Technology at the museum: the missing voice

Abstract

Museums offer opportunities to observe and interact with exhibits, alongside learning about different cultures. Technologies have been developed in order to augment the visitor's experience during their museum visit, and how to make these technologies accessible is also an active and complementary field of research. In this work however, we find that there is a gap when discussing accessible technology for the African museum. We conducted a formative assessment, which incorporates previous work, and augmented it by sampling user reviews on Google Maps of 102 African museums, in order to probe the question of relevance and scalability in the applicability of previous approaches to the African museum. From this, we highlight opportunities to be found in the intersection of the two domains: for cultures to better tell their own stories, to reach an expanded audience, and to offer opportunities for research, together with potential tensions and barriers.