Modes of Engagement: Comparing 'real' and 'virtual' platforms for Holocaust learning
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Nottingham
Department Name: History
Abstract
This project examines user engagement with an interactive, virtual exhibition that explores the role of photography in mediating the public understanding of the Holocaust. It builds on the success of the AHRC funded project 'Photography as Political Practice in National Socialism' (2018-21), which has explored the extent to which public understanding of the Holocaust is currently compromised by a one-sided reliance on perpetrator-made images. This follow-on funding allows us to ascertain whether a digital intervention can help audiences to view photographs of the Holocaust more critically. Our team and staff at the National Holocaust Centre and Museum (NHCM) have collaborated to create a virtual online version of our national touring exhibition 'The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust', to pioneer methods for translating the project's insights into a digital forum, both extending the reach of our intervention and offering new modes for engaging learners with the importance of photographs in understanding histories of atrocity.
In addition to reproducing the core elements of the physical exhibition, the online version supplements them with specially designed virtual pedagogical spaces: an antechamber and a reflection room which users engage with at the beginning and end of the exhibition. These expand on the exhibition's content to engage the user more fully with the role of historical photographs, and to sharpen the pedagogical function in the absence a member of the NHCM's educational team. This project comprises working closely with various groups to assess the impact of the virtual exhibition: schools will provide the primary partners for testing the program, and we will also work closely with charities who engage with community groups. This will take place both in the UK and in collaboration with our international partners in the United States and Germany. Our project is ground-breaking in combining established qualitative methods of museum audience research (questionnaires and interviews) with innovations from digital humanities approaches, including gaze and movement tracking in the virtual exhibition, digitally recording choices visitors make about photographs on interactive screens, and inviting participants to respond textually to questions posed in the virtual exhibition. The resulting evidence will demonstrate the effects of our interventions on different demographics, empowering museums to make optimal use of our research for future developments in digital curatorial and educational strategy to engage target audiences effectively and ethically with photographic depictions of atrocity and victims of persecution. They will also support teachers and educators to improve the visual literacy of a new generation.
This grant would enable us to:
- Design visitor questionnaires and interview questions collaboratively with our museum and international partners, whilst drawing on existing scholarship and practice as outlined in 'Context'
- Develop additional resources to support teachers in framing the classroom discussion around the virtual exhibition
- Organise international trials of the virtual exhibition in the United Kingdom, United States and Germany, coordinating the user questionnaires, interviews and focus groups with teachers both online and in person
- Analyse the outcomes of the above, in conjunction with the data gathered electronically from the virtual exhibition and the interactive activities, to arrive at a holistic assessment that addresses all questions outlined in the 'Objectives'
- Share the outcomes with all participating partners in team meetings and use them to develop concrete recommendations for the future, including, but not confined to, the introduction of interactive and immersive technologies to museums where they have not yet been used
- Work with museum educators and teachers to develop new approaches and pedagogies to enhance the use of digital tools in educational settings
In addition to reproducing the core elements of the physical exhibition, the online version supplements them with specially designed virtual pedagogical spaces: an antechamber and a reflection room which users engage with at the beginning and end of the exhibition. These expand on the exhibition's content to engage the user more fully with the role of historical photographs, and to sharpen the pedagogical function in the absence a member of the NHCM's educational team. This project comprises working closely with various groups to assess the impact of the virtual exhibition: schools will provide the primary partners for testing the program, and we will also work closely with charities who engage with community groups. This will take place both in the UK and in collaboration with our international partners in the United States and Germany. Our project is ground-breaking in combining established qualitative methods of museum audience research (questionnaires and interviews) with innovations from digital humanities approaches, including gaze and movement tracking in the virtual exhibition, digitally recording choices visitors make about photographs on interactive screens, and inviting participants to respond textually to questions posed in the virtual exhibition. The resulting evidence will demonstrate the effects of our interventions on different demographics, empowering museums to make optimal use of our research for future developments in digital curatorial and educational strategy to engage target audiences effectively and ethically with photographic depictions of atrocity and victims of persecution. They will also support teachers and educators to improve the visual literacy of a new generation.
