Abstract
Art museums use a variety of online resources to tell the stories of their artworks and collections. Online publications, online exhibitions, and other interactive resources have interfaces with distinctive temporal and spatial qualities that determine the way narratives are presented and users interact with them. Temporality and spatiality are related to usability of interfaces. This paper draws upon concepts from narratology and digital narratology and uses empirical data from a specialised audience of art history and visual arts scholars to discuss the significance of time and space in online resources’ interfaces. The research interrogates the effectiveness the design and function of paratexts that help users to navigate online resources. Research results invite to rethink the relation between the visual and the verbal in online resources. The spatial disposition of illustrations, understood as paratextual elements, determines the mediality of a narrative. Lastly, it will be discussed how linearity and nonlinearity influences the interactions the user has with the resources. A linear continuous vertical interface requires more time from the user to be read and therefore is better suited for close reading than information seeking.
Highlights
Art museums use online resources to tell the stories of their artworks and collections
As well as these stories happen in historical time and space, their telling in online resources evolves over time and takes place in a space determined by the interface design
The notion of paratext expands to digital media; “interfaces, instructions, menus, statements, reviews, blog posts, and documentation belong to the new generation of paratexts” (Strehovec 2014, Narrative Interfaces: Temporality and spatiality in art museums’ online resources Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja p.47)
Summary
Art museums use online resources to tell the stories of their artworks and collections. The notion of paratext expands to digital media; “interfaces, instructions, menus, statements, reviews, blog posts, and documentation belong to the new generation of paratexts” (Strehovec 2014, Narrative Interfaces: Temporality and spatiality in art museums’ online resources Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja p.47). You have all sorts of modifications of these gateways that we go through, and they are often like organizing systems” Jonathan Gray states (Brookey & Gray 2017) This idea is shared by Johanna Drucker's who makes a similar affirmation, according to her the interface is “a space of affordances and possibilities (...) a set of conditions, structured relations” that enable readings and user interaction” (Drucker 2013). Linear websites is needed to understand the implications of different user times and interfaces design
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