Breaking Barriers: curating linguistically accessible online exhibitions for museums and galleries

This proposal addresses current gaps in knowledge by raising these research questions:

How do linguistic minorities experience inclusion or exclusion in UK art galleries, and how is this linked to their English-language proficiency?

What are the engagement patterns of linguistic minorities with online gallery exhibitions, and how do they compare to physical visits?

How can UK galleries meaningfully engage with and enhance accessibility for linguistically diverse audiences through Digital Exhibitions (DEs), making them feel welcome?

Since the 1970s, digitisation in the Gallery, Library, Archives and Museum (GLAM) sector has often been driven by an aspiration to improve access to cultural heritage materials (Terras, 2015). During the Covid-19 pandemic, galleries' efforts in digitising cultural heritage have more noticeably extended from the digitisation of cultural objects to that of exhibitions in their entirety.

Covid-19 catalysed a shift towards digital and online exhibitions (Catton and Smith, 2021), often produced through immersive photography and virtual reality, to maintain alternative engagement with immobilised audiences (Marschall, 2021). As a producer of DEs who entered the field during the pandemic, I hold an optimistic outlook on the recent surge in DEs in the UK gallery sector.

Nevertheless, I find it necessary to query whether DEs are truly maximising their potential to enhance cultural access, especially when certain groups in society continue to encounter the same barriers in their engagement with online exhibitions as they would with physical exhibitions. One of these prominent barriers is language.

My research will therefore examine the experiences and multilingual needs of linguistic minority groups in the UK when engaging with DEs, focusing on people who do not consider English their first language. This research will: Identify barriers faced by linguistic minorities in engaging with online art exhibitions through user testing;

Work with the University of Edinburgh (UoE) Art Collections to design DEs, demonstrating best practices in terms of creating DE spaces and interfaces;

Develop recommendations for UK galleries to enhance linguistic accessibility of online exhibitions, improving audience engagement.

I will address the proposed research questions through a mixed-method approach with ethnographic elements, involving participation from two linguistic-minority user groups recruited through established links with immigrant-serving organisations: one representing Chinese-speaking participants; and another linguistically diverse, using English as a lingua franca. My bilingual proficiency in English and Chinese will enable me to engage with the former group in the participants' mother tongue and the latter in English, allowing understanding of culturally nuanced perspectives and cross-lingual comparison of findings.

Partnering with the UoE Art Collections, with a contemporary gallery context to be confirmed, I will design an immersive DE that evolves with my research, utilising visual materials from digitised UoE collections and themes chosen in dialogue with the curatorial teams, via a combination of digital technologies: 360-degree photography, 3D software (Blender) and VR tour-building platforms (Theasys).

Understanding curatorial and digitisation practices that promote linguistic accessibility in online exhibitions has important implications for our ability to address participatory inequality and exclusion prevalent in cultural heritage. My research responds to the Museum Association's urgent call for museums and galleries to 'diversify their audience' and 'give authority to the unheard' (Heal, 2024), offering timely opportunities to engage cultural institutions in dialogues with communities that are often underrepresented in their audience, ultimately contributing to a more equitable and diverse digital cultural landscape.