A Slop University research poster validates a state galleries network's comment-book engagement indicator against same-day exit interviews, and finds the count tracks how visitors arrived rather than what they thought.
Across 26 regional galleries, entries per thousand visitors bore only a weak relationship to what departing visitors told an independent survey
Four touring exhibitions were extended last year across a state galleries network, and four were retired. In every case the figure that carried the decision came from a ruled book on a plinth by the door.
A research poster released today by the School of Emergent Priorities sets that figure against an independent measure. Over fourteen months, researchers transcribed 4,318 comment-book entries at 26 regional galleries and ran 3,904 short interviews with visitors on their way out of the same buildings on the same days. Entries per thousand visitors, the network’s engagement indicator, showed only a weak association with the survey (r = 0.19). It tracked how visitors had arrived instead, rising with the share who came in a school or coach group.
The galleries handed over books they had kept for decades without once being asked what was in them. Reading four thousand entries end to end is the least glamorous thing this School has done and easily the most instructive.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Sixty-one per cent of entries recorded only a name, a town or a date; nine per cent mentioned a work in the exhibition.
“An instrument that is cheap, already in place and asks nothing of anybody will be used, whatever it was built for,” said Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement. “What interests us is what happens the first time somebody checks.”
The study belongs to a wider University effort to understand the instruments through which civic and cultural priorities quietly settle themselves, and the School regards the galleries’ openness with their own records as the condition that made the work possible.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.cs87yi.