Webinar: Data-driven perception and collaboration between museums and public audiences

Date: 2nd of June 2022 (Thursday)
Time: 14.00 – 16.30 Stockholm, 15.00 – 17.30 Vilnius, Tallinn

The webinar will explore possibilities for new sustainable practices with digital material and digitized content that pay new ways for collaboration between museums and public audiences. It will also discuss critical issues around data management and publishing, data in human machine interaction and practical aspects of digitization.

Session 1: Contextualizing Museum Data

Time: 14.00 – 15.20 Stockholm, 15.00-16.20 Vilnius, Tallinn
Contextualizing Museum Data

by Dr. Anne Luther

The presentation will focus on three main processes that are important to contextualize when exploring digital strategies in museums:
Social: how is data made, a brief history of digitization and an introduction to roles who interact with data 
Infrastructure: data storage, management and publishing
Literacy: understanding data in human machine interaction

The contextualization will give the audience an overview of the various forms, formats and processes of digital material in museums and open the awareness of possibilities to work with data. Dr. Luther will show her current project Digital Benin as a tangible example of a unique digital project that brings together information about objects from over 120 museums world wide. In the center of the presentation stands the question of who is interacting with digital material internally and externally of the museum database. 

Anne Luther

Dr. Anne Luther is a specialist for digital heritage and a digital humanities scholar. Her work applies technology, design and humanities research for the interaction, exploration and opening of cultural heritage preserved and represented in digital data. She is the founder of The Institute for Digital Heritage and Principal Investigator for Digital Benin, leading the development of a digital platform which brings together rich documentation from collections worldwide to provide a long-requested overview of the royal artworks looted in the 19th century from the Kingdom of Benin.

Session 2: Digitization as bridge between museum and scholarship: practical insights from project “Digital Models”

Time: 15.30 – 16.00 Stockholm, 16.30-17.00 Vilnius, Tallinn
Digitization as bridge between museum and scholarship: practical insights from project “Digital Models”

by Anna Karin Nilsson Stål and Dr. Pelle Snickars

Drawing on the outcomes of the project “Digital Models”, this talk aims to discuss practical aspects of digitization combining perspectives from museum and academy. How can qualitative data be designed to be best used in research? What digitized museum collections can be used for? How researchers and public audiences can be involved in digitization process? What digital competences are needed for museum professionals and how they could be supplied?

Anna Karin

Anna Karin Nilsson Stål is a collection manager at Skansen and chairperson of CMS:s (Centralmuseernas samarbetsråd) digitalization council. She has several years of experience in cultural heritage, digitalization, and collection management. Her professional interests encompass development of a common digital infrastructures for cultural heritage.

Pelle Snickars

Pelle Snickars is professor of digital culture at Lund University. He has a background as Head of Research at the National Library of Sweden. His research is situated at the intersection between media studies, media history and the digital humanities.

Session 3: Discussion forum 16.00 – 16.30 Stockholm, 17.00-17.30 Vilnius, Tallinn

Time: 16.00 – 16.30 Stockholm, 17.00-17.30 Vilnius, Tallinn
Moderator: Ph.D. cand. Nadzeya Charapan

The final session aims to open a discussion of the most critical issues addressed by the speakers and webinar audiences and articulate the main take-aways from the webinar.

Nadzeya Charapan

Nadzeya Charapan is a principal investigator of DigMus project: “DigMus: Empowering Museum Professionals with Digital Skills and Competencies” supported by the supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers in 2020-2022 (NordPlus Adult Program). Her research interests include digital cultural heritage and cultural communication. She teaches several courses in Digital Humanities Master Program at Uppsala University (Sweden).