This paper was written for an introductory research methods class at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.
Contemporary museums are more than mausoleums conserving the material culture of late, great empires for receptive, elite publics. Since the 1990s, museums have increasingly articulated their public value in terms of education and community wellbeing (Hooper-Greenhill, 1999). Embracing insights from sociocultural theory, sociology, neuroscience, and psychology, museums have begun to recognize themselves as multimodal, sensory, and affective spaces (Levent & Pascual-Leone, 2014) and have shifted their communication, programmatic, and educational strategies accordingly.
Citing the United Way of America’s adoption of new evaluation practices in 1995 and the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act in 1993, Stephen Weil argues that the structural changes to non-profit and government funding in the United States has fundamentally transformed the work of museums. Whereas museums used to be internally-facing institutions, focusing almost exclusively on the accumulation, preservation, and interpretation of their collections on behalf of the public, museums are now compelled by funding requirements to demonstrate their public value more broadly (Weil, 1999, 2000). This trend was compounded by the founding of the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Museum Assessment Program of the American Association of Museums (AAM)[1]. The requirement for museums to produce outcome-based assessments and impact statements have thus shifted priorities in policy and practice toward effectiveness and public accountability.
Museum education has been caught up in these institutional shifts. The 1992 report Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums by the AAM summarized these changes and asserted the central role of education in museum practice. The report offered a new definition of museums “as educational institutions that carry out their public service in the spirit of excellence and equity” and argued that “[m]useum missions should state unequivocally that an educational purpose is imbedded in every museum activity” (American Association of Museums & Hirzy, 2008, p. 16). Among other functions deemed “essential” to educational practice, the report cites “human interaction and interaction with objects and ideas” and “direct encounters with objects” as key contributions that museums make to public service and scholarship (American Association of Museums & Hirzy, 2008, p. 13).
Object-handling programs in museums thus align with the recommendations set forth in Excellence and Equity. Indeed, substantial research affirms the value of hands-on learning for conceptual change. Embodied cognition recognizes the entanglement of experience, perception, and thinking, in which cognitive structures both emerge from sensorimotor activities and guide perception (Varela et al., 1991). By recruiting perceptual-motor systems through movement and interaction, hands-on learning coordinates the body with symbolic representations (Abrahamson & Sánchez-García, 2016; Schwartz et al., 2016). In museums, hands-on programs designed to enhance conceptual learning in the social sciences may look like artifact-handling sessions for the general public or touch-tours for blind or low-vision visitors. Outside of structured programs designed to explicitly recruit touch as a learning modality, art and objects in museums nevertheless excite memory and emotion through their (imagined) tactility and sensory qualities. The presence of the artists’ hand in a swipe of paint, marks on artifacts indicating their original use or find context, a finger in a portrait stroking lace or resting on a shiny globe: all invite and activate sensory experience (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007). Since the “sensory turn” in cultural studies (Howes, 2006, 2014; Howes & Classen, 2014), research about and programming for embodied experiences in museums have become increasingly popular (Faron & Banda, 2014; Kai-Kee et al., 2020).
The discussion about touch in Western museums is nothing new. From the royal Wunderkammern of the 16th century to the founding of imperial, encyclopedic museums in the 17th and 18th centuries, touch was considered a key modality for empirical investigation, aesthetic appreciation, and religious veneration. In the 19th century, changes in scientific practice and theory—as well as progressive programs of public education—changed the sensory regime of Western culture (Classen, 2012; Leahy, 2012). Touch in the museum was rendered taboo by the 20th century; a cascade of new socio-sensory ideologies, exhibition display technologies, and techniques of bodily management have elevated sight as the primary sense in museum experience (Classen, 2005).
Despite the increasing regulation of touch in museums since the 19th century, touch—both sanctioned and unsanctioned—has never been entirely absent from the museum visitor experience. In response to David Howes’s 2014 special issue of Senses & Society about the rehabilitation of “sensory museology” (Howes, 2014), Fiona Candlin conducted a preliminary study of “illicit” or “unauthorized” touch at the British Museum. Her interviews with museum guards and visitors highlighted the various reasons why someone might reach out to stroke a stele or sarcophagus. Some visitors were confused about the rules, while others used touch empirically to confirm whether objects were real or replicas. In the majority of responses, “visitors talked about touch as a way of trying to make historical distance comprehensible and in so doing to grasp their own place whether that is ‘as a speck in history’ or as part of ongoing, shared embodied experience” (Candlin, 2017, p. 258). Throughout the changing tides of sensory ideology, museums have continued to be places of learning and social interaction, and sites at which to acquire and convey cultural authority.
