Intersections of the Cultural Kind: Public Digital Humanities and the Museum

The presentation examines a recent research intervention in the Permanent Collection Gallery of the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada that used digital data mining to assess how visitors in a museum of Islamic arts were making sense of their encounters with the patterned works of art – both physical and digital – in the galleries. Data was collected by the researcher through visitor interviews and analysed in NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software. The interview data was compared to material compiled as a literature review of scholarly writing, also imported into NVivo, on the same topic of museum-going subject / patterned museum object intersections. Text data mining and data mapping and visualization methods built up a picture of the striking contrast between scholarly views of visitors’ experiences of patterned art and the actual experiences of visitors themselves when confronted with the art in the galleries. In essence, the salient difference between scholars’ and visitors’ views of patterned art comes down to their approach to the meanings held in the visual patterns themselves: generally meaningless beyond aesthetic functions to scholars yet full of meaning to visitors. By using NVivo to search for consistencies in the interview texts, I discovered that the visual patterns in the art tell stories, and this makes them deeply meaningful to their viewers. My research demonstrates how data visualization methods can be used effectively to uncover and analyze the microcosm of human culture and society that is a museum gallery