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Beyond Virtual Tours: How Can Museums Use Digital Tools to Decolonize Collections and Engage Global Audiences?
2025-11-22 - 03:41 pm
The Problem of Physical Access: Addressing the geographic and economic barriers that prevent global audiences, especially those from source communities, from physically interacting with culturally significant objects held in major Western museums.
Digital Decolonization Efforts: Detailing concrete ways digital tools (high-resolution scanning, 3D modeling, open-source databases) can be used to provide context, repatriate knowledge, and facilitate community-led interpretation of objects.
Transparency and Provenance: Discussing the importance of making comprehensive provenance (the history of ownership) research easily accessible online to address concerns about how objects were acquired during colonial eras.
Interactive Storytelling and Context: Exploring how technology can move beyond simple "virtual tours" to offer immersive, interactive experiences that incorporate diverse cultural narratives and multilingual information about the objects.
The Future of Collaboration: Highlighting examples of successful digital collaborations between institutions in the West and museums or cultural organizations in the objects' countries of origin.