GLAM and Digital Soft Power in the Post-pandemic World: Risks, Opportunities and Approaches

In the 21st century, galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) have transformed from cultural heritage repositories into key actors of the creative economy and new centres of soft power by playing key role in place branding, urban regeneration and tourism development. Under the pressure of the global outbreak of Covid-19 virus these institutions increasingly operate as hybrid spaces existing between physical and virtual worlds projecting their attraction power through new tools, including augmented, mixed, and virtual reality as well as digital and mobile devices. While their global rich and projection power is growing, there is no clear understanding yet among museum practitioners, governments or academics of how to define or measure this power and how to assess its impacts to inform a more strategic, proactive and evidence-based form of development, especially in the context of the post-pandemic reality that brings exciting opportunities yet significant challenges to contemporary diplomacy. Employing data-driven approaches, geo-visualisation and machine learning, this project aims to provide a solution.

Drawing on collaborations with key museums in Singapore, Melbourne and London, the project aims to design innovative computational methods for understanding, measuring and predicting soft power of GLAM actors to demonstrate their growing role in global communications, international cultural relations and digital diplomacy. A new prototype model that visualizes and maps museum soft power will be instrumental to design new tools that governments and museums can employ to strategically use their cultural resources. They will help assess, predict and leverage soft power through a more accurate evaluation of museum impacts supplying data for proactive planning and development.

Learn more at https://datatopower.net

The project aims for three important outcomes and deliverables.

First, it consolidates resources, data inputs and knowledge gained from participating GLAM institutions across Europe and Asia Pacific. The project builds a dedicated online platform to enable a secured and dynamic knowledge exchange among participants and to serve as a data storage space for useful digital data sets and resources.

Second, the project develops and trials a prototype model of the geo-visualisation system that can map, measure and predict soft power of GLAM institutions in the urban context. The prototype model as a key deliverable culminates the first stage in the development of a larger research project aiming to develop a more advanced GIS and AI-enabled software application package that could be employed universally across countries and institutions to leverage soft power of GLAM actors.

Finally, the research project results in several publications, including a co-authored monograph, Digital Soft Power of GLAM Media, currently under consideration in different publishing venues.

Learn more at https://datatopower.net