A digital museum’s contribution to diversity – a user study

ABSTRACT

Responding to the Norwegian cultural policy concern of diversity, this article presents the results from three data sets that capture user background, behaviour, values and opinions regarding the digital portal for museum objects, images and stories, DigitaltMuseum. Specifically, the exploratory research draws data from a ‘population’ survey of digital consumption in Norway, a DigitaltMuseum user survey, and device and usage data captured by Google Analytics. Designed, where possible, to capture a user’s perspective, the three data sources describe who uses the digital platform, their content preferences, motivation for using the platform, and what they ultimately do with material found. Although there is evidence that the findings are representative of a super-user group, the results nevertheless indicate that DigitaltMuseum is contributing to cultural diversity in terms of content, purpose for usage, and dissemination. For policymakers and administrators of online museum platforms, the study demonstrates the platform’s contribution to expanded diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital museum
• digital infrastructure
• museum websites
• museum users
• visitor studies
• cultural diversity

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank KulturIT for their assistance in both facilitating the user surveys on DigitaltMuseum.no and for permitting access to their user data from Google Analytics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Anne-Britt Gran is professor of Culture and Arts Management, and director of the Centre for Creative Industries at BI Norwegian Business School. She has researched modern theatre history, postmodernism and post colonialism, cultural policy, cultural sponsorship, and digital cultural consumption and digitization. Gran leads the ‘Digitalization and Diversity’ research project.

Nina Lager Vestberg is a professor of visual culture in Art and Media Studies at NTNU. Lager Vestberg has researched photography, archive and digitization, and has been co-editor of the anthology Media and the Ecological Crisis (Routledge 2015), which addresses the environmental aspects of media technologies. In the ‘Digitalization and Diversity’ project, she researches digitalized museums and big data.

Peter Booth is postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Creative Industries at BI Norwegian School of Management. Drawing on his background in art and finance, his research covers cultural economics, theories of value, sociology of art and finance, and issues connecting arts, digitization and diversity.

Anne Ogundipe is doctoral candidate in Art and Media Studies at NTNU, where she is studying digitalization and participation in the arts and museum sector. Her professional interests are rooted in aesthetic approaches to media and art history, such as photographic media and media ethics.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway (project number 247602), The Programme on the Culture and Media Sector (KULMEDIA).