Abstract

My doctoral research explores visitor experiences in museums with anthropological collections and in particular imaginative responses towards museum masks. I hope to capture the intangibility and multi-dimensionality involved in imaginative thinking by integrating the self-narrative approach and arts-informed inquiry. The challenge, however, is that the study does not yield substantive data. What do these data inform and how are they significant? How do they illustrate the embedded inquiry? In qualitative research, ‘data interpretation’ has been used by some scholars to replace ‘data analysis’ in acknowledging the researcher’s historical and cultural lenses during the meaning making process. In this talk, I want to take a step further by introducing ‘data transformation’ as a concept in treating ‘created’ rather than ‘collected’ data. I will discuss ‘reflective spirals’ as a thinking tool to ‘transform’ data, which is inspired by ‘creative synthesis’ in heuristic research.