Project description

How do museum visitors remember the spatio-temporal contexts of the exhibits after visiting an exhibition? And are these spatio-temporal references also evident in online exhibitions? At the German Mining Museum in Bochum, as part of the special exhibition "Gras over it ... Mining and the environment in a German-German comparison", the developments and events in the course of the recent past were presented for three different mining regions in Germany. The exhibits were arranged in the museum rooms according to thematic topics. An exploratory questionnaire study at the IWM investigated how visitors remembered the spatio-temporal arrangement of the exhibits after visiting an online exhibition. Findings showed that visitors recognized the individual geographical locations very well, but, although they perceived the large time frame, they did not divide it into individual time periods. Overall, many of the topics covered in the exhibition were remembered after visiting the exhibition and interest was aroused, as visitors stated that they would have liked to click in the online exhibition to access more in-depth information. However, due to the online presentation, the readability and assignability of the texts to the exhibits were sometimes perceived as difficult. This project was part of the Leibniz Research Network "Value of the Past".