As part of a broader research program exploring the value of object-based learning with historical artifacts in heritage contexts (Chatterjee, 2008), this preliminary study uses summative content analysis to understand the context and use of the word “touch” on museum websites. Balancing conservation and education, museums must navigate the rocky terrain between authorized and unauthorized touch: between hands-on, active learning with sanctioned artifacts under organized or programmatic conditions and illicit, incidental, or curious touch. This tension is reflected in the explicit contexts and latent attitudes toward “touch” on museums’ websites. At the site of their most accessible, public presence, museums reveal conflicting approaches to touch: elevating it as a primary learning modality, condemning it for its destructive force, or celebrating it as a mode of connection and reminiscence.
Methods
All American Alliance of Museums-accredited history museums in California (n=106) were sampled for this study, based on the membership database accessible through the AAM website. With their core missions to collect, conserve, and interpret historical material culture for diverse publics, history museums fit the broader research agenda to study object-based learning in heritage contexts. Furthermore, eight percent of AAM-accredited history museums are located within California and represent a range of historical subjects, museum sizes, and visitor populations. Future iterations of this study will include data from other types of collections-oriented heritage museums, including ethnically- and tribally-specific museums, natural history museums, general or multi-disciplinary museums, and anthropology museums (see Table 1).
The Google site:search function [“touch site:example.com”] was used to identify all uses of the word “touch” on each institution’s website. After an initial trial, “hands” was not used as an additional search term, as results that returned for “hands-on” were not specific to artifact or collections object-handling. Excluded uses of “touch” include:
- Children’s “hands-on” galleries, except where museums specifically call for touch as a learning modality
- Idiomatic mentions of touch (“Get in touch,” “he touched the hearts of many,” “this lectures touches upon”)
- Touching animals or living collections exclusively
- Touch screens
- COVID-19-related touch procedures
After excluding the cases listed above, 54 unique uses of the word “touch” across 27 history museums in California were identified for inclusion in the study. Texts featuring the keyword “touch,” direct links, and additional metadata were scraped and added to the study database; PDFs were linked via Google Drive. Additional attribute codes––text context, presence of images, and other details––were then added. The data were read over multiple times by the author to gain an overall sense of content and themes. Initial codes were then developed and included a mixture of structure, description, in vivo, and emotion codes. Magnitude codes were added to capture first impressions of the valence of texts, i.e.: whether “touch” was considered in a positive, neutral, or negative light (Saldaña, 2015).
Results
Texts were analyzed using summative qualitative content analysis. Content analysis is a research technique that systematically employs codes to identify and analyze certain words, themes, and concepts within a given text, leading to a full characterization of the “manifest content of communication” (Berelson, 1952). Summative qualitative content analysis includes both deductive and inductive coding techniques to provide basic insight into the use of keywords in context (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005).[2]
Overall, touch is considered in a positive light on museum websites. Out of 54 texts identified for inclusion in this study, 42 were coded with positive valence (see Table 2 for text examples). Webpages and newsletters designed to market new exhibitions or programs, reflect on past programs, or announce access schemes are overwhelming positive about the potential for touch to deepen visitors’ social and educational experiences. Indeed, a predominant theme identified in the initial round of coding concerns the connection between past and present through sensory engagement. Phrases like “we explained the artifacts at the table with enthusiasm in order to make the history more interesting and exciting for the public,” “students will touch and use artifacts to develop an understanding of past desert cultures and present desert uses,” and “we who share their piece of history, will gently touch a wingtip before climbing aboard, and always recall with reverence, those who came before us” speak to the power of touch in the development of historical empathy, imagination, and perspective-taking (Nilsen, 2016).
A second theme emerging from the initial round of coding concerns touch as one element of a multisensory learning experience. On a webpage advertising Girl Scout badge programs to group leaders, one local history museum describes their offerings for Brownies this way: “Look, listen, smell, taste, and touch. See how Historians use all of their senses in uncovering hidden secrets of the past. Select from several possible options for stimulating all five senses.” Elsewhere, an Asian American cultural center invites families to “Hear, touch, and play! A hands-on taiko experience for the whole family…” Here, touch is framed in the language of exploration and whole-body engagement, one modality (among many) through which to experience history and culture.
