Behind the scenes of the museum website

Abstract

This article examines the role of online resources hosted by museums as a means to communicate, engender research and reach out to new audiences. A number of scholars have already analysed the online presence of institutions and created an innovative new field of study by critiquing and theorising the emergence of ‘digital heritage’. Building upon these developments, this article examines museum websites from a new perspective, through the markup and programme languages used to deliver the online content to the user. Drawing upon the nascent field of ‘critical code studies’, this article analyses the online exhibition ‘Ancient Cyprus in the British Museum’, to illustrate the value of this approach. This analysis highlights the manner in which the ‘virtual’ visitor experience is structured in a fashion comparable to the ‘real’ visitor experience. Using theories of ‘intertextuality’, this article examines the analogous relationship between the markup and programme languages and wider museum practice.