In orbit: distributed curatorial agency when museum objects go online
This project studies processes of selection and interpretation when museum collections go online. We explore the museums authority and the public s agency when curatorial operations such as selection, organization, synthesis and exhibition of meaningful pasts are distributed between people and technology.
The authentic object forms the base of the museum s knowledge and communication. With digitization new assemblages of digital codes, aesthetics, heritage values, copyrights, social practices, political opinions and personal values enter the scene. Upon entering the public sphere and becoming a part of agendas and opinion-making, objects and knowledge may become contentious and debated.
The project s has the phases bound together by conceptual and methodological development. Fieldwork at Sweden's Historical Museum (Historiska museet) will bring to the fore emerging forms of curatorial agency within the museum, as well as how museum visitors circulate images of objects in social media. The next phase examines the sharing of digital representations of museum objects in, e.g., YouTube, Tumblr; Instagram, and Wikipedia. Human and computational processes are traced through the effects they have on selection and viewing. The third and final year will bring together and juxtapose a series of cases that analyze curatorial agencies of museum staff, audiences, objects and technologies and shed light on digitization's implied promise of a more democratic heritage.
The authentic object forms the base of the museum s knowledge and communication. With digitization new assemblages of digital codes, aesthetics, heritage values, copyrights, social practices, political opinions and personal values enter the scene. Upon entering the public sphere and becoming a part of agendas and opinion-making, objects and knowledge may become contentious and debated.
The project s has the phases bound together by conceptual and methodological development. Fieldwork at Sweden's Historical Museum (Historiska museet) will bring to the fore emerging forms of curatorial agency within the museum, as well as how museum visitors circulate images of objects in social media. The next phase examines the sharing of digital representations of museum objects in, e.g., YouTube, Tumblr; Instagram, and Wikipedia. Human and computational processes are traced through the effects they have on selection and viewing. The third and final year will bring together and juxtapose a series of cases that analyze curatorial agencies of museum staff, audiences, objects and technologies and shed light on digitization's implied promise of a more democratic heritage.
Final report
This project aimed to describe and analyze emerging forms of curatorial agency when the Swedish History Museum’s collection is made available on the internet, and the museum shares the power over the collection with a combination of user participation and the instructions that directs the computer s tasks. Digitization underpins policies that seek to democratize culture and promotes the development of more reflexive and post-modern museum practices that challenge the traditional authority of the museum from within. Digitisation bears a promise of the distribution of curatorial agency, that is, control over production and circulation of images of objects in collections as well as the power to interpret and frame historical knowledge produced within the museum and other cultural institutions. Upon entering the public sphere and becoming a part of agendas and opinion-making, objects and knowledge may become contentious and debated.
The project was implemented and developed through a row of case studies leading up to the project’s final outcome, the multi-authored open access book Museum Digitisations and Emerging Curatorial Agencies Online. Vikings in the Digital Age (2022). During 2017, two book chapters on the transformation of curatorial agency within cultural historical museums and on their websites were prepared.
The project’s main direction and the outline of the final outcome developed during 2018 when Sheenagh Pietrobruno and Fiona Cameron were visiting professors at Linköping University. During 2018 regular meetings were held at the Swedish History Museum. Katherine Hauptman, head of the museum, provided crucial expertise in archeology and museum curation. The participants decided to focus on digitisations, born digital objects and knowledge actualised by new research on old finds on objects attributed to the Viking Age. For the Swedish History Museum, the care, study and display of a collection commonly attributed to Vikings pose particular challenges, many of which relate to the popularity of the phenomena and its historical and contemporary use to legitimise national sentiments or even extremist beliefs.
As part of the project, Bodil Axelsson fieldworked at the Swedish History Museum 2017 and Sheenagh Pietrobruno conducted fieldwork and interviews regarding the Swedish History Museum’s traveling exhibition We Call them Vikings at Château des Ducs de Bretagne, in Nantes.
The project also developed through the organization of the PhD course “Cultural Institutions, Online Collections and Digital Media: Critical Perspectives, Theories and Methods” in Norrköping May 2018.
Furthermore, the development of the project gained from Fiona Cameron’s longstanding theorizing of digital heritage and the work she has put in the monograph The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation in a More-Than-Human World (2021), informed by research performed within a series of grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and in the research environment at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.
During the course of the project, Bodil Axelsson established contact with expertise in Natural Language Processing at the Department for Information and Computer Science, Linköping University, SWE-CLARIN and CLARIN.
The project’s results display the many ways digital technologies have contributed to the transnational reach of knowledge on museum objects. Equally important as digitisation of collections are online text-based forums where users can engage in discussions; university and museum press releases and their subsequent dissemination in online news articles, online pedagogical and marketing videos, entertainment and historical channels, the visual documentation of heritage tourism and performances, as well as the online marketing of replicas of heritage objects.
