Looking at Domestic Textiles: An Eye-Tracking Experiment Analysing Influences on Viewing Behaviour at Owlpen Manor

What is it about?

This special issue explores what it felt like to live in the houses of early modern England. It investigates how the changes which were taking place then affected the experience of being indoors in the period when Elizabeth I was on the throne and Shakespeare was writing his plays. It looks in particular at the role textiles played in those experiences, and how we might find out what they were like. It explores how they worked - they often had stories painted on them or woven into them, and we discover here how those stories might have been read, and how they altered the experience of living at home in this period. The article describes an eye-tracking experiment through which we aimed to quantify some of these questions about the way we understand stories told in textiles. We sent two groups of participants one at a time into a room in Owlpen Manor in Gloucetershire wearing mobile eye-tracking equipment and analysed where, for how long and how often they looked at different parts of the narrative depending on information they were given. You can find out what happened by reading on.

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Why is it important?

This special issue is unique because it brings together historians, museum curators and scientists to explore what it felt like to live at home in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has allowed us to run experiments in real spaces and explore both quantitatively and qualitatively how people might have moved around them and interacted with them. It has made it possible to assess how textiles alter spaces, and how we read the stories which were painted and woven into them. By doing this kind of work we have been able to find out more about the kinds of living experience that Shakespeare, for instance, might have had than has been possible before. This article on eye-tracking explores how we interact with historic spaces, telling us more than we've known before about how, where, when and for how long we look at different aspects of interiors and what this means for our visits to heritage sites in particular.

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