Digital Empathy and museum participation

As part of the Travellers’ Tails project the Royal Museums Greenwich are embarking on a research project with UCL’s

Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) to explore Digital Empathy and museum participation.

Aim: To create a tool that engages with an experience of Digital Empathy (moving away from text based provocations and responses) as researched by CASA at UCL.

This might start from a passive experience and building to a fully interactive experience – and how this journey can be facilitated via innovative methods in the public spaces of the museum. The tool will accompany Stubbs’s kangaroo painting on its tour of the Travellers’ Tails partner museums, adapting to each location along the way.

Objectives:

• To challenge a traditional museological approach to audience participation building upon CASA’s research into digital empathy.
• To explore the potential of new and emerging technologies to revolutionise participation, engagement, interaction with museum collections.
• To experiment with how differing perspectives can be engaged, promoting debate and encouraging the public and museum professionals to think further about the themes and ideas collection items draw on, such as the history of exploration – for which the Stubbs’s painting provides an excellent starting point.

Watch this space…