Contemporaneous Field Notes
Researcher-generated data recording visitors’ interactions with the four
touchscreen interfaces studied directly within the research sites of Gallery One at
the CMA and the David M. Rubenstein Gallery at the National Archives.
I observed a total of 499 museum visitors – 350 visitors in the Cleveland Museum
of Art, and 149 in the National Archives Museum.
Field notes recorded both my observations and descriptions of the museum
spaces.
Ø Visitor Tracking Maps
In the Cleveland Museum of Art I completed eleven (11) full tracking of parties
of visitors, using a map of Gallery One (Appendix D) provided to me by the
CMA. Trackings recorded how long visitors stayed in the space, where they
stopped to look at art and/or to touch or not touch the interfaces, and their
movement within the gallery space.
Ø Audio Recorded Interviews
I conducted interviews with 45 people, 43 museum visitors and the exhibit
director at each museum. These interview recordings comprise 35 audio files and
over 4 hours of audio.
Ø Interview Transcripts
Audio recorded interviews were transcribed by Rev.com with support from the
Baker Nord Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Research Grant.
Transcriptions were then verified by researcher during coding.
Ø Visual Documentation
Photographs and video of the four interfaces, the spaces they are housed in,
participant interaction with the interfaces, and artifacts created by participants
during interaction.
I collected 24 photographs at the National Archives Museum and 113
photographs and 4 videos at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Unlike at the CMA,
photographs are not generally allowed at the National Archives Museum due to
government policy. I received special permission to take the photographs I did,
but was not given authorization for video recording.
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APPENDIX B: CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Is this your first time visiting the Cleveland Museum of Art?
–>If no, about how often would you say you visit the museum?
Was this your first time going into the Gallery One space?
–>If no, how often would you say you visit the space, or about how many times
have you visited it before?
Did you have any expectations about your experience within Gallery One?
–>If so, what are they?
Why are you visiting the museum today?
Which pieces of technology did you use during your time in Gallery One today?
Walk me through what you did with them. What were your actions/motions/etc. while
you were using them? Can you describe what you did in detail for me?
How did you know how to do the actions that you did?
What did you take away from your experiences with these pieces of technology?
Did your experience using this technology in this space differ at all from your
expectations prior to entering?
–>If so, how?
Briefly describe for me what you view your personal attitude toward art and/or art
museums to be.
Is this different at all from before your experience in Gallery One?
198
APPENDIX C: NATIONAL ARCHIVES MUSEUM INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Have you visited the National Archives prior to today?
->If yes, did you interact with this instillation during that time?
Did you have any specific expectations about your experience in this exhibit?
->If so, what were they?
Walk me through how you used this touch table instillation. What were your
actions/motions/etc. while you were using it? Can you describe in detail what you did?
How did you know how to do the actions that you did?
Did your experience using this technology in this space differ at all from your
expectations prior to entering?
–>If so, how?
Did you share a reaction to one of the documents?
–>If so, what was your reaction?
Did you feel a response or emotion that was not available to select?
What did you take away from your experiences with this piece of technology?
Briefly describe for me what you view your personal attitude to be toward the material in
this exhibit and/or this museum.
Is this different at all from when you first entered?
199
APPENDIX D: TRACKING MAP
200
APPENDIX E:
LIST OF “CURATED VIEWS OF THE COLLECTION” AT TIME OF DATA
COLLECTION
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
African American Prints and Drawings
Asian Art
Birth/Death
Chairs
Chinese Art
Circles
Color
Dance and Music
Day and Night
Director's Favorites
Dreamworlds
Expression
Fashion
Feast
Funerary Equipment
Gold
Hats
Horizons
Japanese Art
Line and Rhythm
Looking Sideways (which splits the screen into "look right" and "look left")
Love and Lust
Masks
Medieval Textiles
Mother
Patterns
Portraits
Still Life
Top 10 Favorites
Top 50 Favorites (based on users 'likes')
Treasures on Paper
Vessels
Water
Women in Art
201
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