Making Engagement Visible: The Use of Mondrian Transcripts in a Museum

This paper describes how we have used a new transcription system we call Mondrian Transcripts to study visitor engagement and expand professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) in a museum. Methods, concepts and findings from this paper contribute to research concerning interest driven learning (Azevedo, 2013; Ito et al., 2009, Crowley & Jacobs, 2002), how people “make places” for learning while moving through different types of physical or information environments (Taylor & Hall, 2013; Ma & Munter, 2014; Marin, 2013; Lave et al., 1984) and the design of learning environments that can advance professional design practice. Empirical data include 1) 22 case studies of complete museum visits that captured continuous, multi-perspective video and audio records of visitor mobility and interaction and 2) audio, video and survey based data from a professional development and design session with museum educators, exhibit designers, curators and archivists. Introduction and organization of paper The setting and empirical basis of this research is a two year ethnographic study to understand how visitors cultivate interests in and learn about the diverse historical and cultural heritage of American Roots and Country music while visiting a nationally renowned museum located in the mid-South region of the United States. As part of this work, we collected a purposive sample of complete museum visits across 22 visitor group cases including 11 family groups (2-5 visitors per group) over a period of six weeks (twenty-four days of data collection). These 22 case studies captured continuous, multi-perspective video and audio records of visitor group mobility and interaction through small GoPro cameras worn by visitors with no researchers present. In addition, following their visit we conducted 1-2 hour post visit interviews with all visitor groups and we connected with visitors on various social media platforms in order to follow online the content that visitors collected and shared from their visit. Table 1 summarizes this work.