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This article argues that museum visiting and the act of 'spectatorship', both of which are often assumed to be ocularcentric, are multimodal events. Anchored in Goffman's dramaturgy and frame analysis theory, as well as Kress's multimodal and social semiotic theory of representation and communication, this article presents an apposite interpretative and methodological framework to account for what has not been widely addressed by museum studies; that is, the multimodality of the museum experience. By drawing upon audio-visual excerpts of museum encounters, this analysis brings to the fore the embodied visiting and viewing practices of visitors in museum galleries. Specifically, this article highlights the range of modes of communication and representation, beyond gazing and looking, which are employed, negotiated and regulated within the social context of the visit. The article suggests that visitors' experiences are embodied and performative interactions with the exhibits and other visitors.The analysis draws upon methodological developments within sociology and in particular Erving Goffman's dramaturgy and frame analysis theory (1963; 1971), as well as Gunther Kress's (2010) multimodal and social semiotic theory of representation and communication. By drawing upon multimodality, we show how talk, gesture, gaze and elements of the material context blend together and contribute to the production of meaning. We expand on existing sociocultural research into museums, stressing that museum encounters are embodied and multimodal events, during which physical movement, gesture, and gaze may reveal aspects of meaning making not apparent through analysis of the verbal mode alone. By treating nonverbal modes of expression as resources of meaning-making activity, we suggest that action, experience and communication may be brought into fruitful dialogue, if not integrated, to foreground the multiplicity of ways through which people communicate (Bezemer and Mavers 2011).It is through bringing together these two theories, ethnomethodology and multimodal social semiotics that we engage in a much needed interdisciplinary conversation (Dicks 2014). The virtue of these perspectives is that, by contrast to structural and deterministic sociological approaches, they permit us to theorize the agency of visitors as co-producers of meaning. The article proposes an appropriate interpretative and methodological framework which illuminates the social worlds of museums. Both the theoretical framework and the methodological tools employed allow the traditional mind-body dualism to be overcome in order to explore the modes and performances of visitors' encounters, as they arise in and through interaction with people and exhibits. The approach adopted in this article allows us to better understand this mediation through the exhibits, as well as through other fellow and co-present visitors. By raising social interaction to prominence, this article (i) foregrounds the social worlds of museums; and (ii) challenges notions of the 'static' visito...

This paper acknowledges the multimodal and social nature of the museum experience. In this paper, we advocate the view that, within this multimodal frame, visitors are agents of their own design for learning as they engage with the exhibition and each other, redesigning the stories told by the curators. Audio-visual data from two individual projects in the UK illustrate the multimodal, embodied and social nature of the museum experience, which is often assumed to be ocularcentric and logocentric, and suggest that visitors learn by constantly making selections and transformations of the exhibition design, based on their own interests and responses to the various prompts emerging in and through social interaction. As such, the data analysis foregrounds the modes of movement, gaze, deixis and posture, which, alongside speech, are integral elements of the learning experience. Shifting our research focus on visitors' redesigns of the exhibition poses a challenge to the curatorial design and has implications for exhibition-makers as it calls into question the assumptions of what should be learned and why, as well as how the resources in the exhibition space should be organised.

By viewing the museum experience as inextricably linked to an interactive nexus of bodies and objects arranged in the museum space, this paper foregrounds the significance of movement in the shaping of museum encounters. Informed by the fields of dance, symbolic interactionism and multimodal social semiotics, it introduces a conceptualisation of visitors' movement as choreography unfolding either in compliance with the museum 'script' (scripted choreographies), or in response to prompts from other visitors sharing the same space (improvised choreographies). Attending to visitors' positioning and alignment as key resources of movement, the analysis of video data from two London galleries illustrates how visitors oscillate between performing 'scripted choreographies' and 'improvised choreographies' through shifts in positioning and alignment, while being spectators of other visitors' choreographies. Both kinds of choreographies are continuously shaped in interaction with the 'scripted' museum stage and other visitors' 'scripted' and 'improvised choreographies'.