Abstract:

Museums are privileged spaces for informal learning. Learning is one of the museums’ mission, in the age of the economy of experience (Pine and Gilmore, 1999), which also brings to the museum the paradigm of edutainment. Museums are here conceptually considered sociotechnical edutainment artefacts, drawing from STS studies, to account for its complexity as organizations.

Portugal holds a vast and diverse maritime cultural heritage (Nunes, 2008), that is on display in maritime museums and other heritage organizations, that hold maritime and sea-related collections. We call these "sea museums", and they also include aquariums. Most of these “sea museums” invest highly in educational programs, most of them targeting schools. However, there is a gap in other audience development strategies, and hence museums are not fully reaching their potential.

With environmental issues gaining public visibility, museums and aquariums are emerging as relevant informal learning settings for climate literacy education, ocean literacy, and conservation education (Falk & Adelman, 2003; Light & Cerrone, 2018).

Much of the scientific and educational vocation of museums and aquariums is embedded in their digital communication, which is now part of museum management practices and museum professionals’ skills (Carvalho & Matos, 2018; Drotner & Schroder, 2013), crucial to promoting outreach and public engagement.

However, research has long shown that visitors have their own agenda and expectations that might not always match the aquarium or museums’ (Ballantyne & Packer, 2016; Falk & Adelman, 2003). Aquarium and visitors general agenda is to have fun, and aquariums and museums are competing for visitor's leisure time (Falk & Dierking, 2011).

How do visitors experience aquariums? In which ways a politics of conservation and biodiversity is mashed or converges with a politics of fun and entertainment in the “practice” of everyday life (Bourdieu, 1984; Certeau, 1984; Frith, 1996)? How do visitors appropriate the aquariums “serious” message of environmental education, in their leisure time? Do technologies matter in edutainment?

TripAdvisor is a digital platform of user‐generated reviews, hence, it escapes museums and aquariums’ control (Alexander et al., 2018). As such, TripAdvisor with its specific material-semiotic affordances, and its own digital politics (Kidd, 2014), is a privileged digital platform to research visitors’ experience.

This article analyses TripAdvisor reviews of Portuguese Aquarium Vasco da Gama, the oldest aquarium in Portugal. Our data set consists of 417 reviews. The time frame chosen was from 2015-2018, to capture three important moments in the aquarium life: its 120 birthday (2018), and the loss of its main “live attractions”, the turtles (2017) and the seals (2016) in touch tanks, as well as the aquarium’s museum renovation. The live animals were in unsuitable physical conditions, which posed problems for animal welfare, and contradicted the conservation mission of the museum.

These findings are drawn from the on-going, wider research project muSEAum – Branding of Portuguese Sea Museums, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (PTDC/EGE-OGE/29755/2017).

Keywords:

Museums, informal learning, environmental learning, TripAdvisor, maritime museum, aquarium.