How Museums Should Utilize Digital Technology to Drive the Collective Inheritance of Cultural Heritage?
Date：2023-07-11
Zhang Jingwen, Deputy Director of Nankai University Museum, emphasized in the third dialogue of the China-Europe-America Museums Cooperation Initiative why and how museums should utilize digital technology in driving the collective inheritance of cultural heritage. As a public cultural service institution, museums bear the important responsibility of protecting and transmitting cultural heritage. As public demands become increasingly diverse, digital technology provides a powerful means for museums to present and disseminate the value of cultural heritage in new ways, enhancing public understanding and engagement. When discussing the challenges faced by museums in digitization, Dr. Zhang highlighted two key points: firstly, utilizing new technologies to interpret the cultural genes, semantic connotations, and knowledge associations of digital cultural heritage resources, constructing intelligent data for cultural heritage, and building exhibition systems and educational platforms through techniques such as visualization. The second point involves promoting interdisciplinary collaboration and public participation, transforming the process of collecting and presenting cultural heritage information into a two-way knowledge exchange. This turns museum digital platforms into an open space for public discussions and innovative expressions, inspiring the public to take responsibility for cultural inheritance.
Jingwen Zhang. Ph.D. in history. Dr. Zhang is the deputy director of the Nankai University Museum, the deputy head of the Museological and Archaeological Laboratory, the deputy head of the Museological and Archaeological Research Center, associate professor, and master supervisor. Dr. Zhang’s major research fields include museum exhibition and educational activities, theories and methods of the visualization of cultural relics information, innovation application of the digital activation of cultural relics, and game-based learning in museums. As the project leader, Dr. Zhang presided over more than 20 programs, including Key Programs Supported by the National Social Science Fund of China, Strategic Research Projects of Ministry of Education of China, Programs supported by the Tianjin Social Science Fund and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and programs entrusted by other governments and public institutions. Dr. Zhang has published over 20 academic articles in core journals at home and abroad including the Journal of Cultural Heritage, Museum Management and Curatorship and Southeast Culture. Dr. Zhang has also presided over the curating and implementation of more than 30 exhibitions of museums, art galleries and so on.
Full text of the speech
Hello everyone, I am Zhang Jingwen from Nankai University Museum. I'm delighted to have the opportunity today to discuss with you all how museums should utilize digital technology to drive the collective inheritance of cultural heritage.
As we all know, museums serve as public cultural institutions and bear the responsibility of protecting, preserving, and transmitting cultural heritage to future generations. One of their core missions is to elucidate the broader value of cultural heritage and ensure its continuous inheritance. By constructing, interpreting, and sharing the value of cultural heritage, museums can enhance public understanding of it, foster a closer relationship between heritage and society, and enable the cultural information and material carriers of heritage to be continuously passed on to the future.
However, we have gradually realized that relying solely on the limited physical space and tangible artifacts of museums restricts the amount of cultural information that can be conveyed to the public. Moreover, from the perspective of public demand, museums worldwide are facing increasingly diverse expectations, such as a focus on experiential learning, individual perspectives, and self-expression. The younger generation of museum visitors, in particular, exhibits unique characteristics, including a high demand for personalization and enhanced interactive experiences. They expect greater interactivity in information dissemination, greater professionalism and creativity in content, as well as greater immersion and precision of viewing experiences.
Undoubtedly, scholars in the museum community worldwide are tirelessly exploring and striving to meet the diverse demands of museum visitors. They are approaching this issue from various angles and fields. Among them, rapidly evolving digital technology provides us with powerful means to enhance visitor experiences and revitalize the enduring vitality of cultural heritage. In the new realm created by digital technology, museums can express and disseminate the value of cultural heritage in new forms, structures, and representations, enabling them to acquire fresh continuity and growth. At the same time, digital technology also offers more opportunities and possibilities for the democratization of cultural heritage and museum collections.
Since the 1980s, many countries have gradually initiated digital projects focused on cultural heritage preservation and transmission. Examples include the American Memory, Time Machine Europe, and Finland's CultureSampo, among others. In recent years, China's museum community has also made remarkable achievements in this field. Notably, museums such as the Palace Museum, Dunhuang Museum, Nanjing Museum, and Shanghai Museum have leveraged new technologies like cloud computing, the Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence to provide visitors with various services, including venue navigation, artifact interpretation, interactive experiences, and educational livestreams, setting a great example.
However, overall, most museums still face many challenges and issues due to various factors such as technology, talent, and funding. These include low resource utilization and insufficient public participation, among other shortcomings. While the concept of heritage preservation has evolved from the physical preservation of "objects" to the profound interpretation and utilization of "people", "values" and "spirit", there is still a significant disparity between a strong recognition of cultural heritage digitization's value and a weak perception of the current situation. In other words, cultural heritage institutions and the public generally highly appreciate the value of cultural heritage digitization, but their assessment of its development level is relatively low. Although cultural heritage institutions possess a vast amount of data resources, a considerable portion of these resources remains in a state of "dormant data" and "isolated data islands," requiring us to leverage our intelligence and efforts to transform the foundational data of cultural heritage into culturally productive elements that can be deeply utilized, thereby unlocking their multiple values.
To achieve this, we still have a long way to go. I believe there are two crucial aspects that require particular attention, and they are precisely what the Museum Studies program at Nankai University is working on. On one hand, we are committed to leveraging new technologies to drive cultural heritage digitization from weak technological supply characterized by "low precision and low excavation" towards strong technological supply characterized by "high precision and high presentation". For example, we can utilize technologies such as big data and AI to interpret the cultural genes, semantic connotations, knowledge associations, and intrinsic values embedded in digital cultural heritage resources. This enables us to construct intelligent data of cultural heritage that is interpretable, trustworthy, traceable, and inferable. Building upon this foundation, we can then utilize a range of technological means such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and visualization to create exhibition systems and educational platforms that focus on transmitting the values of cultural heritage. In doing so, we can associate, interpret and share research findings on cultural heritage from multiple perspectives, with a broader vision and a more inclusive approach.
On the other hand, we are also striving for interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue, as well as utilizing approaches like crowdsourcing to attract and encourage broader public participation in the collection, processing, and presentation of cultural heritage information. We view the public as potential knowledge producers, so we seek to transform the previous one-way knowledge transmission into two-way knowledge exchange. By employing modern and socialized knowledge transformation approaches, we can ensure the coexistence of previously overlooked voices and a wider range of historical perspectives. The digital platform of museums can thus become an open space for public discussions, innovative expressions of hot topics, and personalized interpretations. Museums, as magnets and connectors, can attract and link public memories, elevating cultural heritage information to become collective memories with local and regional significance. This, in turn, awakens the public's self-confirmation of cultural belonging and their sense of responsibility in cultural inheritance. Ultimately, it provides an enduring spiritual force for human development. That concludes my speech today. Thank you all for your attention.
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