This research project offers an innovative and significant programme of research on motivation, multimodality and embodied interaction in the digital museum, capitalising on leading edge work carried out by the research team in the areas of:
Museum exhibition design and visitor studies
Multimodal research theory and methods
Digital embodied interaction
Although considerable research on the museum visit experience has been conducted over the last 25 years the vast majority of this research uses self-report: linguistically based and survey methodological approaches that fail to capture the rich complexity of the interaction and context. As a result, surprisingly little is known about how people interact with and make meaning at the exhibit interface. This project has come to fill this gap and contribute to a better understanding of this rich interaction, especially in light of the growing recognition of the role of museums in lifelong learning, civic participation, and the economy. The interdisciplinary character of the project offers different perspectives and sheds light on elements of visitor experience and the approaches available to studying them that have not been previously explored. More specifically, this project aims to: 1) explore how families interact with digital exhibits/resources, and 2) develop innovative methodologies that can help us study the relationship between family visitors’ motivation to visit a digital exhibit and their interaction, meaning making and learning with digitally mediated exhibits.
DigitalMuseums 