Narrative, sharing and memory

I was reading an article yesterday about new media as it relates to news processes, but its lessons seem equally applicable to the online museum.
Remembering through Sharing by Julia Sonnevend  addresses Sonnevend’s experiences and observations of entry into an online community engaged in commemorating the death of a film-maker who was brutally murder in Puerto Rico in 2009. After being introduced to the story and community through a friend, Sonnevend became engaged in both learning about – and remembering – a man whom she had never met.

She uses the experience to make two key observations that can be applied to the online museum experience.

The first is that “personalised narrative [can provide an] introduction to further narratives.” She explains:

First, it shows how introductory personalized narratives can help us when we have to choose from many competing stories. You can (and want to) provide your attention only to a very small number of stories and friends can help decide which those will be. Friends’ personalized narratives work as leads to the news items and navigate you in the jungle of news narratives.

In this age of massive data when content curation is an issue of on-going significance, personalised narratives or recommendations can provide an effective entry point into the online museum, be it through social networking sites or other forms of recommendation. If we want people to engage with our websites and collections there needs to be a personal aspect to the engagement, so that the user has a reason to invest their time and energy into the site. While a researcher might examine a collection website because he/she is seeking information on a particular artefact or group of artefacts, if we want non-experts to engage with a site there needs to be a compelling and personal point of entry.

Secondly, Sonnevend discusses sharing as a commemorative act or ‘remembering through sharing’. She writes,

Online commemoration seems a little bit like ‘news:’ central to us for a short time, but forgettable on a long run. Just like traditional news, sharing the information on social networking sites is very effective in triggering social solidarity. And personalized narratives along with personalized visual and textual memorial sites contribute to this triggering effect.

She considers both traditional and new cultural practices for social remembrance, and concludes that the act of sharing information online – through linking and online discussion – is

a quick and powerful way to express solidarity. It is quick, because it does not require more than a few seconds from you. It is powerful, because the low barriers of distribution enable you to broadcast the news to many at the same time. It is important to note, however, that in most of the cases you broadcast to a certain group of people, to your fellow ‘friends’ and ‘followers,’ but not to ‘all.’

Museums are lieux de mémoire – sites of memory. By lowering barriers to engagement and making online objects easy to share and broadcast, we can enable online communities to participate in acts of commemoration and social remembrance and grow their sense of social solidarity.

Museums might make beautiful looking and functional websites, but unless visitors have reason to personally engage with the site and to connect its contents with their own lives, then surely the relationship will be superficial at best. Engagement will come when visitors have an emotional connection to the site and a reason to invest further in it – like when the experience is emotionally rewarding (and maybe even fun!). Personalised narratives can provide a vehicle to get people in, and lowered barriers of engagement can give them a reason to broadcast and share those stories with others. Therefore, when designing museum websites – or apps – maybe we need to consider why someone would personally engage with the site, and how to ensure they broadcast their engagement to get others involved too.

The Museum Metadata Exchange and archival tactics for museum collections

I was just checking out the recent postings by Seb Chan on his fresh + new(er) blog, and saw a link to the Museum Metadata Exchange, a project that started in mid-2010 (and which my friend Heath Killen has apparently been working on). The project has been “designed to harvest collection level descriptions from a number of major museums and the National Film and Sound Archive and to supply that data in a standardised format to the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).”

One of the commenter’s about Seb’s post writes:

The concept of collection-level description by and large tends to be foreign to large swaths of the museum community, whereas of course it’s a major strategy in archives. MARC collection-level records (or rudimentary EAD finding aids) can let the public know that an archive has a large collection of something, even if it hasn’t been described at a deeper level, let alone digitized. I was involved in an effort in the natural history community to create a standard for collection level descriptions (http://www.tdwg.org/activities… and at the Smithsonian, the Field Book Project has incorporated the standard into their approach (http://libreas.eu/ausgabe18/te… Don’t know of too many other projects using collection level descriptions for museum content…

This is one of the interesting implications I am curious about for changing practices within the online museum collection. Are museums now using a more archival approach to collections online as a way to make them more accessible/usable/findable to non-specialist users? Gunther’s comment that collection-level description is a major strategy in archives that we can now see being deployed in projects such as the Museum Metadata Exchange would suggest that this is a possibility.

