Intercultural Dialogues in Third Spaces: A Study of Learning Experiences of Museum Visitors

Bodo (2012) called for the need of museum exhibitions to create “third spaces” where individuals can cross the boundaries of belonging (both physical and psychological) to engage in intercultural dialogues. The imaginary cultural space of museum has propelled us into a realization that we are in an era where interculturality, transculturalism, and the eventual prospect of identifying a cosmopolitan citizenship can become a reality. Predicated on a five-month ethnography work at a provincial museum in British Columbia, Canada, this research explores the following questions: how have cultural and historical museum exhibitions put us in contact with the other and foster an understanding of the other? And how has transculturalism led to the establishment of a cosmopolitan citizenship? This study lends support to the potentiality of a cultural and historical museum transforming into “third spaces” where visitors may actively engage in exploration of complex multitudes of cultural identities and cosmopolitan citizenship. The findings of this study contribute to the literature on “third spaces” and transculturalism by providing an empirical study of learning experiences of visitors in museums. It reaffirms the notion of transculturalism by proposing a new humanism in recognition of the other, and in expressing oneself in a conscious subjective manner with cultural empathy. From a practical perspective, it suggests that in order to encourage international visitors to cross the cultural and psychological boundaries and engage in dialogues, the museum professionals may design interactive programs in a creative manner. It also suggests that museum administrators improve their services to more diverse groups of visitors to enhance inclusiveness.

Using Deep Learning for Collecting Data about Museum Visitor Behavior

Nowadays, technology makes it possible to admire objects and artworks exhibited all over the world remotely. We have been able to appreciate this convenience even more in the last period, in which the pandemic has forced us into our homes for a long time. However, visiting art sites in person remains a truly unique experience. Even during on-site visits, technology can help make them much more satisfactory, by assisting visitors during the fruition of cultural and artistic resources. To this aim, it is necessary to monitor the active user for acquiring information about their behavior. We, therefore, need systems able to monitor and analyze visitor behavior. The literature proposes several techniques for the timing and tracking of museum visitors. In this article, we propose a novel approach to indoor tracking that can represent a promising and non-expensive solution for some of the critical issues that remain. In particular, the system we propose relies on low-cost equipment (i.e., simple badges and off-the-shelf RGB cameras) and harnesses one of the most recent deep neural networks (i.e., Faster R-CNN) for detecting specific objects in an image or a video sequence with high accuracy. An experimental evaluation performed in a real scenario, namely, the “Exhibition of Fake Art” at Roma Tre University, allowed us to test our system on site. The collected data has proven to be accurate and helpful for gathering insightful information on visitor behavior.

Museums as a Tourist Resource: Cultural and Educational Projects in the Modern Cultural Space of a Tourist Destination

The paper highlights and analyzes the world and domestic experience in the implementation of cultural and educational museum projects in the modern cultural space of tourist destinations. The introduction of cultural and educational projects based on museum activities contributes to the profits of museums and meet the needs of society in the pursuit of knowledge. Also, the cultural and educational project improves the basic functions of museums (educational and upbringing), strengthens the resonance through the mass promotion of museum activities. Common cultural museum projects include scientific and educational museum conferences, International Museum Day, Museum Night, thematic intercultural festivals, biennials, etc. It has been proved that in recent decades various cultural museum projects have become widespread, which radically change the cultural space of a tourist destination. An example is a successful project of placing museums in abandoned industrial buildings, which gives impetus to the development not only of the museum, but also the area itself, sometimes depressed. The article considers examples of such projects in the world and Ukraine. For many museum institutions, the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for the cultural sphere as a whole is a challenge that needs to be used to rethink its activities, to introduce new methods of communication with potential museum visitors.

Dinosaurs, Racial Anxiety, and Curatorial Intervention: Whiteness and Performative Historiography in the Museum

This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. Dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other. The author examines early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.

Evaluation of Adaptive Interaction Systems for Virtual Museum Development

Virtual Museum (VM) is an application of Virtual Reality (VR) technology generating realistic visualization and sensation to convince museum visitors to interact with digital content. There are many immersive VR devices that support interactive VM applications. We investigate appropriate devices for interaction within VM. We proposed a Storytelling platform to achieve device organization without modification, the story and interaction were self-adapted to the selected device. Three types of interactive content were designed on our Storytelling platform to be applied on different interaction systems: a 2D standard display, a 3D stereoscopic display and a full immersive CAVE. The results showed different performances of each system supporting VM developers to select an appropriate interaction system. The evaluation contributes to the design of content and interaction of VM development with more efficiency based on user requirements. HIGHLIGHTS Three types of interactive content were designed on our Storytelling platform to be applied on different interaction systems: A 2D standard display, a 3D stereoscopic display, and a full immersive CAVE The 2D Powerwall system with a wide range of views provides immersion. However, with two-dimensional displays, users lack depth perception Users spent more time in selection and manipulation in the 3D stereoscopic system because depth perception is added The CAVE system has user attraction or holding power, users spent more interacting time GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

