What kinds of questions do users ASK us about art?

I ended my last post with a brief exploration of what people are asking about via ASK. I was particularly interested in going beyond the top 100 most-asked about works that the dashboard metrics pull. Based on the information that the top 100’s gave me and my desire to learn if there are any similarities in questions asked across different collections, I decided to break down the dashboard analysis further. I looked again at the top 100 snippets, but broken out by collection type. This was the key to finding similarities across collections. From each of these top 100 collection-specific snippets, I coded the questions based on what they were generally about. Here’s an example of what part of the Asian Art collection chart looked like:

Next came standardizing the themes so I could code them and compare them across collections.

This chart serves as basic data viz for themes across collections. Note that these themes are my interpretation from the questions visitors asked and could vary based on what another researcher codes the questions as.

Several universal themes across collections came out of this analysis. I personally find ‘damages/missing parts’ one of the most fascinating findings. If a work of art has something that appears to be missing from it, intentional or not, visitors will likely ask about it. Other themes across most of the different collection areas include:

• Creation techniques/materials
• Symbolism
• Purpose/function
• Curatorial decisions
• Significance/meaning

The coding system of themes, definitions, and collection areas. Note ECANEA stands for Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Art.

While this thematic breakdown does provide interesting insight into what visitors want to know, I still wanted to delve deeper into user behavior with the app, especially in regards to the complete trajectory of a visit. These themes are based on only a snippet of entire conversation. What could we learn if we looked at that entire conversation? Unfortunately, the dashboard won’t export entire conversations yet, so I had to pause this line of inquiry. But I picked up another thread and began to follow it. More on that next week!