II. Shifting Paradigms in Visitor Participation: Digital User-Generated Content at the Portland Art Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture

Introduction

Over the past decade, American museums have increasingly turned towards technological resources for novel visitor engagement opportunities. Digital user-generated content (UGC) is one such avenue of museum participation that validates visitors’ individuality and knowledge, and its utilization signifies a fundamental shift in museum’s relationship to their visitors. The work of the National Museum of African American History (NMAAHC) and the Portland Art Museum (PAM) present two fitting case studies of successful digital UGC initiatives implemented by American art and history museums. In particular, NMAAHC’s Reflection Booth and PAM’s Object Stories represent two distinct implementations of digital UGC recording booths within exhibition spaces. These institution’s adaptations of digital UGC illustrate the evolution of museum visitor participation and how museum’s digital UGC initiatives share interpretive authority with visitors, fosters inclusive, collaborative dialogues, and assist museums in achieving their institutional missions.

Defining & Contextualizing the Rise of Digital User-Generated Content

There does not appear to be a consensus across the sector on the definition of user-generated content or even firm distinctions between user-generated content and crowd-sourced content. Since some museums may use these terms interchangeably to refer to “anything shared by customers and patrons about an organization,” digital UGC must therefore be further defined within the scope of this research.¹ Mia Ridge’s Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage provides a succinct definition of crowdsourcing as “the act of taking work once performed within an organization and outsourcing it to the general public through an open call for participants… as a tool for digitizing or computing vast amounts of data.”² The Library of Congress’ (LOC) crowdsourcing campaign, By the People, exemplifies crowdsourcing within galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) cultural institutions. LOC invites its visitors to assist with digitizing projects on people like Mary Church Terrell and Alan Lomax by tagging, transcribing, and reviewing their collections. ³ Crowdsourcing participants in this context operate within strict parameters to complete clear-cut, specific tasks. On the other hand, nearly anything, from videos to photographs and artwork, may constitute user-generated content. Museums typically solicit a diverse range of UGC from the general public for activities across all museum departments.⁴ Likewise, digital UGC in Object Stories and the Reflection Booth are more free-form and center around participants driving the direction of content development themselves.

The rise of digital user-generated content across museums is due in part to the sector’s utilization of twenty-first century technological advancements, particularly social web technologies. The internet enabled increased societal participation; newfound accessibility to content meant a growing number of people, regardless of their geographic limitations, were able to partake in community-building on digital platforms. Additionally, barriers to early online participation, such as computer programming experience and access to means of production like cameras and video recorders, were lowered over time. Smart phone technologies and social media in particular granted users easier access to the aforementioned means of production required for digital content creation. As the years progressed, social web technologies of the mid-2000s such as Facebook, as well as user-generated digital brands like YouTube and Wikipedia, utilized and monetized internet users’ digital participation. American corporations concentrated on the lucrative opportunities’ digital user-generated content initiatives presented to e-commerce.

By contrast, museums’ draw towards digital UGC were more idealistic in nature and focused on democratizing the voices of authority within museums. Museums have traditionally exerted authoritative control over their collections and rejected the idea that visitors’ knowledge or interpretations of history were equal to museum curated or academic sources of knowledge. Such trends led museums to adopt restrictive “consumer-producer” relationships with visitors that perpetuated the myth of museums as the sole producers of content and visitors as the passive consumers of content. However, by the turn of the twenty-first century museums began to fully recognize how UGC, especially digital UGC, allowed museums to partner with “millions of creative community-minded people who are ready to visit, contribute, and participate.” ⁵ Building these online communication networks through museum websites, Flickr! Commons, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram has exponentially expanded the global reach of museums. Staking claim in online communities further enables museums to share their authority with visitors which in turn allows museums to better understand their visitors and effectively serve their communities. To maintain relevance, museums must continue to provide visitors with powerful platforms of engagement with their cultural heritage that cannot be easily replicated outside museum’s digital and physical sites.