And so I wonder whether museum collections, although created under different curatorial premises to archives, are now moving towards a more archival approach to online collection management, particularly given that the Internet is itself essentially a giant archive? And if so, is this a legitimate tactic for opening collection up more effectively to non-experts?

To be cont.

Coming from Newcastle Australia, there aren’t many people who share my interest in museums, the web and evolving digital heritage. So the best thing about attending MW2011 in April was that I met a small community of like-minded souls who are similarly passionate about this topic. And being Net-geeks, that passion translates into online interactions via twitter, blogs and other sites.

Therefore I’ve decided to start blogging about museums and the web. This will have a dual purpose… both so that I can engage in the debate that is happening within the field; and to explore ideas relevant to my PhD. The first three posts were originally listed on my personal blog.

The breadth of change happening in the field is a significant challenge to my research. My PhD study is focussed on examining how evolving archival memory practices impacts the online museum collection. However, this is very broad, and there is so much happening in this field all the time that anything I write now might be completely irrelevant in three years. So my first step is to work out whether I can justify this idea that there has been a regime change in archival memory practices, and if so, precisely what that means.

I first came across the idea reading Geoffrey Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences. He writes

With digital archiving in all its forms, a new regime of technologies for holding and shaping experience has emerged. Our past has always been malleable, but now it is malleable with a new viscosity. The new texture of our past is that we can go from the global to the local and back again with great speed. [1]

Bowker argues that changes in the way a society archives bring about new memory practices, and that “each new medium imprints its own special flavour to the memories of that epoch.”[2] Further, he writes that sets of memory practices become articulated into “memory regimes, which articulate technologies and practices into relatively historically constant sets of memory practices that permit both the creation of a continuous, useful past and the transmission sub rosa of information, stories, and practices from our wild, discontinuous, ever-changing past.”[3]

As an institution of memory, the museum has been a vehicle for such memory practices in which a seemingly consistent and useful story of our past has been constructed and transmitted. Since inception, the museum has played a critical role in the formation, preservation and dissemination of our collective memories, and therefore, of our social, political and cultural identity. Museums have existed as repositories of material objects that help foster an understanding of the world by providing a means for interpreting the past and present, in order to anticipate the future.

However, the context in which the online museum collection is situated is a vastly different one from previous collections. People can access and interact with the online museum collection in new ways, particularly as the Internet becomes increasingly social.

We also now have things like born digital museums to consider – museums that exist without a physical location. At MW2011 Jasper Visser from the Dutch Museum of National History hosted an unconference session on born digital museums, and one of the conclusions that was drawn from the group was that

A digital museum should have digital representations of artefacts (and especially born digital artefacts). However, it should not be a nearly endless bunch of fabulous data. Every artefact and every presentation requires an (emotionally) inspiring narrative to trigger discovery and curiosity… The context of the artefacts (stories, etc.) and connections with other sources of information and experience are more important in the digital museum than the artefact itself.

So here we move away from the notion that the museum is about objects, and towards a notion that the museum, particularly online, is about ideas and story-telling – about connection. Arguably this has always been the case, but the way that people can interact with online museum objects is now vastly different from the way they can interact with the physical object in the rarefied environment of the museum.

In his Ignite Smithsonian talk (head to about 48.30), Koven Smith of the Denver Art Museum asks why we have online collections. He calls for museums to “disambiguate the physical experience from the digital experience completely,” and to do what he terms ‘agile content development’ – quick, responsive development of limitless content, and limitless kinds of experiences. He envisions effective museums online as those institutions who can enable experience, rather than simply producing content, and instead making it so that people can access useful content online – whether it is produced by the museum or by others.

He concludes with a question: “In a world where there there is youtube, there is facebook, exactly why would someone come to your museum website? What’s the reason? As soon as we can answer that question, we’re going to build finally a website that makes sense – at least to me, and hopefully to the rest of you.”

Why should we create online collections? I think that if memory practices are undergoing regime change, if the way our society accesses and shapes the past is becoming digital, then anything that’s left offline is at risk of being forgotten through sheer inconvenience of access.

But why would people access online collections, and continue to use them? And what is the role of the museum in a world where everything is archived, and sites like wikipedia and google exist and are people’s first ports for seeking knowledge and understanding? Well, they are harder questions… But I think that Jasper is probably right when he argues that museums must now see ideas and connections – more than simply artefacts – as central to their role online.


[1] Geoffrey Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2005: 5
[2] Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences, 5
[3] Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences, 9