2025.Mar.04

REPORTS

Report on the 31st B’AI Book Club
Axelsson, Bodil, et al. (2022) Museum Digitisations and Emerging Curatorial Agencies Online: Vikings in the Digital Age

The 31st session of the B’AI Book Club took place on August 24. B’AI Research Assistant Nozomi Ohtsuki introduced the book “Museum Digitisations and Emerging Curatorial Agencies Online: Vikings in the Digital Age” (2022).

This book was published due to the project “In Orbit: Distributed Curatorial Agency When Museum Objects and Knowledge Go Online.” In this book, four authors analyse changes in the circulation of museum knowledge due to digitisation, focusing on the Swedish History Museum’s Viking Age collection in each chapter. Using the concept of curatorial agency, which is positioned at the intersection of the mission of collection management in museums and dependence on the social, technological, and material infrastructure of digital capitalism, the authors discuss how online discussions, search engines, machine learning, and ecosystem processes affect the circulation of museum knowledge. Moving away from human-centred interpretations, the book incorporates new materialism and posthumanism perspectives, proposing a new theoretical framework that views digitised heritage as an ecological construct and curatorial agency as an ecosystem-like process. The analysis by the four authors, each with different approaches, concluded that curatorial agency simultaneously has three aspects: human-subjective, mechanical-computational, and embedded in more-than-human ontological formations. The study showed that museum knowledge becomes personalised and open-ended when circulated through multiple platforms.

In the discussion, points were raised about how museums, curators, and specialists should provide expert knowledge in an era of digital information circulation where museum collections and expertise are reinterpreted, recontextualised, and individualised, and whether they need to distribute content in anticipation of unexpected uses and interpretations by humans and machine learning. There was also a discussion referencing the science communication project that B’AI Global Forum is working on jointly with the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan). Specifically, the “Question Board” at the museum allows visitors to encounter thoughts of others who do not share the same time and space, raising points about the relationship between the Other (whose understanding goes beyond that of experts) and unexpected uses of knowledge in digital spaces. Additionally, citizen science and citizen curators cannot be ignored in digital spaces, just as in traditional society, alongside personalisation and machine learning. In an era where all such curatorial agency trends are involved in the circulation and interpretation of museum knowledge and scientific technology/knowledge, the role of experts needs to be constantly updated. Still, there are few specialists and professionals in Japan today who can adapt to the digital age. Furthermore, the importance of provenance information in museums and digital archives is increasing, and this issue should be addressed with consideration for the fluidity of materials and their value.