Digital UGC at the National Museum of African American History and Culture

On December 16, 2003, Congress passed H.R.3491 – National Museum of African American History and Culture Act. ⁶ NMAAHC opened its doors to the public on September 24, 2016, making it the nineteenth museum in the Smithsonian Institution. This museum’s 36,000+ artifacts comprise the only national museum devoted exclusively to African Americans. ⁷ NMAAHC’s mission is divided into four pillars:

1. It provides an opportunity for those who are interested in African American culture to explore and revel in this history through interactive exhibitions

2. It helps all Americans see how their stories, their histories, and their cultures are shaped and informed by global influences

3. It explores what it means to be an American and share how American values like resiliency, optimism, and spirituality are reflected in African American history and culture

4. It serves as a place of collaboration that reaches beyond Washington, D.C. to engage new audiences and to work with the myriad of museums and educational institutions that have explored and preserved this important history well before this museum was created ⁸

These four pillars can each be witnessed in NMAAHC’s Reflection Booth, a key vehicle for capturing digital UGC within the museum. There are three recording booths within the History Galleries. One is located at the end of the Slavery and Freedom exhibition which is centered around visitors’ exploration of “the complex story of slavery and freedom which rests at the core of our nation’s shared history.” ⁹ As visitors pass through the Civil War and Reconstruction panels, the exhibition opens up to a row of wooden benches and the Reflection Booth. The benches are intentionally nestled between photographs and quotes from famous African Americans such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Mary McLeod Bethune. This alcove offers visitors their first opportunity to rest in the History Galleries which stretches over a mile in length. NMAAHC expertly utilizes the architectural design of this space to invite visitors to absorb these inspiring words all the while gently nudging them to use their own voices at platforms in the Reflection Booth.

Interior of the Reflection Booth, Courtesy of Rachel Rosenfeld

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Once visitors decide to participate, they enter a small recording booth fitted with two wooden chairs, a long wooden bench, a reflective rectangular screen, and a touchscreen. Unlike traditional recording booths, the ample seating here encourages interpersonal dialogue within larger groups. The Reflection Booth prompts visitors to “record your thoughts about African American history and culture and contribute your voice to the museum by answering a series of key questions.”¹⁰ Several of its carefully constructed questions are listed below:

1. Does your family have ties back to slavery and, if so, how do they discuss slavery and the family history?

2. After Emancipation, African Americans held annual celebrations. What traditions have passed down in your family? Do you know when and where they were first celebrated?

3. Churches, schools, and other social organizations have held the African American community together during difficult times. What holds your family/community together during difficult times?

4. What portions of the exhibition you just walked through, Slavery and Freedom, are most memorable to you and why? ¹¹

In The Participatory Museum, author Nina Simon posits that great questions are not just open to a variety of responses, but also make “visitors feel confident and capable of answering the questions” by drawing on “their knowledge, not their comprehension of institutional knowledge.”¹² Each of the Reflection Booth’s questions encapsulate Simon’s guiding principles through their frameworks for visitor responses. Their open-ended nature encourages visitors to draw from their personal experiences as they ruminate on profound questions of family history, their place within society, the significance of our institutions, and reflections on NMAAHC’s Slavery and Freedom exhibition. In other words, NMAAHC expertly grounds their questions in visitors’ lived experiences, thus eliminating the possibility of a “right” answer to any question that could discourage visitors from participating. These question parameters can be easily replicated at other museums, regardless of the scope of a museum’s digital user-generated content initiative.

Museum professionals must also be intentional with phrasing their digital UGC questions. NMAAHC excels at this in the Reflection Booth by tying its questions back to the four pillars of its mission. In doing so, they continually justify the presence of digital UGC within their institution. The first question on family ties to slavery directly echoes the second pillar’s goal to help all Americans uncover the interrelated nature of “their stories, their histories, and their cultures” within a global framework.¹³ The Reflection Booth’s questions on community institutions and ways to commemorate participation in American society draws directly on NMAAHC’s third pillar. For centuries, African American churches and schools have successfully cultivated black pride and unity within their community. These questions motivate visitors to consider the ways in which these sites were safe spaces to celebrate African American’s embodiment of American values such as “resiliency, optimism, and spirituality” in the face of rampant discrimination.¹⁴ The Reflection Booth’s fourth question is equally germane to the museum’s mission. Its focus on the most memorable aspects of the exhibition is important because it grants visitors the opportunity to “revel in this history” of African American culture.¹⁵ At the same time, this question prompts visitors to contemplate what aspects of the interactive exhibitions they connect most intimately with which can in turn inform future exhibition design at NMAAHC. Ultimately, each of the Reflection Booth’s questions are thoughtfully constructed because the museum is genuinely interested in hearing visitors’ responses.

