Co-Census: Designing an Interactive Museum Space to Prompt Negotiated Narratives of Ethnicity, Community, and Identity

• In Event: Tools for Constructing Historical Narratives: Teaching African American and Latino Histories With GIS Census Maps

Abstract

This paper discusses an ongoing design-based research project developing an exhibit in a small history museum in Chicago. A combination of embodied interaction technologies creates an exhibit that, although shared by visitors, is still able to respond to the bodily motions of each visitor uniquely, allowing visitors to co-investigate U.S. census data through the lens of their individual demographic identities. A radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag provided to visitors alerts the display to their presence, causing the population data for their ancestry group to appear on a map of the local community. The data are displayed as graduated-size circles, creating a “bubble map” depicting the number of residents per census tract sharing that visitor’s ancestry. Subsequent visitor movements (like approaching the display, moving laterally, or jumping) are tracked and reflected in the appearance and animation of the mapped data. This embodied interaction approach allows each visitor to see how he or she is “reflected” in the census data from a particular decade in American history, and to connect their family’s historical narrative to larger immigration trends. Because the display responds to all visitors within range, the visitor will also be able to see the “reflections” of other visitors.

A museum is uniquely situated as a learning institution in which personal, private, autobiographical narratives – or “little” narratives of individuals – can come into contact with larger, collective, national-scale, “big” narratives in a powerful way (Rowe, Wertsch & Kosyaeva, 2002). This exhibit provides a bridge between the two, infusing individual visitors’ stories with broader social narratives of immigration. The researchers intentionally structured the exhibit to capitalize on the dialectical relationship visitors innately form with exhibits (McLean, 1999). Visitors often interrogate exhibits by contrasting their lived experiences against the familiarity or “other”-ness they perceive in the exhibit, either silently or in conversation with companions. This project recasts the visitor-exhibit dialogue as a shared process between visitors, reifying interrogations as physical actions in the exhibition space to make them more visible and thus accessible to others. By casting visitors as “co-creators” of the resulting visualization, it extends the current trend in museums where visitors, not the institutional voice of the museum, are empowered to be the final authority of the interpretative narrative (Roberts, 1997).

The analysis of video and interview data focuses on how visitors chose to take advantage of the interpretive agency afforded by this embodied exhibit. The researchers used a grounded-theory approach to explore these interactions, taking special interest in the referents used in speech as a window into visitors’ negotiated familiar-vs-other perceptions when generating interpretive narratives. Transcripts from video were coded to identify visitors’ questions posed and inferences drawn, as well as nonverbal interactions with the embodied component of the display, in order to link different interpretative strategies to specific elements of the design. Visitors produced a range of narratives (e.g., geo-referenced, rooted in family history, rooted in social phenomena), and different visual and interaction designs mediated the “big” and “little” narratives employed by visitors.

Authors

• Jessica Roberts, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Leilah Lyons, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Joshua L. Radinsky, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Francesco Cafaro, University of Illinois at Chicago