Does the materiality of museum collections matter in Digital Humanities?

Abstract

After more than one hundred years of increasingly self-reflective collecting, museums and archives around the globe hold an immense corpus of physical objects and relevant archival material from the Sepik area of Papua New Guinea. While culturally coded knowledge is embodied in these materials, the use of additional outside observations may help to describe some of these areas of knowledge. To keep traditional knowledge alive, methodologies beyond the reading of traditional texts, photographs, and sound recordings have to be developed and applied consistently. The unusual complexity and high diversity of Sepik art makes developing new digital methods of storing, studying, and sharing these resources a challenging task. Future museum activities are likely to put the original object into a new, focused light. Long overlooked aspects in the work of artists may thus come to the fore. By communicating with source communities and, at the end other end, with museum visitors, and by fostering research activities combining the context oriented approach of disciplines rooted in natural science and/or in the humanities, museums will redefine our views of Sepik art and culture.