Color coherence, photos of the same artifacts, and patterns in the visualizations indicate that visitors take similar routes while touring the museum space.
We assume that for most of the Hermitage visitors, a museum experience is congruent with a tourist experience, which frames what visitors share on social media. The purpose of a tourist taking pictures is to create a connection between the tourist and the city through photos with memorable objects. The Hermitage visitors wish to preserve memories of their visit to the museum as a part of their tourist and sightseeing experience in Saint Petersburg. For that reason, visitors pose in the most recognizable places, such as the Jordan staircase, in front of the Winter Palace, and take selfies or pose next to "masterpieces" in the collection.
Visitors take selfies and photograph their shoes, tickets, and museum maps in their hands. We categorize these images as a variation of a "tourist posing," which aims to send a message about the visitor's connection with the place.

Additionally, in posting one's visit to the Hermitage on Instagram, individuals attempt to represent their visual identity and connect with "high" practices of cultural and art consumption. By posting well-known artifacts, visitors direct attention to the visual and cultural background they share with their Instagram followers. All this leads to the repetitiveness of topics and objects in Instagram Hermitage photos.

The State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art and culture. It offers limited opportunities for visitors to interact with the artifacts. Most of the objects on display are fenced off and do not allow for close access. Photo-taking, then, is the only legitimate form of interaction. This explains the significant amount of visual content generated in the museum.

In addition to zooming in on artifacts and documenting them, visitors invent new ways of interacting with art. They "complement" the composition of paintings, react to portraits' gestures, and mimic the poses of statues. Sometimes these interactions go beyond the museum rules and we see how visitors touch museum exhibits. In doing so tourists connect with the museum space. For the same reasons, tourists touch the city's monuments.

In this project, we explored the capacity of Internet data and cultural analytics to understand visitor' experience in the museum. We find this approach useful in our exploratory phase of research, as it enables us to grasp the complexity of the research topic. When applied to visitor preferences and experience, this approach helps us manage large quantities of visual data that are challenging to analyze using qualitative techniques.
Researchers and museum practitioners who wish to reproduce this research design and apply computational methods to the study of museum attendance will need a deep understanding of a certain museum to interpret the data produced by its visitors. The use of large data sets might result in observations that are too general to be useful, complicating the analysis. To avoid a stereotypical reading of museums, we focused on one specific location and could thus deconstruct the experience of social media users who generate content in one place. As a result, we can correlate colors with meanings in a dataset and interpret visualizations.