Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

This paper provides museum professionals a tool to map museum engagement in the online space. The pressures for museums to have online spaces and offer materials there are increasing together with pressures of digitalization of content and making things widely available online. However, the museum offering or museum repertoires are focusing around their own understanding of the digital space. This kind of focus ignores the importance of audience perception and audience engagement as we also lack knowledge as to how to assess the engagement potential of the online environments. This paper tackles the concept of audience engagement in digital space through literature review and empirical case studies in order to provide an analytical tool for museum professionals that permits investigation of museum digital spaces to understand what kind of audience engagement it affords. Following theoretical ideas about engagement from museum and media studies perspectives and affordances from a design perspective, we propose systematization engagement experiences. We integrate different ideas of engagement, among others the idea of the social, intellectual, emotional, and informational engagement, with the idea of perceived affordances from the different audiences. We also discuss the idea that different audience groups have different modes of engagement with museums in the digital space.