The most important result of the project is its contribution to theoretical and methodological revisions of the concept of curatorial agency. Through a series of analytical/interpretative cuts into the online circulation of museum knowledge, born digital objects, narratives and digitisations, the project has explored curatorial agency in terms of the moderating and framing of new archaeological research, human-machinic curation on platforms such as YouTube and Pinterest, and as eco-curating in planetary computational infrastructures. We have studied curatorial agency (denoting acting in the world through selecting, organising and influencing) in terms of empirically visible traces of moderation and the interplay between, on the one hand human choice, connoisseurship and interpretation, and on the other hand, the actions of personalisation algorithms and the AI branch machine learning which steer social media feeds. We have also approached curatorial agency as immanent or interdependent processes including a range of other-than-human coordinates or influencers, from software, programming languages, mathematical equations, and calculative storage processes, to elemental chemicals embedded in computational capacities, the electromagnetic forms of transmission that pass through data centers, and the rare-earth minerals that serve as conductors of electricity.
A second important result of the project is a deeper understanding of how profit-making American platforms impact on curatorial actions and the circulation of museum knowledge. Social media platforms are unstable media that curate by iteratively calibrating relations between users and museum knowledge. On one hand, the ways in which museum collections and knowledge circulate on and in between social media platforms promise to fulfil democratic goals by multiplying the interpretations; on the other hand, the data these flows generate is owned by the platforms. They consequently hold vast amounts of data that potentially can be employed to map users and their many diverging interpretations of museum collections without the user’s consent, thus violating their privacy.
The third important result of the project is its contribution to an increased awareness of the challenges for museum pedagogy when the hopes for a more democratic museum culture coincide with an increasingly polarized political landscape, one in which issues of race, gender, citizenship and belonging are publicly debated. The online circulation of museum knowledge highlights the limits to museums’ pedagogical reach and the vulnerability of museum curators.
The project has harboured some productive epistemological and ontological tensions between humanistic conceptualisations of agency as connected to human choice, meaning making and semiosis, and a post-human standpoint conceptualising agency in terms of material and more-than-human influences on courses of action. These tensions may be further explored and theorized. The project has also generated new questions regarding the impact of the AI branch machine learning for the circulation of museum knowledge, for example when employed to enrich collection data. One of the main challenges of comprehending the consequences of machinic curatorial agency from a humanist point of view stems from the complexity of the mathematical functions and statistical formulas that are employed in its categorisations, selections and predictions of relevance.
In its design, the project included researchers from three different continents: Europe, Canada and Australia. It has investigated how the Swedish History Museum’s collection of Viking Age objects has taken on a transnational dispersed life. It has been presented at a number of international arenas.
The internationalisation of the project significantly benefited from Bodil Axelsson’s collaboration with the project “Museum: A Culture of Copies”, led by Brita Brenna at the University of Oslo and with workshops held in Norway, Denmark, and the UK.
A series of conferences provided critical avenues for the presentation of the research findings to an international audience:
Knowledge, Culture, Ecologies, 2017, Santiago, Chile
Knowledge Culture, Technology, 2018, Lüneburg, Germany
Heritage Across Borders, Association of Critical Heritage Studies, 4th Biennial Conference, 2018, Hangzhou, China
Futures, Association of Critical Heritage Studies, 5th Biennial Conference, 2020, London/online
CLARIN Annual Conference 2020, online.
The project has been presented for museum professionals on several occasions, for example The Sharing is Caring Extension Open Data – now what? Applying principles of openness and collaboration in strategy and practice, Nationalmuseet Stockholm, 2019; Digital Heritage and Oral History Workshop, 2018, at the Nordic Museum, Stockholm, and The Collecting Contemporary Photo workshop, Nordic Museum, 2018.
Sheenagh Pietrobruno has been invited speaker at two policy events:
Platforms on the Future of Cultural Heritage: A Problem-Solving Approach. Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age. Prague, October 7-8, 2019
G20 Culture Ministerial - Thematic Webinar 3 - Human Capital: The Driver of Culture-led Regeneration, Webinar 13 April 2021
The project was implemented and developed through a row of case studies leading up to the project’s final outcome, the multi-authored open access book Museum Digitisations and Emerging Curatorial Agencies Online. Vikings in the Digital Age (2022). During 2017, two book chapters on the transformation of curatorial agency within cultural historical museums and on their websites were prepared.
The project’s main direction and the outline of the final outcome developed during 2018 when Sheenagh Pietrobruno and Fiona Cameron were visiting professors at Linköping University. During 2018 regular meetings were held at the Swedish History Museum. Katherine Hauptman, head of the museum, provided crucial expertise in archeology and museum curation. The participants decided to focus on digitisations, born digital objects and knowledge actualised by new research on old finds on objects attributed to the Viking Age. For the Swedish History Museum, the care, study and display of a collection commonly attributed to Vikings pose particular challenges, many of which relate to the popularity of the phenomena and its historical and contemporary use to legitimise national sentiments or even extremist beliefs.
As part of the project, Bodil Axelsson fieldworked at the Swedish History Museum 2017 and Sheenagh Pietrobruno conducted fieldwork and interviews regarding the Swedish History Museum’s traveling exhibition We Call them Vikings at Château des Ducs de Bretagne, in Nantes.
