Exploring digital innovations in museum online communications

• Exploring the impact of Covid-19 crises on digital museum communications with local and international audiences
• Identifying novel approaches that museums have recently applied in their online activities to meet the challenges of pandemic related lock-downs and safety measurements  
• Investigating the uses of new digital platforms/tools/approaches of museums as valuable experiences for audiences  
• Describing how the innovative techniques can assist museums to maintain a high visibility and an appealing reputation among their online communities

The project aims to address the following research questions:

• What new digital platforms/tools/approaches did major museums in Singapore, London and Melbourne recently adopt to meet the challenges of the Covid-19 crisis?
• What new experiences and opportunities did these innovations bring to the museums and their audiences?

The research will draw on triangulation of key methods, including:

• Document analysis (analysis of museum reports, policies, research papers produced during or shortly after the pandemics, analysis of their online presence across social media platforms and other digital activities)
• Focused interviews with museum managers from selected museums (collecting data not accessible through public domain sources, including visitation data, analytics reports, etc as well as exploring museums’ motivation behind specific online activities)
• Cross-case synthesis (identifying and describing the most meaningful/engaging/ valuable digital practices through a comparative analysis across cases)

The project is situated within the digital museology theoretical framework.  It particularly looks at such important notions of digital communication as digital interactivity, online engagement, onsite vs virtual audiences.