School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableMuseums as Actors of City Diplomacy: From “Hard” Assets to “Soft” Power(Springer International Publishing, 2020)Historically, museums have earned their dedicated role as important agents of cultural diplomacy. In the age of increasing urbanization, museums have become important center of urban soft power and actors of city diplomacy. This chapter argues that museums are vital actors of city diplomacy, because of a high cultural and economic value of their “hard” or tangible resources and “soft” power of their social activities that engage global audiences and facilitate international cultural relations. This chapter discusses this framework of museum diplomacy resources and outputs in two main sections. The first section focuses on “hard” assets of museums such as collections and facilities. It explains why and how the cultural infrastructure offered by museums play an important role in city diplomacy, especially in place making and city branding. The second section explores soft power generated by museums through their social activities and programming that help activate cultural resources and transform them into diplomatic outputs.
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ItemIs there a Place for a Crowdsourcing in Multilateral Diplomacy? Searching for a New Museum Definition(Routledge, 2020-10-29)This chapter explores the practice of crowdsourcing in global governance as a tool of multilateral diplomacy to interrogate its exact role and place in the decision-making processes. It investigates the case of the online cultural diplomacy of the International Commission of Museums (ICOM), focusing on the 2019 crowdsourcing campaign delivered by the ICOM’s Standing Committee for Museum Definition, which aimed to collect public contributions to re-define the museum agency in the 21st century. The chapter draws on media discourse analysis of the public debates concerning the new definition and applies content analysis of the 268 definitions submitted by the public to the ICOM’s official online platform. It also features interview insights from the MDPP Committee Chair. Based on key findings, the chapter argues that in the context of ICOM, multilateralism 2.0 remains a desirable vision rather than a reality.
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ItemSustainable Fundraising in the 21st Century: Behind the Scenes of the Global Guggenheim Success(Rowman & Littlefield, 2017-08-01)
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ItemResearching Online Museums: Digital Methods to Study Virtual Visitors(Springer International Publishing, 2018)Digital ethnography can be used to study online audiences and virtual communities built around museum content. Virtual museum visitors can participate in online museum spaces, including interactive online galleries, virtual three-dimensional museum simulators, or museum profiles on social network sites or blogs. These online environments can include recording tools, to trace all of the activities of the users and to display all of the visible records. This chapter discusses challenges, ethical implications, and online research opportunities of the digital ethnographic methodology employed to study online museum audiences. It illustrates the method through empirical studies of online communities at internationally recognized museums. Digital ethnographic research conducted in online museum communities can inform Digital Humanities and incorporate perspectives from visitor studies.
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ItemMuseum Ethnography in the Digital Age: Ethical Considerations(Lang - Peter Lang, 2017-08-01)As a digital museum ethnographer, I would like to devote this chapter to sharing my personal experience in addressing ethical considerations while conducting research on museum visitors’ behavior in online spaces. My research looks at online museums as important sites of cross-cultural communication. These sites project powerful political and cultural messages across borders and engage not only local but predominantly international audiences. Captivated by the diversity of online museum programs that connect people across the globe, opening up virtual spaces for cross-cultural learning, and immersing online visitors into educational experiences, I traveled the world to conduct a number of case studies. I researched digital spaces of large international museums in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Singapore. My ethnographic research revealed that museum online communities as social interactive worlds can be powerful tools of cultural representation or mis-representation, sites of memory and identity construction, and building citizenry or political battlegrounds of resistance and social riots. Online museums can build unique “bridges” among communities for improving intercultural competence and tolerance or, in contrast, can invoke religious and cultural wars. These insights and findings were possible due to immersive ethnographic research within different digital museum spaces. I explored various online museum communities and collected and analyzed a large amount of textual and visual data demonstrating various behaviors of online “museum goers.”
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ItemResearching online Museums: Digital Methods to Study Virtual Visitors(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)This chapter focuses on the application of visitor studies methodologies to museums as cultural institutions that incorporate digital media into their cultural programming and social activities. It provides a comprehensive guide to three types of research methods employed by contemporary museums to study online visitors: quantitative, behavioral and qualitative. Illuminating how traditional museum visitor research tools informed emerging digital methods, the chapter describes important procedures of online museum audience studies. Step by step, three sections introduce more sophisticated online methods, which add new dimensions to the understanding of virtual visitors.
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ItemGlobal PR that works: The case of the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia(Routledge, 2018)Founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, the State Hermitage Museum in Russia is one of the largest and best-known museums in the world. With 3 million objects displayed in six buildings along the Neva River, the Hermitage Museum occupies an important position alongside such leading museums as the Louvre, British Museum and Metropolitan Museum. The cases study looks at the International Hermitage Friends Club as a successful global Public Relation (PR) strategy that allows the museum to expand its audiences and constituencies far beyond the Russian borders.