5 Case Study 1 - Leicester Research Archive - University of Leicester

new media in museums were conducted. The interview is one of the most used
methodologies in the social sciences and as will be shown particularly in Chapter
4, it has proved to be a very useful tool to shed light on the question why
museums are engaging in podcasting and in developing a typology of museum
podcasts. As has been stated before, the medium of podcasting is very young and
at the time when the fieldwork conducted (2006), there were not many people
who engaged in podcasting in museums. Because of this, a survey amongst
museums would not have turned out any interesting results. The medium of
podcasting was not widely used enough, at the time. For this reason (and indeed
the same reason, why the House of research has decided to make interviews
rather than a survey) it was decided that speaking to museum professionals
directly, people who were engaging in podcasting, would turn out more relevant
data than a survey.
CS 1 draws upon a series of qualitative, semi-structured interviews with museum
professionals, which were conducted between the summer of 2006 and January
2007. With the exception of the interviews with Christian Dirks and Eva
Wesemann, which were conducted at their offices in the Jewish Museum Berlin
and Antenna Audio Berlin, most interviews were conducted by the author by
telephone, recorded digitally and transcribed. Additional conversations not
referenced in the research were also held either in person, over the phone and by
email. These often took place at seminars and conferences such as the
Department of Museum Studies Research Week 2005 and 2006, the UK Museum
and the Web 2005 and 2006, the Summer School in New Media 2005 and 2006
(all University of Leicester), EVA Berlin 2006, Museums and the Internet 2007
(MAI-Tagung) at the Center of Media Arts in Karlsruhe, the Museums and
Heritage Show in London 2007 and the Podcasting Day of the e-learning group
for museums, libraries and archives taking place at Tate Britain in 2007.
Interviews were conducted with fourteen museum professionals. Taken together
this amounts to about 10,000 words of transcribed interviews:
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