Digital Museums and Diverse Cultural Knowledges: Moving Past the Traditional Catalog
This article is about the idea of Museum 2.0. Museums have tried to move beyond the one curatorial voice that has traditionally been presented, mostly by opening up their engagement with the public to panel discussions, presentations and talks. However, the museum catalog has become more and more standardised. Web 2.0 may offer the potential to reverse this trend with more input from the public in the form of tagging, blogging and social computing. Cultural institutions should use Web 2.0 technologies to allow multiple, and conflicting perspectives, which would allow for further engagement. Contemporary museum studies acknowledges: 1) reality, truth and knowledge are relative 2) people come to know things through a social process which is generated by discussion and perception that the topic is thought well of my a trusted community 3) each conversation about a topic is a contribution to other ongoing and simultaneous discussions in over-lapping networks 4) each sequence of knowledge takes the form of a narrative, and are endless 5) knowledge is knowledge of/about objects, which are things that the user knows (knowledge is embodied within objects), and generation of knowledge requires engagement. The challenges to standardisation are: a) the effective silencing of the voices who cannot or do not contribute to the "expert consensus" b) the reproduction of biases, prejudices and other assumptions held by the few who do contribute. Cultural institutions face a challenge is showing an object as a representation of a larger body of knowledge, and how that object is grounded in local knowledge. People from different communities may describe the same object with different concepts and ideas, and all of these are important to the museum experience. Many case studies are shown for how increasing engagement and allowing more diverse voices can benefit cultural institutions.
Implications
This paper helps to show that further engagement with the public is beneficial for the museums to complete some of the goals of the new museology. With new technologies, it is no longer explicitly necessary to standardise all metadata into specific formats in order to make the objects accessible. It is possible to allow multiple and conflicting metadata to represent the object from different community perspectives. Instead of creating chaos, this could help the public to find the objects easier.
This article is about the idea of Museum 2.0. Museums have tried to move beyond the one curatorial voice that has traditionally been presented, mostly by opening up their engagement with the public to panel discussions, presentations and talks. However, the museum catalog has become more and more standardised. Web 2.0 may offer the potential to reverse this trend with more input from the public in the form of tagging, blogging and social computing. Cultural institutions should use Web 2.0 technologies to allow multiple, and conflicting perspectives, which would allow for further engagement. Contemporary museum studies acknowledges: 1) reality, truth and knowledge are relative 2) people come to know things through a social process which is generated by discussion and perception that the topic is thought well of my a trusted community 3) each conversation about a topic is a contribution to other ongoing and simultaneous discussions in over-lapping networks 4) each sequence of knowledge takes the form of a narrative, and are endless 5) knowledge is knowledge of/about objects, which are things that the user knows (knowledge is embodied within objects), and generation of knowledge requires engagement. The challenges to standardisation are: a) the effective silencing of the voices who cannot or do not contribute to the "expert consensus" b) the reproduction of biases, prejudices and other assumptions held by the few who do contribute. Cultural institutions face a challenge is showing an object as a representation of a larger body of knowledge, and how that object is grounded in local knowledge. People from different communities may describe the same object with different concepts and ideas, and all of these are important to the museum experience. Many case studies are shown for how increasing engagement and allowing more diverse voices can benefit cultural institutions.
Implications
This paper helps to show that further engagement with the public is beneficial for the museums to complete some of the goals of the new museology. With new technologies, it is no longer explicitly necessary to standardise all metadata into specific formats in order to make the objects accessible. It is possible to allow multiple and conflicting metadata to represent the object from different community perspectives. Instead of creating chaos, this could help the public to find the objects easier.
No comments:
Post a Comment