Sustainability is central to the longevity of this digital UGC initiative. Beyond the initial construction costs, maintenance expenses were not overly burdensome for this federally-funded museum. Thankfully, digital UGC initiatives are naturally flexible and still achievable for smaller scale museums. Ravon Ruffin, the former Digital Engagement Producer at NMAAHC, believes “this project is adoptable by a number of institutions, at varying scales” because without recording booths, museums can still utilize DSLR or phone cameras to “quickly capture visitor experiences.”¹⁶ Throughout Ruffin’s tenure, NMAAHC’s staff took great care to sustainably archive each Reflection Booth response. She recalled working diligently with the staff oral historian who led “the team in cataloguing the thousands of videos, to excavate videos that represented a cross-section of the millions of Museum visitors.”¹⁷ This care and attention to detail stands in stark contrast to many museum’s routine disposal of UGC response notebooks or flashcards due to storage limitations, budget restrictions, or general disinterest in visitor responses. Disposal of UGC tends to occur more frequently if UGC is simply put up for show and not germane to museum goals, but this is not the case with the Reflection Booth.

Transparency and trust between NMAAHC’s staff and the Reflection Booth’s participants is also an essential aspect to the interactive’s sustainability. At the beginning of each Reflection Booth session, participating adults and supervised children must explicitly grant NMAAHC permission to feature their digital UGC in future exhibitions, the museum’s social media platforms, and its website. Such clearly defined standards of consent and articulated project goals intentionally fosters transparency between NMAAHC and their audience. Additionally, NMAAHC expertly gains visitors’ trust by granting them the power to create digital user-generated content that is only shared privately via email, not with the museum. While these components of the Reflection Booth may appear small in the grand scheme of the initiative, they collectively can make visitors feel safe, valued, and comfortable as they begin to engage with the recording booths.

In the twenty-first century, the internet is the most effective tool for NMAAHC to serve “as a place of collaboration that reaches beyond Washington, D.C. to engage new audiences.”¹⁸ Thus, NMAAHC has occasionally highlighted its digital user-generated content from the Reflection Booth on their social media platforms. The Visitor Voices campaign is the clearest example of NMAAHC implementing digital UGC to serve the last pillar of its institutional mission. YouTube and NMAAHC partnered for the Visitor Voices video series which commemorated NMAAHC’s first anniversary. The campaign sought to highlight visitors’ “time at the Museum to empower them to see themselves as part of the Museum’s history and community.”¹⁹ The month-long campaign shared thirty videos on NMAAHC’s YouTube and Twitter profiles, and encouraged visitors to contribute even more by using the hashtag #VisitorVoices, commenting, and liking each post on social media.

NMAAHC’s Digital Strategy Plan outlines the museum’s drive towards social listening within their social media practices, and the digital UGC in the Visitor Voices campaign follows this plan.²⁰ Since visitors naturally expect and listen to heavily curated institutional voices in museums, NMAAHC’s spotlight on digital UGC is notable because it broadens the scope of sources utilized in the museum’s interpretation of African American history. There is an inherent power in the personal testimonies captured through digital UGC. Unlike reading exhibition text or glancing at photographs, digital UGC is more tangible, it allows visitors to see the speakers directly and hear their testimonies in their own words. Visitor Voices treats participants as individuals, not just members of a nameless crowd or an isolated quote on an exhibit panel. Ravon Ruffin commended the ability of NMAAHC’s digital projects to “tell the unvarnished truth without editing visitor responses, [which] captured people’s response to that truth.”²¹ For example, the delivery of Prince D. Holland’s family history as sharecroppers or Johnny Fraiser Jr.’s traumatic experiences of being “brutally beaten and yanked off a bus” during the civil rights era are all the more gripping and impactful for consumers of the Visitor Voices campaign because of its digital format.²²

While Holland and Fraiser Jr.’s testimonies stimulate conversations about racial discrimination, Visitor Voices also featured digital UGC about visitors taking advantage of NMAAHC as a platform for building a fairer, more inclusive future. In “You Should Take That Risk For Change,” a visitor grappled with the fact that “if people weren’t willing to take the risk, then people like me would still be in chains.”²³ His struggles echo the speaker in “Are We Wasting All That Effort?” who proclaimed, “after this experience, I want to fight back. I want to stand up for something.”²⁴ NMAAHC serves as a space for visitors to reflect on our country’s checkered past and hopes to educate the general public so that they may learn from past injustices. The brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 is one such American atrocity that may never be undone or corrected. In “I Never Knew About Emmett Till,” a young black woman channels her sorrow and anger over hate crimes into a call for action:

So, I would just like to ask to anyone who sees this to try your best to be a better person, to be a prouder person, to be proud of you and where you came from, but don’t look down on others because of where they came from. To be positive and always lend a helping hand, to take care of others…That’s something we should do and start as a nation, as a world, as a country, as a planet, love each other.²⁵

Through NMAAHC’s digital platforms, Foster’s powerful call to action is amplified across the internet and viewers are invited to contribute their personal responses to her content. This museum not only respects its visitors’ personal contributions to their institution, but craves visitor insight.

