• Enhancing Museum Narratives: Tales of Things and UCL’s Grant Museum

    Author(s):
    Mark Carnall, Steven Gray, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Claire Ross, Melissa Terras (see profile) , Claire Warwick
    Date:
    2017
    Subject(s):
    Digital humanities, Museums, Museums--Study and teaching
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    interactive museum, mobile technologies, interaction dde, Museum studies
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M69V5F
    Abstract:
    Emergent mobile technologies offer museum professionals new ways of engaging visitors with their collections. Museums are powerful learning environments and mobile technology can enable visitors to experience the narratives in museum objects and galleries and integrate them with their own personal reflections and interpretations. UCL‟s QRator project is exploring how handheld mobile devices and interactive digital labels can create new models for public engagement, personal meaning making and the construction of narrative opportunities inside museum spaces. The use of narrative in museums has long been recognised as a powerful communication technique to engage visitors and to explore the different kinds of learning and participation that result. Many museums make extensive use of narrative, or storytelling, as a learning, interpretive, and meaning making tool. This chapter discusses the potential for mobile technologies to connect museums to audiences through co-creation of narratives, taking the QRator project as a case study. The QRator project aims to stress the necessity of engaging visitors actively in the creation of their own interpretations of museum collections through the integration of QR codes, iPhone, iPad, and Android apps into UCL‟s Grant Museum of Zoology. Although this chapter will concentrate on mobile technology created for a natural history museum, issues of meaning making and narrative creation through mobile technology are applicable to any discipline. In the first instance, the concern is with the development of mobile media in museums followed by a discussion of the QRator project which stresses the opportunities and challenges in utilizing mobile technology to enhance visitor meaning making and narrative construction. Finally, this chapter discusses the extent to which mobile technologies might be used purposefully to transform institutional cultures, practices and relationships with visitors.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Publisher:
    Routledge
    Book Title:
    Digital Storytelling and Mobile Media: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies
    Author/Editor:
    Farman, J.
    Page Range:
    276 - 289
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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