Facebook has often been hailed for affording participation and thus for representing an opportunity for institutions to interact with the public. However, research concerning how institutions are actualizing this communicative opportunity is still scarce. In this article, we seek to address this gap by investigating empirically how one type of institution, namely museums, and their Facebook followers, actually communicate. Our approach is innovative in combining analytical tools from speech act theory and Conversation Analysis (CA) to a corpus of activities from the Facebook pages of nine Danish museums of different types and sizes collected during eight consecutive weeks in 2013. This approach enables us to both investigate communicative actions as isolated speech acts and the micromechanics of the interaction that potentially arise from these actions. Our findings indicate that certain kinds of speech act are used more than others and that certain speech acts lead to more interaction than others. By analyzing a fairly standard example of museum/follower interaction, we show how different kinds of micro-conversational dynamics play out. In light of this analysis, we ask what modes of participation the interaction affords and we discuss the implications of our findings for recent debates about how museums can adapt to the participatory paradigm underlying institutional Facebook communication.
Co-designing a co-design tool to strengthen ideation in digital experience design at museumsThis article presents and discusses a paper-based co-design tool that was developed in order to strengthen ideation in digital experience design processes at museums. The tool, called the ASAP Map, was co-designed as part of an action research project with 10 museums from EU and the USA. The museum partners used the tool in their home institutions and the article focuses on their feedback and the following iterations of the tool through ongoing feedback loops. Concludingly, the usefulness and applicability of the tool is discussed, also touching on the relevance of this study for the broader co-design field.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.