Social media analytics in museums: extracting expressions of inspiration

Abstract

Museums have a remit to inspire visitors. However, inspiration is a complex, subjective construct and analyses of inspiration are often laborious. Increased use of social media by museums and visitors may provide new opportunities to collect evidence of inspiration more efficiently. This research investigates the feasibility of a system based on knowledge patterns from FrameNet -a lexicon structured around models of typical experiences -to extract expressions of inspiration from social media.The study balanced interpretation of inspiration by museum staff and computational processing of Twitter data. This balance was achieved by using prototype tools to change a museum's Information Systems in ways that both enabled the potential of new, social-media-based information sources to be assessed, and which caused the museum staff to reflect upon the nature of inspiration and its role in the relationships between the museum and its visitors.The prototype tools collected and helped analyse Twitter data related to two events. Working with museum experts, the value of finding expressions of inspiration in Tweets was explored and an evaluation using annotated content achieved an F-measure of 0.46, indicating that social media may have some potential as a source of valuable information for museums, though this depends heavily upon how annotation exercises are conducted. These findings are discussed along with the wider implications of the role of social media in museums.

Social Media Interaction as Informal Science Learning: a Comparison of Message Design in Two Niches

“…museums, science centers, aquaria, zoos), are undertaking efforts to utilize social media, but the approach tends to be practitioner-focused, emphasizing mass messaging or didactic marketing (Drotner & Schrøder, 2013), or focused entirely on art or cultural institutions, not science centers or institutions (e.g. Budge, 2017;Gerrard, Sykora, & Jackson, 2017). Indeed, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) both have applied the basics of marketing to social media in order to develop effective strategies for bringing in the same populations, but this approach is misaligned with the educative mission of these institutions and falls short of expanding the audience to those traditionally underserved (Author & Author, 2019).…”

Developing and validating the self-transcendent emotion dictionary for text analysis

“…An additional 28 supplemental words/word stems were generated via a brain-storming session involving the authors and another senior researcher. Notably, there are a number of existing dictionaries that tap into certain constructs reflected in the STED [ 14 , 32 , 38 , 39 ]. These lexicons, despite not being specifically consulted during our dictionary construction phase, were largely included in the 783 base words/phrases for future examination.…”

#artoninstagram: Engaging with art in the era of the selfie

“…By posting content online and tagging the arts institution through captions and hashtags, visitors become its brand ambassadors (Vale & Fernandes, 2018). Photos, videos, and stories, together with all the data generated independently by visitors, are constantly updated, measured, analyzed, and controlled by museums through the strategic use of digital technologies, intended to create new economic and social value, as a result of a transparent dialogue with plural interconnections (Gerrard et al, 2017; Mandelli, 2018). Among the digital content created by visitors, anything considered strategically more valid can be selected and made visible on a museum’s website.…”

“…The strong increase in the use of digital technologies and social media has made the information flow more rapid and transparent, leading traditional museums to design new competitive scenarios in which it is possible to capture strategic insights from and for visitors through the multidimensional interaction recreated with them. As social media allow for co-creating valuable brand experiences and multiplying the reach of newly targeted global markets, they provide a means to collect data about visitor expectations (Gerrard et al, 2017; Mandelli, 2018).…”

“…Integrating previous literature from fields as diverse as marketing (Chlebus-Grudzień, 2018;Dolbeau-Bandin, 2016;Gerrard et al, 2017;Vassiliadis & Belenioti, 2017), psychology (R. Wang et al, 2017), communication (Warfield, 2016), critical theory (Lacan, 1977), and consumer behavior (Presi et al, 2016), this article investigates how an emotional environment experienced through digital devices changes the way in which individuals engage with art through selfies. The methodological framework combines a non-participant observation of the museum-visual and material ethnography supplemented by a photography technique-with individual semi-structured interviews and netnography.…”