An Exploratory Study of Sensemaking of Historical Information

There are many ways of documenting and making sense of the past. Contemporary museums are attempting to facilitate these processes by creating online as well as in-museum experiences for visitors. Whether they encounter the past via physical or digital artefacts, visitors often reflect the values and interests of the communities to which they belong. Museums have a growing interest in gathering additional ’crowdsourced’ historical information through the experiences they design; experiences that are likely to contrast these communities. Online and in-museum visitor experiences are different but could reflect an engagement with the past in complementary ways, depending on how visitors make sense of them. We report an exploratory study of sensemaking by museum visitors as they encountered a set of digital historical images in a military museum. Based on Dervin’s approach to sensemaking, the images were accompanied by three neutral verbal prompts to encourage thinking about their individual meaning. Visitors were able to spontaneously suggest a wide range of terms to describe their interest in each image but the variety was notably greater when the first in the set was of an individual airman in a state of repose, rather than of a group of personnel in a social setting. Our study raises a number of questions about the relationship between the navigation of museum visitors through digital artefacts and the design of support for their journeys. We argue that anchoring an experience on a direct relationship with a personal image could have particular significance for sensemaking processes that could engage visitors with a more nuanced understanding of the past. It may be that direct relationships of this kind are able to bridge differences of understanding between the communities to which visitors belong.