Estonian National Museum
Interactive ticket log data from Estonian National Museum’s Encounters exhibition enables detailed analysis of visitor journeys, time use, language choices, and behavioral patterns within a museum space.
The Estonian National Museum’s permanent exhibition Encounters uses an interactive visitor ticket that allows visitors to change the language of exhibition texts and to save selected content for later viewing at home through a personal “My ERM” experience. The dataset consists of log files generated by these tickets, capturing anonymized interaction data throughout a museum visit. The logs record time-stamped events related to visitor movement and interaction within the exhibition space.
This makes it possible to reconstruct visitor journeys: where visitors go, how long they stay at specific exhibition sections or objects, how much time passes between locations, and how long a complete visit lasts. Language-switching events provide insight into multilingual usage patterns and visitor preferences. The dataset enables analysis of visitor behavior at multiple levels, including identification of popular objects or exhibition areas, comparison of visit durations, and detection of temporal patterns such as differences by time of day, weekday, or season. When combined with external contextual data (e.g. weather, special events), the dataset offers further analytical potential.
Due to its behavioral nature, the data requires careful interpretation and strong contextual understanding of the exhibition space. Nevertheless, it provides a rare and valuable opportunity to explore museum visitor behavior using real-world interaction data, making it well suited for hackathon projects focused on data analysis, visualization, and visitor experience research.
