Worlding Museums’ Data

Museums use online catalogues to convey stories of their objects, enriched with descriptive data and categories. As museums worldwide adopt information systems and digital media, their intention is to enhance accessibility to their collections and amplify the visibility of their objects. Despite the potential of digital media to democratise and challenge prevailing narratives in global arts and culture, digital tools often perpetuate existing power imbalances rooted in colonial foundations and western epistemologies. This dichotomy, coupled with critical examinations of museum narratives, prompts a careful exploration of concepts when framing museum narratives in a data-oriented realm. It brings to the fore the necessity of reimagining and worlding museums to incorporate counter-narratives that reflect other ways of knowing and being.

This presentation discusses how worlding museums’ databases and data can offer pathways for curators and scholars to present nuanced counter-narratives through data-centric approaches, envisioning a more reparative and emancipatory representation of global cultural heritage. Brought up within the framework of the Worlding Public Cultures project this approach is used to examine tensions in the rationale behind collecting mechanisms and the hierarchical frameworks and structures dictating the categorisation, labelling, and classification of artefacts, creators, and cultures.

Departing from traditional museum-as-text approaches, this presentation scrutinises the complex and often contradictory interplay between databases and narratives and rejects notions of database neutrality, objectivity, and flattening when introducing the concept of data as ‘capta,’ shaped through human interpretation. The analysis emphasises the intricate dynamics within museum databases, revealing complexities, generalisations, and contradictions. Bringing forward the reparative and emancipatory potential of digital technologies and narratives, the presentation will propose possible strategies some of which are illustrated by existing practices and digital projects, such as the database and website of Worlding Public Cultures.