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Social media analytics in museums: extracting expressions of inspiration

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-05-04, 09:03 authored by David M. Gerrard, Martin SykoraMartin Sykora, Tom JacksonTom Jackson
Museums have a remit to inspire visitors. However, inspiration is a complex, subjective construct and analyses of inspiration are often laborious. Increased use of social media by museums and visitors may provide new opportunities to collect evidence of inspiration more efficiently. This research investigates the feasibility of a system based on knowledge patterns from FrameNet – a lexicon structured around models of typical experiences – to extract expressions of inspiration from social media. The study balanced interpretation of inspiration by museum staff and computational processing of Twitter data. This balance was achieved by using prototype tools to change a museum’s Information Systems in ways that both enabled the potential of new, social-media-based information sources to be assessed, and which caused the museum staff to reflect upon the nature of inspiration and its role in the relationships between the museum and its visitors. The prototype tools collected and helped analyse Twitter data related to two events. Working with museum experts, the value of finding expressions of inspiration in Tweets was explored and an evaluation using annotated content achieved an F-measure of 0.46, indicating that social media may have some potential as a source of valuable information for museums, though this depends heavily upon how annotation exercises are conducted. These findings are discussed along with the wider implications of the role of social media in museums.

Funding

This research was partly funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number 1234317].

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Museum Management and Curatorship

Volume

32

Issue

3

Pages

232 - 250

Citation

GERRARD, D.M., SYKORA, M.D. and JACKSON, T., 2017. Social media analytics in museums: extracting expressions of inspiration. Museum Management and Curatorship, 32 (3), pp. 232-250.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-03-02

Publication date

2017-03-29

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Museum Management and Curatorship on 29th March 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09647775.2017.1302815.

ISSN

0964-7775

eISSN

1872-9185

Language

  • en