Museums, Storytelling, and Digital Colonialism

Museums have always been technologies of knowledge organization — deciding what is collected, how it is categorized, who has access, and what stories are told. The digitization of cultural institutions raises the stakes of these decisions dramatically. Arnold and Tilton’s Distant Viewing offers methods for analyzing visual corpora computationally, while Owens asks what “data” even means for humanists working with cultural objects that resist quantification. Mike Pepi’s provocation — “Is a Museum a Database?” — gets to the heart of the matter. Our guest, Kimon Keramidas from the Rubin Museum, has spent years navigating these questions in practice, leading digital strategy initiatives that put storytelling and scholarly rigor ahead of technological novelty. His work on Project Himalayan Art and the Webby-winning AWAKEN podcast offers a model of what digital institution-building can look like when technology serves the mission rather than the other way around.

What happens to cultural heritage when it is digitized and made available to AI systems? How do museums maintain interpretive authority in an age of algorithmic recommendation? And what does it mean to build digital infrastructure for communities whose cultural objects were often collected under conditions of colonial violence?