Global Digital Museum Narratives: Representation, authorship and audiences

The museum visiting experience and content production have exponentially shifted towards the online sphere in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis. From a critical viewpoint, the increased interest that audiences have in the digital offerings of these institutions worldwide invite questions on certain issues: what are the stories and subjects presented by museums? Where do these stories originate and from what perspectives are they being told? What are the intended audiences of these stories? This paper employs digital narratology as a framework to interrogate museums’ online presence. Digital narratology, the theory that studies digital narratives and storytelling, when informed by digital humanities decolonial studies, provides the necessary critical mass to address issues of representation, narrative perspective and audiences’ reception. The paper will be focused on the study of online exhibitions, exhibition websites, microsites and other features about objects and artists from the global South in different geographic territories. It will compare the way in which their stories are represented in the global North and the global South. Additionally, it will discuss technological inequalities in terms of both production and access.