In contrast to the positive framing of touch in these contexts, visitor policies trend toward the negative: “”Guests must NOT touch the glass and must stay at least one foot away from objects. They must NOT touch exhibits, walls, or statues.” “”No sitting on or touching the Adobe furniture.” “”Refrain from touching the exhibitions, stantions, and ropes.” Notably, all of the texts labeled with negative valence in this study (n=9) come from PDFs that are not easily accessible from the homepage of the museum. That is, one must go looking for the visitor policy and then download additional material to find these negative statements about touch. Additionally, two of these negatively-framed no-touch policies are embedded in materials for K-12 audiences, while three instances of no-touch policies directed at K-12 audiences are decidedly positive in their framing. For example:
We hope that your visit will be a fun and enjoyable experience. To ensure that all guests to the museum on the day of your expedition have a similar experience, please encourage children not to touch the exhibits, displays or statues and to speak and walk softly as if they were in a library. Please ensure that students do not climb on the statues or columns…This is not only for the sake of the statues and columns, but for the safety of the students.
Indeed, seven no-touch policies for K-12 and public audiences are framed in this way: the policy begins with a polite opening (“please”), ample justification is offered, and visitors are encouraged to use other learning modalities to supplement their active learning process (“It is usually best to stay at least arm’s length from any displayed object and ‘point’ with a flat hand”). It is in these visitor policies––hidden under layers of webpages––that the tension between productive and destructive touch is clearest.
Conclusions
Do not touch Controls and Switches–this is a live ship and you could hurt yourself or others
Walk up and touch the fighters, bombers, and helicopters that took naval aviation into the jet age
This pair of texts––each from a different naval ship museum––speaks to this unique moment in museological practice. Variations in the valence of messaging on the websites of California’s history museums reflect the contested status of touch as an important aspect of multisensory learning on the one hand and as a threat to the conservation of valuable material culture on the other. As museums begin to re-open after COVID-19-related closures, visitor policies and interactive programming will undergo massive changes (Trusty, 2020). Almost 30 years after the publication of Excellence and Equity, museum education still faces a crisis of evaluation; it is difficult for practitioners to articulate what change (if any) museum education can effect (Garcia, 2012). In the midst of these ongoing challenges, leaders in the field are already declaring a “code red” moment for museum education (Hogarth, 2020). Despite the popularity and efficacy of hands-on programs, it is unclear whether there will be any education staff left to facilitate them.[3] Additionally, increased vigilance about touch-related visitor policies in a post-COVID-19 world will likely lead to differential monitoring and enforcement. Maurice Berger, art critic and curator who died of COVID-19-related complications in March, posed the question in 1992: “Are Art Museums Racist?” (Berger, 2020). Thirty years later, the answer has not changed. Despite the overwhelmingly positive appraisal of touch on the websites of California’s history museums, the field will need to be ever more aware of and responsive to institutional legacies of racism and classism as they manifest in managerial practices, visitor policies, and enforcement behavior once the doors are opened again.
Limitations and reflection on methods: Some museum websites may be poor indicators of conditions “on the ground” as relating to touch-based programs; the presence of archived newsletters in the study database collected through the Google site:search function indicate that this data collection method may skew results toward older programs and communications that no longer represent current museum practice. The inclusion of additional categories of collections-based historical museums (for example, Tribal museums) and Second Cycle coding methods (Berger, 2020) would help to achieve saturation, support the validity of the findings, and identify possible sites for targeted interviews. Following the model set forth in Candlin’s article about illicit touch, an ethnographic approach to studying variations of touch at one or more institutions could lead to rich findings.
It became clear to me that one round of initial coding using Google sheets was not sufficient to make definitive claims about a phenomenon, and I am not confident in the magnitude coding scheme to determine the valence of texts. After conducting this study, I see the value of having a team of code reviewers, more systematic approaches to coding (including axial coding), and coding software like MAXQDA. I look forward to honing my coding skills in future qualitative research courses.
[1] The name of the association was changed to the American Alliance of Museums in 2012 to “better reflect the 106-year old organization’s mission of unifying the diverse museum field, championing its cause and nurturing excellence among all of America’s museums” (Press Release: The Association Is Now the Alliance, 2012).
[2] Although the data are not anonymized, quotes from museum websites in the remainder of the report will not be cited (as practice for future research).
[3] For instance, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City told educators “it will be months, if not years, before we anticipate returning to budget and operations levels to require educator services” (Di Liscia, 2020).
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mindful museums 