The project also developed through the organization of the PhD course “Cultural Institutions, Online Collections and Digital Media: Critical Perspectives, Theories and Methods” in Norrköping May 2018.
Furthermore, the development of the project gained from Fiona Cameron’s longstanding theorizing of digital heritage and the work she has put in the monograph The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation in a More-Than-Human World (2021), informed by research performed within a series of grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and in the research environment at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.
During the course of the project, Bodil Axelsson established contact with expertise in Natural Language Processing at the Department for Information and Computer Science, Linköping University, SWE-CLARIN and CLARIN.
The project’s results display the many ways digital technologies have contributed to the transnational reach of knowledge on museum objects. Equally important as digitisation of collections are online text-based forums where users can engage in discussions; university and museum press releases and their subsequent dissemination in online news articles, online pedagogical and marketing videos, entertainment and historical channels, the visual documentation of heritage tourism and performances, as well as the online marketing of replicas of heritage objects.
The most important result of the project is its contribution to theoretical and methodological revisions of the concept of curatorial agency. Through a series of analytical/interpretative cuts into the online circulation of museum knowledge, born digital objects, narratives and digitisations, the project has explored curatorial agency in terms of the moderating and framing of new archaeological research, human-machinic curation on platforms such as YouTube and Pinterest, and as eco-curating in planetary computational infrastructures. We have studied curatorial agency (denoting acting in the world through selecting, organising and influencing) in terms of empirically visible traces of moderation and the interplay between, on the one hand human choice, connoisseurship and interpretation, and on the other hand, the actions of personalisation algorithms and the AI branch machine learning which steer social media feeds. We have also approached curatorial agency as immanent or interdependent processes including a range of other-than-human coordinates or influencers, from software, programming languages, mathematical equations, and calculative storage processes, to elemental chemicals embedded in computational capacities, the electromagnetic forms of transmission that pass through data centers, and the rare-earth minerals that serve as conductors of electricity.
A second important result of the project is a deeper understanding of how profit-making American platforms impact on curatorial actions and the circulation of museum knowledge. Social media platforms are unstable media that curate by iteratively calibrating relations between users and museum knowledge. On one hand, the ways in which museum collections and knowledge circulate on and in between social media platforms promise to fulfil democratic goals by multiplying the interpretations; on the other hand, the data these flows generate is owned by the platforms. They consequently hold vast amounts of data that potentially can be employed to map users and their many diverging interpretations of museum collections without the user’s consent, thus violating their privacy.
The third important result of the project is its contribution to an increased awareness of the challenges for museum pedagogy when the hopes for a more democratic museum culture coincide with an increasingly polarized political landscape, one in which issues of race, gender, citizenship and belonging are publicly debated. The online circulation of museum knowledge highlights the limits to museums’ pedagogical reach and the vulnerability of museum curators.
The project has harboured some productive epistemological and ontological tensions between humanistic conceptualisations of agency as connected to human choice, meaning making and semiosis, and a post-human standpoint conceptualising agency in terms of material and more-than-human influences on courses of action. These tensions may be further explored and theorized. The project has also generated new questions regarding the impact of the AI branch machine learning for the circulation of museum knowledge, for example when employed to enrich collection data. One of the main challenges of comprehending the consequences of machinic curatorial agency from a humanist point of view stems from the complexity of the mathematical functions and statistical formulas that are employed in its categorisations, selections and predictions of relevance.
In its design, the project included researchers from three different continents: Europe, Canada and Australia. It has investigated how the Swedish History Museum’s collection of Viking Age objects has taken on a transnational dispersed life. It has been presented at a number of international arenas.
The internationalisation of the project significantly benefited from Bodil Axelsson’s collaboration with the project “Museum: A Culture of Copies”, led by Brita Brenna at the University of Oslo and with workshops held in Norway, Denmark, and the UK.
A series of conferences provided critical avenues for the presentation of the research findings to an international audience:
Knowledge, Culture, Ecologies, 2017, Santiago, Chile
Knowledge Culture, Technology, 2018, Lüneburg, Germany
Heritage Across Borders, Association of Critical Heritage Studies, 4th Biennial Conference, 2018, Hangzhou, China
Futures, Association of Critical Heritage Studies, 5th Biennial Conference, 2020, London/online
CLARIN Annual Conference 2020, online.
The project has been presented for museum professionals on several occasions, for example The Sharing is Caring Extension Open Data – now what? Applying principles of openness and collaboration in strategy and practice, Nationalmuseet Stockholm, 2019; Digital Heritage and Oral History Workshop, 2018, at the Nordic Museum, Stockholm, and The Collecting Contemporary Photo workshop, Nordic Museum, 2018.
Sheenagh Pietrobruno has been invited speaker at two policy events:
Platforms on the Future of Cultural Heritage: A Problem-Solving Approach. Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age. Prague, October 7-8, 2019
G20 Culture Ministerial - Thematic Webinar 3 - Human Capital: The Driver of Culture-led Regeneration, Webinar 13 April 2021