Evaluating Historical Districts: exploring the use of photographs and slide experiments

This study explores approaches and methods to investigate visitors’ evaluation of historical districts. Personal interviews with use of Repertory Grid Analysis and Laddering Analysis and slide experiments with photographs were conducted with a sample of students to reveal relationships between various evaluative components. The results of the two sets of methods are examined in a comparative manner to obtain abundant insights into evaluations of historical districts and the efficacy of these methods. The results provide insights into issues raised by past studies. Particularly, they shed light on the complex nature of visitors’ evaluation of historical districts, as represented by the mixed effects of the presence of other people, commercialisation and modernity. Personal interviews and slide experiments are found to be mutually complementary in that, while the former illuminate the complex relationships between components of subjects’ evaluations, the latter depict these relationships in a more holistic and simple form by uncovering the commonality between the elicited components. The findings of the slide experiments also suggest room for further attempts to elicit evaluative components. Further studies of this kind with different groups of subjects and in different field settings would provide further insights into this complex area