Centennial Stances: Museums, Morals and the First World War

<p>This thesis examines the extent to which New Zealand’s Centennial Great War exhibitions impact visitor perceptions, particularly those regarding their personal moral values. Two case studies are used, in order to inform discussions on the current and desired roles of New Zealand museums in relation to activism. While this research aims to provide New Zealand museums with more relevant findings than literature gaps currently allow, any discussions and recommendations may be more broadly applied to other countries. Similarly, despite a focus on the topical and largely publicised subject of WWI ‘100 years on’, discussions and recommendations are also relevant to general queries regarding museum representations, visitor interpretations and activism in museums. This research also intends to emphasise the benefits of interdisciplinary research by including museological, criminological and, to a lesser extent, philosophical literature. The research methods used within the two case studies can be broadly separated into three parts. First, a thick description method is used to provide in-depth overviews of The Great War Exhibition and Te Papa Tongarewa’s Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War. This section attempts to present a largely unbiased description of Great War representation in New Zealand’s capital. Second, the interpretations of ten visitors from each exhibition are gathered in the form of researcher-accompanied, audio-recorded visits. Such a research method intends to extract visitor thought processes in a relatively fluid and natural way. Finally, visitor questionnaires taken at the conclusion of each visit provide information on visitor demographics and overall thoughts regarding the exhibition, war itself and any inclusion of activism in museums. Alongside museum studies literature, criminological literature and debates are referenced to explain and exemplify the plentiful and diverse perceptions surrounding war. Overall, this study found most participants to be wary of activism in museum exhibitions. However, it also found that New Zealand museum visitors tended to possess a strong desire to determine their own moral perceptions through exposure to as many alternative narratives as possible. Therefore, any opposition to activism is not, in this case, due to any overriding wishes to favour ‘traditional narratives’. It is consequentially recommended that emphasis be put on clarity, transparency and multi-narrative approaches in museum exhibitions, as visitors appear to so strongly value their right to autonomous interpretation.</p>

Centennial Stances: Museums, Morals and the First World War

<p>This thesis examines the extent to which New Zealand’s Centennial Great War exhibitions impact visitor perceptions, particularly those regarding their personal moral values. Two case studies are used, in order to inform discussions on the current and desired roles of New Zealand museums in relation to activism. While this research aims to provide New Zealand museums with more relevant findings than literature gaps currently allow, any discussions and recommendations may be more broadly applied to other countries. Similarly, despite a focus on the topical and largely publicised subject of WWI ‘100 years on’, discussions and recommendations are also relevant to general queries regarding museum representations, visitor interpretations and activism in museums. This research also intends to emphasise the benefits of interdisciplinary research by including museological, criminological and, to a lesser extent, philosophical literature. The research methods used within the two case studies can be broadly separated into three parts. First, a thick description method is used to provide in-depth overviews of The Great War Exhibition and Te Papa Tongarewa’s Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War. This section attempts to present a largely unbiased description of Great War representation in New Zealand’s capital. Second, the interpretations of ten visitors from each exhibition are gathered in the form of researcher-accompanied, audio-recorded visits. Such a research method intends to extract visitor thought processes in a relatively fluid and natural way. Finally, visitor questionnaires taken at the conclusion of each visit provide information on visitor demographics and overall thoughts regarding the exhibition, war itself and any inclusion of activism in museums. Alongside museum studies literature, criminological literature and debates are referenced to explain and exemplify the plentiful and diverse perceptions surrounding war. Overall, this study found most participants to be wary of activism in museum exhibitions. However, it also found that New Zealand museum visitors tended to possess a strong desire to determine their own moral perceptions through exposure to as many alternative narratives as possible. Therefore, any opposition to activism is not, in this case, due to any overriding wishes to favour ‘traditional narratives’. It is consequentially recommended that emphasis be put on clarity, transparency and multi-narrative approaches in museum exhibitions, as visitors appear to so strongly value their right to autonomous interpretation.</p>

User eXperience (UX) Evaluation for MR Cultural Applications: The CEMEC Holographic Showcases in European Museums

Within the EU CEMEC project framework, a novel approach for using holographic showcases in museums has been conceived and experimented upon in different venues in the context of an itinerant exhibition dealing with Early Medieval European collections. The purpose of this holographic showcase, the so-called “box of stories”, is to improve the link and interaction between real and virtual contents in the museum’s context, making the exhibited object “alive” in the visitors’ perception. An Avar sword and a Byzantine treasure have been used as the main case studies, and they have been experienced in the museums of several European regions by audiences with different cultural backgrounds. This has been a great opportunity to carry out user experience (UX) evaluations in order to collect feedback (from about 600 museum visitors) regarding the attractiveness of such a mixed reality (MR) system, its usability, the comprehension of the contents, the efficacy of the logistics and environmental conditions, as well as the educational impact. The results of such inquiries helped the CNR ISPC team to identify the most meaningful User eXperience Analytics (UXA) able to support the work of UX evaluators and UX designers to assess the efficacy of digital cultural products. Indeed, this manuscript presents UXA and tries to draft a concrete and effective evaluation model for future digital projects for museum contexts.

Augmented reality in the dynamic world of virtual tourism

The issue of virtual tourism penetrates the consciousness of many current explorers and visitors to interesting sites and local attractions. Is it really necessary to physically travel to the chosen location, sacrifice time, money and increase your carbon footprint? The article deals with the issue of creating an application using augmented reality for the presentation of 3D models of cultural monuments. The application is designed for mobile devices, on which museum visitors can view digital copies of selected objects of interest. They can also take a virtual tour of the museum through their mobile devices from the comfort of their home. The introductory part of the article describes surveying of shape and visual properties in situ using photogrammetry and laser scanning. The sequent chapters are an analysis of the creation of 3D models in real scale with photorealistic textures and their presentation in a mixed reality environment. In our case, we will specifically focus on the augmented reality application and its development in the Unity multiplatform game engine. The article aims to describe the development of a mobile marker-based AR application briefly, to demonstrate the possibilities of augmented reality and to indicate the potential benefits resulting from the integration of X-reality into our lives. Specifically, we will focus on the application of AR to cartographic works and the enrichment of the content of classical 2D map works and plans with virtually designed 3D models on their surface.