Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

This study uses the Owl House in Nieu Bethesda as an exemplar for interrogating the possibilities of digital curation in South Africa. It draws on a conceptual framework encompassing the digital humanities, museology, Baudrillard’s notion of simulation, as well as contemporary research and similar studies. Digital curation of a Visionary Environment, which falls within the ambit of Outsider Art, is a largely unprecedented practice. This qualitative study is situated in a social constructivist paradigm and uses elements of a phenomenological approach. As an instance of qualitative research, at the heart of this study is an emphasis on understanding how people construct their realities and interpret their experiences. The experiences of interpreting and viewing digital artifacts outside of a museum are not the same as viewing them in real life. This inevitably changes the way that someone experiences and interprets a collection. The challenge of digitizing a museum is thus to understand what this transformation process (physical to digital) does to the integrity of the original collection. Digitisation within museums offers so many possibilities, especially in the context of site-specific museums that are largely inaccessible. A digitally curated collection of high-quality digital media can allow for a museum like the Owl House to be visited digitally, and moreover, that visitors can have a rich and layered museum experience. The data for this study was collected from interviews with participants who engaged with a digitized sub-collection of the Owl House.