Ultimately, NMAAHC’s utilization of digital user-generated content is a prime example of shifting dynamics amongst museums and their visitors. Museum professionals and academics are no longer the only sources of content, and NMAAHC’s embracement of digital UGC centered on their visitors’ perspectives signifies innovative changes in the sector for the better.

Digital UGC at the Portland Art Museum

The Portland Art Museum (PAM) was founded in 1892, making it the oldest art museum in the Pacific Northwest.²⁶ Its founding collection consisted of one hundred plaster casts of Roman and Greek sculptures, and over the past century, has grown to over 42,000 diverse objects. PAM is one of the leading cultural institutions in the Pacific Northwest, and its mission today is to “engage diverse communities through art and film of enduring quality, and to collect, preserve, and educate for the enrichment of present and future generations.”²⁷ Its digital UGC initiative, Object Stories, channels this broad mission through personal storytelling with objects. While NMAAHC’s digital UGC is but one component in a larger exhibition, digital UGC at PAM has evolved into an exhibition series grounded in its local community’s testimonies. The ongoing iterations of Object Stories speaks to the evolution of digital user-generated content within museums and the ways such projects center their content on public contributions as opposed to solely museum or academic ones.

Object Stories was initially launched in 2010 through a partnership with the Northwest Film Center, the Milagro Theater, and Write Around Portland. The project was also funded by a MetLife Foundation grant for community engagement and outreach.²⁸ Similar to the Reflection Booth, PAM created an in-gallery recording booth for its digital UGC. By March 2011, they also created an app for visitors who didn’t have access to the museum and organized Object Stories Middle, a partnership with local middle schools focused on personal storytelling experiences. The in-gallery recording booth became the main focus of Object Stories. Visitors had two options for their reservation-based sessions, they could tell a Personal Story about an object that they found to be meaningful or share a Museum Story about their personal connection to PAM’s collection.²⁹ One might assume the effort required to register online for this digital UGC experience would draw out dynamic visitor responses, but this was not the case. In 2011, Christina Olsen, the former Director of Education and Public Programs, recalled the earliest iteration of the project delivered an underwhelming product. The narrative structure within the Personal Story sessions granted visitors too much freedom over their content development. Olsen found that “people would go in, do their story, come out, say it was so powerful and cathartic, but then the videos would be really bad – boring, too, long, unstructured.”³⁰ PAM encountered equally lukewarm results to the Museum Story sessions. Olsen admitted, “these stories were, frankly, often very banal” because the stories were often about “objects that they might come see once or twice and like, but not really have a deep connection with.”³¹ Upon further reflection of these roadblocks, PAM concluded guided, more structured participation was less daunting to participants and therefore more conducive to successful digital UGC.

Object Stories Exhibition, Courtesy of the Portland Art Museum

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The Portland Art Museum began remedying the situation by first reformatting the digital UGC and including UGC examples for participants. The museum proceeded to nix the more stream of conscious video format in favor of digital UGC grounded in audio and photographs paired with carefully constructed prompts. Object Stories provided five prompts to visitors who then had forty-five seconds to respond. Examples of these prompts include, “when and how did you first receive, discover, or encounter your object? What was your first feeling or impression of it? Who was there?” and “If you had to give it to someone, who would it be and what would you say to them?”³² Similar to the Reflection Booth, these prompts effectively guided visitors’ experiences without limiting the scope of their responses to “right” or “wrong” answers. It rather focused on their lived experience and personal knowledge. Following these audio recordings, visitors were invited to take photographs with their objects in different positions and create a six-word title for their content. It is important to note this iteration of Object Stories included cases to display objects as well as an online digital archive and browsing kiosk for museum visitors to expand the project’s reach. Overall, each of these changes to the parameters of Object Stories drastically improved the digital UGC end product.

As PAM’s staff worked out these kinks in Object Stories, they encountered several other roadblocks that changed the trajectory of this digital user-generated content initiative. In a 2015 Museum Computer Network (MCN) livestream, Kristin Bayans, the former Manager of Interpretive Media at the Portland Art Museum, granted viewers insight into the challenges of Object Stories. For instance, the design and production of their recording booths was no small cost. Additionally, the code for Fashionbudda, PAM’s costly customized backend content-management system (CMS), continually broke and the company eventually went out of business, leaving the Object Stories team at a loss.³³ After regrouping, the Portland Art Museum staff opted for a standardized CMS and moved away from the in-gallery recording booth by shifting towards a more curated and completely mobile digital UGC platform that they hoped would allow for easier staffing and time management.

