Why are visuals important for tourists when visiting a museum?

The idea of the museum has become fundamental to collecting  practices beyond the museum practices that cannot only produce knowledge about objects but also configure particular ways of knowing and perceiving. Collecting practices confirm authenticity with its esteemed cultural capital because by establishing collections institutions perform the power they have in terms of practices of accessing, obtaining, transporting, preserving, and presenting esteemed objects and artifacts.

Tourists are great at collecting, as practices of both collecting and documenting (accessing, obtaining, photographing, transporting, etc.) are constitutive to the role of the tourist. By their definition as such, tourists expect and are expected to encounter exceptional sites and sights and to attempt to “preserve the moment” by employing various technologies of documentation. Being a tourist in this regard concerns being alert to aesthetic and otherwise notable sceneries and attractions, together with the willingness to and  possibility of recollecting them at a later point. For tourists,  pictures, videos, and souvenirs of sorts provide strong evidence of authenticity and resources for convincing storytelling and reminiscing and are part and parcel of the practices  that establish the social role of the tourist and the cultural capital involved.

In the context of modern tourism it represents the production of difference: this is a scientific image and not a  tourist souvenir or an emotional commemorative display.  If tourists commonly position themselves inside the frame,  thus authenticating their presence at the site; social scientists usually do the reverse. This is why the image conveys  the larger story of bodies. It conveys the dual embodiments and available  traces of the actual presence of both the visitors—who  signed in the visitor book,  and of the researcher—who documented their inscriptions and in order to do so had  followed their path and journeyed to the site.

In our projects: Providing visuals such as a virtual tour on DVDs or replacing the book signing with digital storytelling videos will satisfy this need of collecting souvenirs. 

Source:

Noy, C. (2011). The Aesthetics of Qualitative Research Performing Ethnography at a Hetitage Museum. Qualitative Inquiry. Vol 17 no. 10, 917-929