The Role of Museums’ Social Media for Supporting Socially Engaged Museum Practices (MAXQDA)

The dataset encompasses diverse forms of mainly qualitative data including interview transcriptions, ethnographic observations, institutional documents, meeting minutes/meeting notes and social media posts from four key museum case studies that are organised into five folders. This dataset encompasses a variety of documents including Docx, PDF, and Excel files. The dataset underpins the thesis titled ‘Crafting Museum Social Media for Social Inclusion Work’ which was part of the European Union ECR Training Network – POEM on participatory memory practices in digital ecologies funded by the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant, agreement No. 764859. The Dataset was used to understand the main research question of the thesis: 1) How can social media support the museum’s socially inclusive role to potentially challenge social exclusion and associated inequalities? This was underpinned by two additional questions: 2) How do structures (institutional and social platforms) shape how staff carry out social inclusion work through social media? 3) Which work processes enable staff to pursue social inclusion through social media

Surfacing the National Collections: adapting image cataloguing standards to transform access to National Museums Scotland's online collections (dataset)

The dataset was produced as part of a project with National Museums Scotland (February - June 2023) to improve their online collections findability and searchability through a user-centred approach. Publicly available data: Includes aggregated and anonymised data from the user/non-user interviews, surveys, and user queries, which were collected to understand how participants do and desire to explore the National Museums Scotland’s online collections. This includes a report containing aggregated results from two online surveys ‘Survey Data Report Summary’ (PDF), a folder of images from interviews (from the card sort and concept mapping activities), titled ‘Card-sort and Concept Map Images’ (36 JPEG/PNG), and a series of tables summarising findings from a sample of user search queries from the Museums’ Search our Collections Portal (from 2020-2021) titled ‘GKEF SoC Aggregated Data’ (PDF). Participants are referred to in these documents by pseudonyms. Not available publicly: A folder of ‘Transcriptions of Interviews from Users/Non-users’ (10 Docx files) and a folder containing ‘Transcriptions of Interviews with National Museums Scotland’s Staff’ (13 Docx files). Participants are referred to by a number

Care-ful participation in museums : a review of The Museum as a Space of Social Care by Nuala Morse

A review of The Museum as a Space of Social Care by Nuala Morse. The activist, radical, or socially just museum:1 the discipline of museum studies has a tradition of aiming to push (the idea of) a conservative institution into a progressive, just, and relevant mold that stands in close connection to society. As the world grapples with multiple crises, the museum's relevance depends on multiple perspectives and internal change. Climate crises and their global and local impacts have brought forward ideas of how museums might positively contribute to change in society, all the while working to decrease their own environmental footprint.2 Healthcare crises, brought about by neoliberal and austerity politics, have fostered new connections among cultural and health institutions.3 Racial justice crises have provided new urgency for museums to critically examine their contribution to historical and current injustices.4 In the meantime, museum practitioners in Northern America have successfully begun to organize themselves into unions, fighting injustices as they find themselves in exploitative positions.5 As the COVID-19 pandemic further changed the world drastically over the last one and half years, discussions on the museum institution's relevance will take new directions

Surfacing the National Collections: adapting image cataloguing standards to transform access to National Museums Scotland's online collections

No abstract available

Repairing online spaces for "safe" outreach with older adults

Despite the widely recognized importance in the museum sector of cultivating safe, welcoming spaces for projects that work towards social change, few studies consider how feelings of safety can be cultivated online. To provide insight for future museum practices, this study focuses on a series of collaborative sessions facilitated by a museum outreach institution and a social enterprise to provide online engagement activities for older adults during COVID-19. Employing a social media ethnography, this study reveals how staff can create feelings of safety online through repair processes that work around, with, and against the unethical and contradictory bounds of online infrastructures

Museum Social Media Practices: In Need of Repair?

Within the museum sector, research and associated theories on technology can often lead to rhetoric on progression that results in the idealization of the new or the emergent. However, if we approach technologies with a sensitivity towards their fragility, we see it is not always progression that is most interesting, but processes of repair. Social media, it can be argued, is an outdated technology which has lost its excitement and like the larger ideals associated with digital in the cultural heritage sector, is perceived with skepticism. Yet, with the rise of the museum’s social role, museums have an ethical responsibility to understand the factors that shape how social media practices are enacted. In this paper I take on perspective of repair to explore the intersection between social media and organizational structures through an in-depth ethnographic case study of Glasgow Museums Services (Glasgow, UK). The analysis provides essential insights into the (dis)-connections between museum social media practices and museum infrastructure. It suggests that the desire for more participatory social media practices overlooks the underpinning and incompatible elements of the museum institution

Museums, Challenging Heritage and Social Media During COVID-19

In this opinion piece I reflect upon museum social media trends during COVID-19 and consider what it could mean in terms of future online engagement and the (mis)alignment of practices with institutional social missions. In opposition to the recent focus on uplifting museum content and activities online, I investigate an overlooked question regarding the role of challenging heritage on social media during the pandemic. I end with a call for the sector to consider the complexities of including or excluding challenging heritage from current museum online activities and in turn, the opening or foreclosure of critical reflections at a pivotal time in history

Crafting museum social media for social inclusion work

Abstract not currently available

Platforms as bridging digitally enabled participation with exhibitions

No abstract available