At the 4th Dialogue of the C.E.A. Museums Cooperation Initiative, many speakers shared their insights on museums in the digital age, such as the "theatrical expressions" of digital humanities, creativity in numbers, and applying management knowledge to advance museum development. Jingwen Zhang, Deputy Director of the Nankai University Museum and Deputy Head of the Museological and Archaeological Laboratory, introduced an indispensable concept for museums in the digital age—knowledge graphs.
Full speech by Jingwen Zhang
In 1683, Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum opened to the public, marking the birth of the modern museum. Since their inception, modern museums have served as centers for both the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. With the advent of the Information Age, the concept of "smart museums" has gained widespread acceptance.
Zhang believes that the key to a "smart museum" lies in effectively organizing, aggregating, and correlating artifact knowledge. However, in this regard, museums face numerous difficulties and challenges.
- Data Content Organization—Primarily rely on self-built databases, resulting in pronounced data silos.
- Data Management and Description—Lack of in-depth description of the semantic characteristics of heritage resources.
- Data Service—Insufficient resource correlation, insufficient depth of mining, lack of complete knowledge system support.
The solution to these issues lies in museum knowledge graphs.
What is a knowledge graph? Simply put, a knowledge graph is an application of artificial intelligence in a big data environment. It transforms scattered, unstructured information into structured knowledge and presents it in visual form. Not only does it use data to reflect events, but it also reveals the relationships between events.
As Zhang mentioned, museums must continuously reform their approaches to cultural knowledge production and innovate their service paradigms to authentically animate artifacts. Currently, a few large and medium-sized museums, both domestically and internationally, have begun to establish artifact knowledge graph application platforms and experiment with integrating knowledge graphs into exhibitions and educational activities to provide audiences with comprehensive knowledge services and enhanced visual experiences.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, through its Heritage Connector project, offers diverse avenues for visitors to explore artifacts by establishing connections among exhibits.
The British Museum's Museum of the World project presents temporal and spatial visualizations of selected museum artifacts.
Projects such as "Dong Qichang Digital Humanities" and "Embracing Spring: Digital Special Topic on Jiangnan Culture" at the Shanghai Museum integrate elements of time, location, people, events, and objects, significantly broadening visitors' interests and perspectives in knowledge discovery.
The Dunhuang Academy has developed an interactive digital narrative system by semantically describing and annotating mural image information.
Looking ahead, Zhang mentioned that the current digitalization efforts in Chinese museums are transitioning from a previous weak technological supply characterized by "low precision and shallow exploration" to a strong technological supply model marked by "high precision and high correlation".
- Realize knowledge integration in the original field and even across different fields.
- Achieve an innovation knowledge production model through interdisciplinary knowledge integration.
- Enhance the public’s sense of experience in acquiring cultural heritage knowledge.
- Enhance the cultural innovation and dissemination capabilities of museums.
The ultimate goal of all these efforts, as Zhang summarized, is to breathe new life into our precious cultural heritage.
Jingwen Zhang Deputy Director of the Nankai University Museum and Deputy Head of the Museological and Archaeological Laboratory
Jingwen Zhang is a professor of history at Nankai University, as well as the Deputy Director of the Nankai University Museum and the Deputy Head of the Museological and Archaeological Laboratory. She focuses on studies of archaeology and museum, and has published over 20 papers in core academic journals both domestically and internationally. "Value Exploration and Innovative Communication of Museum Artifacts Based on Knowledge Graphs" is a recent focus of her research.
