That museum visiting is a social event—it is carried out in the presence of others, even if
they are not part of the same visiting group—is at one level obvious but also, as Christian
Heath and colleagues have argued in a set of papers (e.g. Heath and vom Lehn 2004;
Heath et al. 2002, 2005; Hindmarsh et al. 2002, 2005), largely ignored by research. In fact,
there is some work, such as that of Fyfe and Ross (1996) and Longhurst et al. (2004) that
has sought to explore wider narratives in which museum visiting might occur, although
this has not yet been thoroughly linked to what goes on in the museum; and there is also
work that has argued that the social contexts of visiting (e.g. for a family ‘day out’) inflect
upon the particular ‘readings’ of an exhibition (Macdonald 2002, chapter 8). But what is
largely lacking, as Heath and colleagues maintain, is study of visitor interaction in
galleries. Their own work seeks to address this by employing video technologies to
observe and analyse interactions among visitors in specific—sometimes specially
designed—exhibitions.