Assisting Audience Participation through Reading Rhetoric and Innovating Online Forum DesignMary Pettice

12 April, 2012

Museums and the Web 2012, San Diego, CA USA

Narrating Culture on the Web

The Story—from the beginning

In praise of generalists, or, why I’m here

Puke Ariki Museum, Library, and Information Centre

New Plymouth, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Have Your Say

What I knew, and what I had to learn

The promise: Digital democracy and the enlightened citizen

The reality: “Someone is wrong on the Internet.”

The broken public forum: CNN

Forums are failing in online news sites and many other online communities

Journalists are on the story

Scalability: Where am I? What are the best comments?

Civility: Failures of decorum?

Constructive Interaction

The good: “Posting comments in both online newspaper and blogs appears to increase participants’ interest in politics” (Mitchelstein, 2011).

The bad: Faced with “fallacious symptomatic arguments” and “ad hominem attacks,” “the deliberative democratic potential of online discussion is a long way from the deliberative ideal” (Richardson & Stanyer, 2011).

Challenges facing online forums:

Scalability solutions: Slashdot

Scalability solutions: Reddit

But what if deliberation is not the highest function of online comment areas?

Narration, not deliberation—it’s all about the story

The engaged visitor makes meaning of the stories museums tell, these impressions and encounters; the engaged online forum member on a museum-hosted site should be prompted to do the same. And if the stories told by the museum yield fragments of thoughtful narratives from online commenters, the value of online forums may not be in deliberation, but in narration.

Storytelling and the museum visitor

The goal of the museum online comment area, then, should be to encourage visitors’ storytelling:

about their trip to the museum,

about how they reacted to an exhibit,

about how they responded to another visitor’s interpretation,

and about how they meet and match the museum’s story as they make it relevant to their own lives and identities.

Institutional goals and the forum

The creation of a thoughtful, well designed comment space serves two basic visitor-directed functions for the museum:

1) It allows visitors to interact with museum stories and staff, and

2) 2) it creates a space that non-commenters can visit to re-engage with an exhibit or to investigate other visitors’ experiences with an exhibit.

Why bother?

Nina Simon (2010) argues that engaged visitors who feel valued by the institution are “more likely to visit again, become members, renew their memberships, and donate time and money to the institution.”

Allen-Greil and MacArthur (2010) report that the number of users who communicate with their museum online “is growing but still pales in comparison to the number who “lurk” or make use of our static Web pages.” And they conclude that, despite the low numbers of direct participants on their museum’s site, these projects should continue because of a belief that “the benefits extend beyond just the relative few who directly participate.”

The data on online interaction with museums seems to validate Jakob Neilson’s observation (2006) that “90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute),” “9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time,” and only “1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions.”

The Solution:Simple.

Turn lurkers into participants.

What, not so simple?

The Challenge: 90-9-1

Everyone’s becoming a curator

Turning lurkers into participants through encouraging curation and rating

Using design to promote participation

The tldr Interface

U.S. Dept. of State: Opinion Space

People who have seen this exhibit are ready to embrace the museum as a forum, and users of the website can become themselves become editors and narrators of the forum material.

The writers seek knowledge and feel empowered by the museum to add their own information and reaction to the exhibit narrative.

These writers demonstrate through these comments that they want to become actors in the narrative they’re adding themselves to or rejecting in favor of other narratives.

The use of new media, with its implication that visitor voices deserve to ascend the stage in a formal virtual environment, shows us how prepared the audience is to offer a supplementary Taranaki Wars narrative and potentially enter into a more active discussion with others. Puke Ariki has given these voices a forum and has implicitly acknowledged the value of this user-directed narrative.

Back to Puke Ariki

The Big Picture

The threaded (dreaded?) message board

The number of prompts, the general nature of the first forum (The Big Picture), and the overlap of topic material might not have been a concern if the message boards had had heavy numbers of users.

However, the total of 1273 comments, with 57 (6%) comments removed by moderation, is notable both because the board was open for almost 5 months and because only 88 (7.4%) of the comments were in response to other comments.

Of that 88, 20 were removed by moderation, or almost 23%. Threaded comment forum setup carries with it the expectation that people will interact with each other. The “What If?” forums generated initial statements, but few users chose to respond to these initial statements even though they had the opportunity.

“Even in an irreverent community like Slashdot, “I-statements” are indicators of good content and civility matters” (Brennan, Wrazien and Greenstadt 2010).

Part of the answer: Scaffolding!

Simon (2010) points out, “The best participatory experiences are not wide open. They are scaffolded to help people feel comfortable engaging in the activity.”

In a discussion about existing newspaper comment areas, Stijn Debrouwere (2011) writes that “We're giving readers a blank canvas: a text area and a general instruction to ‘respond to this story.’” He argues that this indeterminate invitation contributes to the current unsatisfactory state of online comments and argues that “We need to change the language that invites readers into the conversation to reflect what the story is about.”

From museums to online news sites, we’re realizing users need scaffolding:

Beyond Comment Threads: The winners

Tagul

• A non-linear platform, one that

uses design elements that complement and

incorporate the artwork associated with the exhibit or

institution.

Designs should allow museum viewers to grasp the major conversations inspired by the exhibit. These designs can be adapted to reflect the institution’s goals and exhibit-specific content:

• Museum collection-inspired icons for commenters: Users should be able to create user names and display profile icons that have connections to both their identities and the museum. From an easily searched thumbnail list of objects in the museum collection, users can select an icon that will be displayed along with their comments. Visitors can then see connections they share with other users, possibly facilitating goodwill between visitors who admire the same museum objects. The goal is to keep the museum collection, exhibits, and experience as central to how a user identifies himself or herself on the museum-hosted forum site.

Relating user identification to the institution

• Give users a way to pull in visual or linked content from a central museum-hosted exhibit site: Each exhibit’s online offerings should include easily linked material, images, charts, videos, that a user may feel supports his/her comment. A click and drag mechanism might automatically insert a link and add text to a comment such as “Go here to see what I’m talking about.”

• Curatorial roles for lurkers: Simon (2010) points out that “there are many more people who enjoy spectating and critiquing content than there are those who enjoy creating it.” Simple instructions might ask for help in ranking comments “most helpful” or “best museum links.”

• Emphasize storytelling: Questions and prompts that begin discussions should seek to identify the stories presented by the museum and encourage visitors to respond to these narratives with stories of their own.

And most importantly:

Such design guidelines would allow the community a vibrant place in which to talk about museum visits and to see what others thought of an exhibit's message and implications, resulting in a greater connection to the institution for commenters and lurkers.

Design and linguistic prompts should keep the museum central to the forum’s users; a museum exhibit comment area should use the museum as a reflection of community and cultural identities and offer users a way to declare their own identities and communicate with others.

Keep the museum central