This grant would enable us to:
- Design visitor questionnaires and interview questions collaboratively with our museum and international partners, whilst drawing on existing scholarship and practice as outlined in 'Context'
- Develop additional resources to support teachers in framing the classroom discussion around the virtual exhibition
- Organise international trials of the virtual exhibition in the United Kingdom, United States and Germany, coordinating the user questionnaires, interviews and focus groups with teachers both online and in person
- Analyse the outcomes of the above, in conjunction with the data gathered electronically from the virtual exhibition and the interactive activities, to arrive at a holistic assessment that addresses all questions outlined in the 'Objectives'
- Share the outcomes with all participating partners in team meetings and use them to develop concrete recommendations for the future, including, but not confined to, the introduction of interactive and immersive technologies to museums where they have not yet been used
- Work with museum educators and teachers to develop new approaches and pedagogies to enhance the use of digital tools in educational settings
| Title | Digital Exhibitions |
| Description | As part of this award, we created and tested with audiences our innovative multi-media exhibitions entitled "The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust", respectively as a physical touring exhibition in five UK venues, and as an online re-creation of the exhibtion's content in an interactive on-screen format. Detailed visitor observations (see narrative 'key findings') have informed ongoing improvements to the platform itself. But they have also spawned a new online exhibition, which we co-created with Co-I Paul Tennent and his team from the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, and the curatorial team at the UK National Holocaust Centre and Museum. Funded by a digtial innovation award from Arts Council England, we created 'Bubbles', which is a spatialised zoom call in which visitors explore a recreation of one room of the museums' award winning 'Journey' exhibition about Jewish life in 1930s Berlin. This new online exhibition has undergone an external evaluation process, and is now informing the museum's overall approach to better connecting physical exhibition design on-site and digital outreach. |
| Type Of Art | Artistic/Creative Exhibition |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Impact | As described in more detail in the narrative impact section of this submission, we learnt a number of key lessons about the optimal integration of physical exhibitions and digital platforms. Both versions make use of immersive media -- e.g. the ability to "step into" a photo or a historical environment -- but both also need to respond to the different atmospheres of a museum space versus a classroom or home environment in which digital visitors sit. These findings are now informing the creative collaborations involved in a major museum redevelopment project at the National Holocaust Museum. |
| URL | http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszpt/eaw |
| Description | We used a range of different methods -- questionnaires, interviews, and digital data from interactive touch screens and head sets -- to ascertain commonalities and difference in visitors' experiences of a physical touring exhibition, and an online digital recreation of the same exhibition. Pedagogically, results proved similar: visitors learnt similar lessons in the physical and the digtial space -- this bodes well for expanding museum access through digital means to audiences who are unwilling or unable to travel to a museum in person. We also found that different audience demographics has surprisingly little bearing on the learning objectvies of our exhibition, which related to the history of the Nazi Holocaust, antisemitism, and the ethics of 'victim photography', from the Nazi era and in more contemporary settings. However, we did find two notable differences in how people experience and make sense of an exhibition visit. First, visitors will happily spend around 45 minutes exploring a digitial museum space online, interacting with objects and recording their responses. But visitors will often spend longer in a physical museum space: the immersive bodily experience, the absence of distractions in a school or home environment, and the ability to discuss the experience as it happens with others (friends, family, classmates) facilitate longer periods of concentration. This relates to the second point: conversation while epxeriencing a museum exhibition is a crucial part of meaning-making, and enhances both the enjoyment of and learning from a museum visit. We concluded that online recreations of exhibitions are best used not as substitutes for an entire museum visit, but will function optimally when they have a tight, very specific focus. In this way, virtual visits can help preprare visitors for a physical visit, or as a follow-up excercise, to explore in more depth specific points that were only skimmed over during a physical visit. |
