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Museum Ethnography in the Digital Age
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.”