The Intersection of Art and Data
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John Moore, Analyst, Elanco Animal Health
James Troy Smythe, Education and Interpretation Supervisor, Corning Museum of Glass
The Corning Museum of Glass is a not-for-profit museum dedicated to telling the story of a single material: glass. The museum is in the planning stages of redesigning one of its largest galleries. A timing and tracking study recorded the path and activities of visitors as they were in the gallery. The authors used the mapping, visualization and analytical power of JMP to gain insights into visitor flow and behavior. These insights will be used to plan the new design of the gallery.
Map of 35 Centuries of Glass Gallery
The 35 Centuries of Glass gallery, the oldest gallery at the Corning Museum of Glass, shows the history of glass from ancient Egypt to Modern day. Corning Museum of Glass is planning to redesign the gallery and commissioned a timing and tracking study of visitors.
Observers follow visitors through the gallery unnoticed recording:
- Size, type, and age of visitor group
- Entry and exit time
- Locations visited in the gallery and activities at the locations
If an observer is observed by a subject that visit is not used in the timing and tracking study.
Where are visitors entering and exiting?
A parallel plot in Graph Builder easily shows that most visitors are entering at the Origins exhibit and exiting at the Modern exhibit.
How long are visitors staying?
Graph Buider makes it easy to compare visit durations.
Visit paths
The Custom Map Creator add-in by Justin Mosiman made it easy to create a map of the gallery in JMP. You can find Custom Map Creator at JMP User Community File Exchange.
We used the "row order" option in Graph Builder's Line chart to show visitors paths through the gallery.
Visitors tended to "hug" the outside wall. We also noticed visitor fatigue. Visitors would start their visits looking at many displays but after a certain point they got tired and started skipping most of the displays.
Where are visitors going? What are they doing?
Graph Builder also gave us an easy way to show where visitors did activities such as: stopping, reading, taking photos, watching videos, and talking with other visitors.
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Association Analysis, a new tool to JMP 13, allowed us to see if visits to certain displays clustered together. We found five topics, or clusters of displays. Most of the topics were displays that were near each other, but topic three was spread out across different areas. Conversations with the curators revealed that the displays in topic three all dealt with surface treatments such as painting, etching, and cutting.
