Representational practices in digital museums: A case study of the National Digital Museum Project of Taiwan

The study explores the semiotic aspects of the migration of museum artifacts to the digital domain. Seeing digital museums from a semiotic perspective helps foreground the representational practices utilized and the “museum effects” they create in the digital environment. Three levels of representational practices were discussed: the representation of the original artifacts by their digital images, the representation of the national consciousness by the cultural elements highlighted by the collections, and the representational schemes that provide access to cultural materials. A case study of the theme projects under Taiwan's National Digital Museum Project is presented with a view to examining current representational schemes for cultural materials. The relations among curatorial intention, the nature of the cultural image, and the representational schemes are explored. The implications of current practices on the dissemination of cultural materials online are discussed.