The Online Museum: A "Placeless" Space of the "Civic Laboratory"

Abstract

Building on Tony Bennett’s (1995) understanding of a museum as a “civic laboratory,” this study advances this framework by researching a museum space in a virtual world. It shows that an online museum can be understood as a “placeless” space of a “civic laboratory” by analyzing visitor research methodologies that are utilized online. Through comparison of traditional museum-visitor research tools and methods with the ones that online museum spaces employ, this article seeks to demonstrate that the online museum environment is equipped with a plethora of tools that make it a laboratory-type research setting where visitor studies are conducted. The analysis reveals that the historical development of online museum-audience research has gone through methodological stages similar to those of traditional visitor research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.