Dissertation Week 5

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.

Dissertation Week 2

Return to Babel:  Emergent Diversity, Digital Resources, and Local Knowledge

This article presents the argument that the use of online communities can help to preserve and promote local narratives for cultural objects.  It proposes that current technology could allow us to show visitors to museums different perspectives on a piece of art or culture, rather than the singular perspective of the museum itself.
In essence, the article states that with new technology, there is no longer a particular need for everything to remain standardised to facilitate finding.  It proposes that it is now possible to have parallel schemes for finding any object, and that all of these may have validity and purpose.  It proposes that having only one scheme limits the way that the audience can interact with an object, and thus with the museum. 
With new technology, it is now possible to engage directly with different communities, and determine how they may classify objects, rather than simply translating exisiting schema into their cultural framework.  Also, the article would like museums to explore means to getting these communities to take up authorship of narratives. 
The article promotes RSS tagging as a possible means of achieving this. 
Three important points are made regarding distributed communities:
1.  knowledge is based in a time frame and a place.  So it is important to know where and when someone makes a statement.
2.  authority is a problem for all information objects.  authority cannot be guaranteed centrally, but must be renegotiated in each context.  authority is linked to authorship.
3.  changing knowledge to information removes its dynamic character

Implications

Given that I intend to limit my dissertation to the creation of descriptive metadata, it may not be possible to use all the points of this article immediately.  My understanding would be that this would require engagement with the originating culture (if such still exist), and allow a different metadata standard to be created for each.  While I certainaly think this is a worthwhile endeavor, I'm not sure that about the technical capacity of a museum to have a different metadata standard for each culture.  I may be mistaken, and I will need to clarify this point with the British Museum, as they have much more experience in dealing with objects from a variety of cultures. 
Some points are very well made, and bear more consideration.  Particularly, that knowledge is based in a time and a place, and I'm sure that metadata could be used to collect that information from those contributing to an object.

Digital:  Museum as Platform, Curator as Champion, in the Age of Social Media

This article discusses the change in dialogue between museums and their audiences in the digital age.  The author posits that the musuem is no longer the sole repository of knowledge and discussion about their collection, whether they wish it or not.  Most activity about museum collections no longer primarily occurs on the museum's website, but on many other platforms such as social media.  Also, the article states that most of a museum's visitors are now visiting it online. 
New trends also allow smaller museums to expand their reach by further engagment with the public.  Particularly it discusses the Torrance Art Museum in California, which has opened up their curating to crowdsourcing as an ongoing project.
Opening up collections to the online community can help museums to identify objects, such as was the case with the Powerhouse Museum in Australia, that received identification and a summary of the object from a patron. 
4 points were madebased on an online discussion with the public by the Collections Trust in the UK :
1.  they're our collections (the public)
2.  many voices are critical to the interpretation of culture
3.  the museum will attempt to go where the participation takes them.
4.  the museum will provide the platform for culture, the training and advocacy to support it, and would like to work with their audience to construct the content.

So, the curator becomes the assembler of many voices, and still does require expertise. 

Implications

It is important to engage with audiences actively so the museum remains relevant to the discussion about their collections.  If the museum is able to do this, then their audiences will reward them with increased understanding about their own objects.