New Tools for Studying Visitor Behaviours in Museums: A Case Study at the Louvre

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the exploitation of data originated from Bluetooth-enabled devices to understand visitor’s behaviour in the Louvre museum in Paris, France. The collected samples are analysed to examine frequent patterns in visitor’s behaviours, their trajectory, length of stay and some relationships, offering new details on behaviour than previously available. Our work reinforces the emergence of a new methodology to study visitors. It is part of recent lines of investigation that exploit the presence of pervasive data networks to complement more traditional methods in tourism studies, such as surveys based on observation or interviews. However, most past experiments have explored quantitative data coming from mobile phones, GPS, or even geo-tagged user generated content to understand behaviour in a region, or a city, at a larger scale than that of our current work.