ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the strengths and weaknesses identified in relevant studies in order to explore the democratizing potential of Norway’s Digital Museum (digitaltmuseum.no) and its ability to retrieve gender sensitive content. The main thesis is that new technologies and methods for aggregating, presenting, and searching the digitized corpus of museum objects – what Sverdljuk calls electronic curation – foster social diversity in terms of content, making possible the dissemination of local history from women’s perspectives. At the same time, as feminist theories of technology demonstrate, material entities, including digital museum artifacts, possess not just technical, but performative, flexible, and discourse-related natures. Therefore, gender-sensitive dissemination of digital museum artifacts largely depends upon the efforts of curators, who supply metadata and other qualitative object descriptions. Sverdljuk uses the affordances of a keyword-targeted search of this unique digitization project, focusing on three of the results of searching for women’s story, to show how Digital Museum can give voice to marginalized figures, such as coastal women in northern Norway and women migrants living in Oslo.
