Mixed Cultural Visits or What COVID-19 Taught Us

Abstract

When the majority of museums and other cultural institutions were shut down due to the pandemic, mixed museum visits became a hot issue. After the pandemic, mixed visits, in the opinion of many experts, would become the new norm for experiencing cultural content. Diverse types of mergers between online and onsite visits have already begun to be investigated by researchers, with the purpose of not only avoiding the spread of disease but also of enabling visits of people who were previously excluded, such as persons in remote geographic areas or people with mobility challenges. In fact, over the last three years, there have been rapid developments in mixed visits in cultural heritage sites. The current work takes into account a contextual model of museum learning to define potential use scenarios for visits from people of different cultural backgrounds and offers an evaluation of current practices. The new model that emerges, the contextual model of mixed visits, allows for the further study of the field, as it attempts to describe recent research efforts in four main contexts: mixed visits in the personal context, mixed visits in the socio-cultural context, mixed visits in the physical context, and temporality of mixed visits. Inductive analysis of a literature review allowed the extraction of relevant themes, examples from museums, as well as extraction of guidelines.