Exploring risks and challenges in museum online communications

• Exploring the impact of Covid-19 crises on digital museum communications with local and international audiences
• Identifying risks and challenges that museums have recently faced in their online activities while experimenting in the digital realm during the pandemic related lockdowns and safety measurements  
• Investigating digital practices of museums in relation to such critical questions as: bot communications and fake news, competition for attention with algorithms, AI and new ethics, public spaces and corporate data surveillance systems
• Describing how museums have employed digital and online communication technologies in response to the threats of the “dark” side of the Internet

The project aims to address the following research questions:

• What new threats and risks did major museums in Singapore, London and Melbourne recently met while experimenting online during the Covid-19 crisis?
• What new competencies, expertise, actions, and policies did these challenges  require from 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 and valuable digital practices addressing new online threats 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 public spaces, digital democracy and inclusion, digital ethics