The final iteration of Object Stories has been the most successful version of this digital user-generated content initiative and is the clearest embodiment of PAM’s goals. Yet, if one of Object Stories’ missions is to subvert the authoritative curatorial voice of museums, doesn’t implementing a heavier curatorial hand in this digital UGC exhibition series seem counterintuitive? In theory, yes, but Object Stories exhibits take distinct steps to avoid the paternalistic, curatorial voice that visitors traditionally expect in exhibitions. In practice, PAM does not heavily edit testimonies and deliberately implements curation only as a design tool in Object Stories to create a coherent, succinct platform “where Portland and the Pacific Northwest’s many communities can directly address issues affecting their lives.”³⁴ Even though Object Stories now only highlight fix to seven voices, its digital UGC is still centered on personal storytelling through objects and treats members of the general public as co-creators of museum content.

Object Stories’ final iteration marks a dramatic shift towards embracing digital user-generated content as a primary vehicle for social justice activism within the Portland Art Museum. By spotlighting the ongoing struggles of marginalized Portlanders, Object Stories enacts PAM’s philosophical and core value by creating “a deeper understanding of our shared humanity.”³⁵ PAM rotates Object Stories three to four times a year, and since 2014 they have successfully implemented fourteen thematic exhibitions. Its iterations include, but are not limited to: Invisible Me, an exhibition centered on individuals with chronic physical, cognitive, and neurological conditions; Powerful Self: LGBTQIA2S+ Lives Today, an exhibition grounded in relationships between intergenerational persons within the Pacific Northwest LGBTQIA2S+ communities; Combat Paper, an exhibition in which American veterans, active duty military, and civilians engage in discourse about reframing “how we think about war and military service.”³⁶ Similar to NMAAHC’s Reflection Booth responses, each of these digital UGC-based exhibitions gained visitor consent before utilizing the general public as the foundation for their narratives. PAM’s visitors relish these unique opportunities to contribute their voices to the museum and spread calls to action across the community.

One Step Away is one of the Portland Art Museum’s most recent iteration of Object Stories, and was on display from July 2018 – January 2019. The personal objects and individual testimonies center on the “compound and growing issues of homelessness and housing insecurity” in Portland today.³⁷ America’s homeless populations are far too often treated as statistics, not as individuals. One Step Away’s seven digital UGC recordings work to humanize homeless Portlanders by providing each person a platform to share their story on their own terms and hopefully garner support to enact long-lasting change. Joel’ Waddell’s entry is a particularly powerful example of digital UGC:

Before I became homeless, I just thought it was a disease or something… I got a job, I worked that and I got laid off and then I couldn’t afford a place to stay. When I became homeless, I’m like, I’m not a drug addict, I don’t have a record, but I’m here so you know, why? Why am I here? What did I do wrong to get here? Homeless people are not lazy, they just want opportunity, they want a chance. Sometimes you need help… I hope when I finish this journey that somebody that see this will understand.³⁸

Waddell yearns to impart empathy into his listeners, and Object Stories effectively amplifies his message through its exhibition space, the museum’s YouTube channel, and its social media networks on Twitter and Facebook.

The sheer diversity of contributors to Object Stories speaks to the initiative’s success at creating inclusive spaces within PAM for visitors from all walks of life. Without digital avenues for user-generated content creation, the Portland Art Museum would not have developed this dynamic campaign whose high-impact content symbolizes progressive challenges to the traditional scope and main subjects of traditional art exhibitions.

Concluding Thoughts

The rise in digital user-generated content in the museum field signifies a fundamental shift in how twenty-first century museums operate. By inviting visitors to actively contribute their lived experiences to exhibition development, museums affirm the value of visitor perspectives in every facet of their work. Museums must respect their visitors, and digital UGC created through recording booths enrich engagement between these two groups in ways impossible without technology. NMAAHC strives to facilitate “a national dialogue on race…[and] foster a spirit of reconciliation and healing” across the country, and its Reflection Booth effectively provides visitors a digital and physical platform to do just that.³⁹ The Portland Art Museum’s final iteration of Object Stories directly echoes NMAAHC’s call to action through its exhibitions focused on social activism within the local community. As the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Portland Art Museum’s utilization of digital platforms continue to amplify their visitors’ voices, one hopes these conversations around inclusivity and museum visitor participation will continue and encourage more museums to reap the benefits of digital user-generated content.

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Notes