From Timing and Tracking to Sequence Analysis. The Dynamics of Attention in Museum Visitor Studies
This article focuses on the use of spatiotemporal data in timing and tracking visitor studies. It underlines a paradox common in such researches: they use sequential data, ordered sequences of coordinates, but do not take into account the temporalities of the visitor experience in their analyses. We propose two explanations. First, the evaluation perspective that visitor studies usually take encourages the researchers to change their scale of analysis by turning actor-centered data into object-centered analyses. Second, the standardization of analytical tools did not stimulate the adoption of sequential data analysis. Finally, we present preliminary results of an ethnographic fieldwork on the museum reception of an old master’s work, and we show how one could make sense of the temporalities of the visitor experience.