| Exploitation Route | The 'impact' section of this submission describes in detail how this project has already informed a massive physical and digital redevelopment programme undertaken by our project partners, the UK National Holocaust Centre and Musem, which draws directly on findings from this project. In addition, the PI has presented findings at a number of other museums and conferences. These included, for example, a talk about this project in October 2022 in Hamburg, Germany, on the occasion of an exhibition there about "Verfolgen und Aufklären: Die erste Generation der Holocaustforschung", about Jewish documents and photos of the Holocaust. Umbach was also invited to submit a tender bid (which was, however, not successful) to design the digital learning programme for the new Holocaust Gallery at the Imperial War Museum London: conversations with colleagues there (Rachel Donneley and James Bulgin) about how our project's findings can support IWM's work are still ongoing. Finally, together with Prof Ofer Ashkenazi (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), Umbach is currently working with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington on improving digital resources to enhance their museum visitors' experience. |
| Sectors | Creative Economy,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Description | Working closely with our project partners, the UK National Holocaust Centre and Museum, we have used the findings from this project -- comparing physical and virtual / digital exhibition experiences -- to inform a £4 million redevelopment programme of the museum, funded in turn by Arts Council England, Heritage Lottery funding, and private donors. Umbach, the PI, has been seconded (from January 2022, initially for two years, renewable) to work at the museum as chief academic advisor on the above redevelopment. Umbach works closely with the CEO, and together with him, has recruited a new leadership team -- chief curator and director of education -- to implement the redevelopment's objectives. Key to this is a better integration of digital outreach and physical redevelopment. For example, together with Co-I Paul Tennent from Nottingham's Computer Science Department, and the museums's new director of learning, the team developed a new digital platform "Bubbles", a spatialised group zoom call, that allows a digital visit of the museums' "Journey" exhibition, about the history of the kindertransport from Nazi Germany. This was a direct response ot a project's key finding, which is that in our "Eye as Witness" exhibition's online version, visitors missed the opportunity for live interaction with others that a physical museum visit offers: users reported on-site conversations during the visit crucially contribute to meaning-making. "Bubbles" answers to this need, in that it allows visits to interact with photographs and digital objects on the screen, but to converse about the experience with others while it is happening, facilitated by the museum's education staff. A second finding from our project was that users will only spend around 45 minutes in on on-screen virtual museum environment, but will happily spend at least twice as long in a physical exhibition space. Therefore, the museum has now adopted an approach to use online platforms not as substitues for the physical visits, but for two other functions: as preparation excercises, to allow young learners in a classroom to prepare for a visit, and thus spend the time at the museum more productively; and as follow-up excerises, to explore particular aspects of a museum visit in greater depth through online post-visit. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2022 |
| Sector | Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |
| Description | Learning about phygital audience engagement: partnership work with the UK National Holocaust Centre and Museum and its audiences |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Third sector organisations |
| Results and Impact | Working closely with our project partners, the UK National Holocaust Centre and Museum, we have used the findings from this project -- comparing physical and virtual / digital exhibition experiences -- to inform a £4 million redevelopment programme of the museum, funded in turn by Arts Council England, Heritage Lottery funding, and private donors. Umbach, the PI, has been seconded (from January 2022, initially for two years, renewable) to work at the museum as chief academic advisor on the above redevelopment. Umbach works closely with the CEO, and together with him, has recruited a new leadership team -- chief curator and director of education -- to implement the redevelopment's objectives. Key to this is a better integration of digital outreach and physical redevelopment. For example, together with Co-I Paul Tennent from Nottingham's Computer Science Department, and the museums's new director of learning, the team developed a new digital platform "Bubbles", a spatialised group zoom call, that allows a digital visit of the museums' "Journey" exhibition, about the history of the kindertransport from Nazi Germany. This was a direct response ot a project's key finding, which is that in our "Eye as Witness" exhibition's online version, visitors missed the opportunity for live interaction with others that a physical museum visit offers: users reported on-site conversations during the visit crucially contribute to meaning-making. "Bubbles" answers to this need, in that it allows visits to interact with photographs and digital objects on the screen, but to converse about the experience with others while it is happening, facilitated by the museum's education staff. A second finding from our project was that users will only spend around 45 minutes in on on-screen virtual museum environment, but will happily spend at least twice as long in a physical exhibition space. Therefore, the museum has now adopted an approach to use online platforms not as substitues for the physical visits, but for two other functions: as preparation excercises, to allow young learners in a classroom to prepare for a visit, and thus spend the time at the museum more productively; and as follow-up excerises, to explore particular aspects of a museum visit in greater depth through online post-visit. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |