International Journal of Heritage Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjhs20

Object biographies in the digital age:

documentation, life-histories, and data

Chiara Zuanni

To cite this article: Chiara Zuanni (2023): Object biographies in the digital age:
documentation, life-histories, and data, International Journal of Heritage Studies, DOI:
10.1080/13527258.2023.2215733

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2023.2215733

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.

Published online: 23 May 2023.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2023.2215733

Object biographies in the digital age: documentation,

life-histories, and data
Chiara Zuanni
Centre for Information Modelling, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper explores how the framework of object biographies can be used Received 17 June 2022
to analyse our digital activities, both disseminating and expanding these Accepted 15 May 2023
same biographies. During the digitisation and cataloguing processes, KEYWORDS
biographies are not only – and in limited format – recorded, but are also Object biographies;
expanded by the affordances of the digital medium. Similarly, digital digitisation; digital
interpretation and engagement programmes, and their reception by interpretation; digital
museum audiences contribute to the establishing of new relationships engagement; social media;
around the object and the emergence of new narratives. User-generated metadata
content is also a witness of contemporary interpretation and networks
emerging from public interest in, and use of, cultural heritage objects. The
case-study of the Victory of Samothrace, and its traces in the Louvre’s own
digital offer and among audiences’ data is used to discuss the range of
digital content surrounding an object. This paper argues that all these
instances of an object in the digital sphere are worth studying as adding
new chapters in its life-history, in an ever-changing scenario of both
ephemeral and meaningful digital representations. The relationship
between originals and this digital content is considered as multifaceted,
documenting, mediating, and expanding the original object biography,
but also enabling digital surrogates to develop their own independent
biographies.

Introduction
This paper discusses how object biographies are re-framed in the digital age and it argues that
digital methods aiming to reproduce an object and its life-history have a significant role in not only
documenting, but also enriching and expanding an object biography. Object biographies, intended
as the recounting of the life-history of an object, allow exploring the different meanings, values, and
relationships that were associated to the object in different moments of its life. In the past, object
biographies, as first defined by Kopytoff (1986), have been used to trace the history of museum
objects, in doing so informing histories of knowledge, museums, and material culture. They have
therefore become a useful frame for researching material culture and critically situating museum
narratives (Alberti 2005; Hill 2012), albeit potentially problematic (Hicks 2020). However, there is
a need for more research on how digitisation processes and user-generated content on digital
platforms can enhance and expand an object biography. On the one hand, digital surrogates,
created by recording information about the object in digital form, presenting this information
through digital applications, or sharing it on social media, can document, mediate, and disseminate

CONTACT Chiara Zuanni chiara.zuanni@uni-graz.at Centre for Information Modelling, University of Graz, Elisabethstraße
59/III (ZIM-ACDH), Graz 8010, Austria
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow
the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
2 C. ZUANNI

an object’s life-history. On the other hand, digital surrogates also represent and enable new
interactions and relations with the object and, as such, deserve to be acknowledged and documented
as part of an object biography. This paper aims therefore to explore how digital content about an
object becomes part of this same object’s biography, in a complex balance of relationships between
original and reproduction, documentation and engagement, reference to the physical counterpart
and newborn-digital object.
After a short review of current perspectives on object biographies, the paper will focus on their
expansion into the digital realm. First, it will introduce the key themes and present a case-study, the
Victory of Samothrace and its digital presence. Secondly, it will discuss the implications and steps in
the digital lives of an object, as emerging from the case-study. In doing so, three core sections will
broaden the discussion, exploring 1) how object biographies are represented in the digitisation
process, through metadata and reproductions; 2) how this information is conveyed to the public,
through a variety of digital methods; 3) how online audiences interact with this published content,
additionally modifying, remixing, and expanding the potential interpretations and perspectives on
a given object. Ultimately, I will argue that digital documentation of, and engagement with, an
heritage object not only disseminate an object biography, but also become part of it – with new
digital objects entering in a relationship with the physical object and expanding its networks and
meanings, thus becoming witnesses of new steps in its biography.

Object biographies in the museum

The concept of object biography was famously first proposed by Kopytoff in 1986, referring to the
ways in which we can narrate the life-histories of objects, through their production, exchanges, and
consumption, and the meanings they assume in these contexts (Kopytoff 1986). In archaeology,
object biographies have been famously proposed by Gosden and Marshall (1999), in a special issue
of the journal World Archaeology, in 1999. As they summarise, ‘at the heart of the notion of
biography are questions about the links between people and things; about the ways meanings and
values are accumulated and transformed’ (Gosden and Marshall 1999, 172). Successively, Cornelius
Holtorf used a life history approach to observe how the practices of archaeology affect artefact’s
identities, so that even ‘the material identities ascribed to things are not their essential properties but
the result of relationships of people and things’ (Holtorf 2002, 64). Hoskins (2006) reflected on the
relation between the notion of object biographies and that of agency, and drawing on Gell (1998)
suggested that ‘Material objects thus embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency’
(Hoskins 2006, 75). As a consequence, she highlighted that ‘the agentive turn [. . .] requires
attention to biographical frames of meaning and individual relations established through things
with other persons’ (Hoskins 2006, 82) and concluded that ‘Object themselves may not be
animated, but their relations have certainly animated many debates about the ways to understand
society, culture and human lives’ (ibid). Ten years on from Gosden’s and Marshall’s special issue,
Joy (2009) reviewed the concepts of object biographies and life histories, suggesting a relational
approach, since ‘an object biography is comprised of the sum of the relationships that constitute it’
(Joy 2009, 552), rather than being a linear historical reconstruction of its birth, life, and death.
Object biographies have also been largely used to trace the histories of museum objects and
collections. As Samuel Alberti argued, ‘Clearly the biography of an object did not stagnate once it
arrived at the museum’ (Alberti 2005, 565). On the one hand, he observed how objects maintain
their polysemy in the museum, becoming boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989). On the
other hand, he pointed to curatorial agency, writing that ‘The meanings of an object were impacted
upon not only by its arrangement and place in the overall classification – which were more often
intellectual than physical – but also by its immediate display environment’ (Alberti 2005, 568). In
this sense, ‘to track one object through the decades and centuries of changing modes of exhibition is
to present a rich history of the cultures of display in the context of that museum/city/nation’ (ibid).
Indeed, Kate Hill’s edited volume Museums and Biographies. Stories, Objects, Identities (Hill 2012)
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 3

explored different ways in which biographical approaches could help reveal histories of collections,
collectors, and institutions. Prior to that, the project The Relational Museum in Oxford had built
upon the notion of object biographies to develop a methodology, drawing on social network
analysis, to explore the history of key collectors and curators in the Pitt Rivers and their connection
to a set of objects. By using network diagrams, the project focused therefore on the history of the
objects’ arrival in the museum, investigating ‘the past social connectedness of collectors, producers,
users and donors’ (Larson, Petch, and Zeitlyn 2007, 236).
The focus of numerous object biographies on the European collectors and donors of artefacts,
ignoring the original networks and meanings that surrounded objects in the place of their creation
and first use, is at the base of Dan Hicks’ recent critic of the concept (Hicks 2020, 2021). Hicks draws
on the idea of ‘necropolitics’, which Achille Mbembe used to correct Foucault’s account of the
biopolitical, to propose the concept of a ‘necrography’: the writing of the histories of destruction
that accompany many anthropological collections. The resulting ‘knowledge made through death
and loss’ (Hicks 2020, 34), or ‘necrology’, would allow addressing the violent history of museums
and inform the task of restitution (Hicks 2020). Thus, the call to research necrographies, instead of
biographies, highlights Hicks’ positioning within the restitution debate and frames his research on
Benin’s artefacts. However, as Geismar points out, object biographies as a methodology have
already been used to ‘delegitimize narratives of national superiority and imperial conquest in
museums’ since they offer the possibility ‘to present the complexity and multiplicity of experience
that surrounds the singular stories often presented by short labels in museums’ Gosden and
Marshall had already stated that object biographies make apparent ‘the variety of relationships
between people and things in different cultural contexts’ and the success of the notion will ‘depend
upon on its role in revealing this variety’ (Gosden and Marshall 1999, 173). Geismar adds that object
biographies ‘empower and create space for voices from outside of the institution’ and thus allow ‘a
polyphonous, grass-roots or bottom – up approach’ (Geismar 2012).
Furthermore, Alberti, in the before-mentioned article, went one step further by highlighting how
the meaning of an object was dependent also on its viewers, i.e. the visitors. The fact that the
relationships surrounding museum objects ‘involved visitors means that the history of things in
museums is clearly a fruitful area for the study of the public experience of science, which is
especially interesting when meanings are contested. (Alberti 2005, 571). Despite Alberti’s focus
on science collections, I would argue that the previous quote can be reformulated to highlight how
the study of object biographies can support research on the creation, understanding, and values
associated with cultural heritage. Indeed, mine is not a new argument, given the importance of
audience research in museum and heritage studies. Alberti mentions how record on museum
visiting had been kept since the Renaissance (e.g. in the natural history collections by Ulisse
Aldovrandi, opened in the 16th century in Bologna) and charted more methodically since the
19th century. However, these records point to who had the possibility of accessing collections (and
chose to), rather than their experience. As he continues, ‘visitors recorded their responses in diaries
and published them in travelogues and memoirs’, while since the 20th century audience studies and
oral histories offer further information (ibid, 570). Hicks himself, despite his criticisms of object
biographies, talks about the ‘unfinished events’ that surround each object, highlighting how every
museum visit reveals something to the visitor, and asking ‘Does some small trace of such visits even
remain for future visitors, building up in the gallery space?’ (Hicks 2020, 230). In the 21st century,
this means considering user-generated content on social media, and the last section of this paper
will question what does it mean, in a digital age, to include visitor’s experiences in the study of an
object biography.

Digital object biographies and objects’ life-histories in the digital sphere

In the previous section, I have summarised some of the key literature on object biographies,
with the aim of not only contextualising the concept, but also emphasising the continuous
4 C. ZUANNI

and constant evolution of an object biography, through its musealisation and its interaction
with the visitors. In the following sections, I suggest that digital media do not only
contribute to tell an object biography, but they also are witnesses of new interactions
with the object, adding new steps to its life-history, and therefore worthy of inclusion in
the object biography.
Digital media have been used to collect information about an object and presenting it, with
the aim to propose interactive, participatory, and ultimately more engaging narratives.
Objects, once entered in the museum, are recorded and presented in a variety of digital
formats: from the documentation surrounding their acquisition and their cataloguing in
a database, to their publication in online collection portals, virtual exhibitions, or on
a range of digital mediation and engagement platforms, both online or available via digital
supports and mobile applications in the galleries. The data produced by the museum are often
reused or aggregated on external platforms, while researchers and heritage audiences share
more, and eventually alternative, presentations and information on the object in a range of
websites. Finally, museum visitors can also produce new content during their visit and share it
on social networks, where it could be further discussed. Although not all these digital activities
set out to tell an object biography, they can – at times – be used to present a digitally-
mediated object biography.
Still, all the above-mentioned digital recording and presentations of an object constitute
new interactions with the object. From the recording of the object’s information in
a database to a social media post, this digital content documents new encounters with the
original, each leaving a trace of what Hicks called ‘unfinished events’. These encounters will
be driven by the interest of the museum professional or the casual visitor, will be more or
less depth in their focus on the object, and will entail shorter or longer reflections on it: as
in every life-history, each encounter will inform a different relationship and value ascribed
to the object, but not all those might stand out. In this paper, I argue, though, that these
encounters should be considered as part of the object life-history and taken into account
when writing object biographies in the digital age. An ambiguity, which needs to be
acknowledged, is the tension between the physical object and its digital reproductions.
Those latter constitute ontologically different objects, with their own independent lives,
which could be worthy of their own biographies (see e.g. the use of platform biographies,
Burgess and Baym 2022).
Therefore, in this paper, I consider the implications of digitisation, digital mediation and digital
engagement data for object biographies distinguishing between:

● the digital biography of an object, intended as the recounting – with digital methods – of the
object’s biography;
● the life-history of an object in the digital sphere, intended as the multiple interactions and
interpretation of an object in the digital realm, which I consider as an extension and
continuation of its life-history;
● the life-history and biography of a digital object, referring to the life of a digital resource and
its narration, from the creation of the data to their encoding and presentation within a selected
platform (whether a database, a website, a social media platform, etc.).

This paper is mainly concerned by arguing for the value of researching and studying the life-
history of an object in relation to its instances in the digital sphere. Previous literature has
focused on the potential of digital methods for mediating heritage content, including object
biographies, as I will discuss below. I will not, instead, focus on the biography of digital objects
within this paper.
The following section will briefly present a case-study, while the subsequent discussion sections
will observe the ways in which interactions with the object contribute to expand its life-history from
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 5

the creation of digital surrogates within the museum, to their mediation to a broader public, to
audience-generated content.

Case-study: the victory of samothrace

The statue of the Victory of Samothrace was produced in the Hellenistic period, and subsequently
‘lost’, until its rediscovery in the modern age. A traditional object biography would trace its contexts
and relationships from the 3rd-2nd century BCE, investigating its production and original location,
as well as its possible functions, until its rediscovery in 1863, its arrival in Paris in 1864, and its
subsequent life in the museum (Bodenstein 2012), through restorations, display, and new research
on its archaeological context and features. This biography might then also consider its reproduction
in art books and scholarly articles, as well as its presence in souvenirs and popular culture, in order
to examine the successive encounters with the statue and its use by different groups (e.g. academics,
tourists, artists).
A biography, aiming to include the life-history of this statue through its encounters with the
digital sphere, would begin with its record in the Louvre database, observing its creation and any
successive modification. Subsequently, this biography would consider its public digital presence,
through different platforms. It has not been possible to identify its first online representation,
although it could be expected that the statue was present in the Louvre’s early digital offer, such as
the museum’s website, launched in 1995 (Prot 2003) and first captured by the Wayback Machine in
January 1999.1 In 2003, the museum also launched Atlas, an online collections portal which
included only objects on public display in the museum (ca. 30.000 records); additionally, through­
out the years, the statue was featured in different pages of the Louvre’s portals. For example, in 2013,
through the portal ‘Tous mécènes!’,2 the crowdsourcing platform of the Louvre launched in 2010,
over 1 million Euro were raised for the restoration of the statue making it the Louvre’s most
successful crowdsourcing campaign at the time.
Currently, the statue is present in the new Louvre’s ‘Collections’ portal, 3 launched in
March 2021 to substitute the former portal ‘Atlas’. There, it is possible to see a notable number
of images of the statue (58 photos), a simple title, which lists separately the statue and the base
before its famous name ‘statue; base de statue; Victoire de Samothrace’, the period, place of creation,
and place of discovery. The object page URL includes a persistent identifier (using an ARK, i.e. an
Archival Resource Key), thus guaranteeing a permanent link to the object, while a JSON4 data
stream is also available. The information can be downloaded as a PDF or shared to Facebook,
Twitter, or via email. The record highlights where the object is displayed in the museum, with the
indication of the room (linking to an interactive map). A following section reports the adminis­
trative metadata, i.e. the inventory number(s) and the collection, i.e. the Département des
Antiquités grecques, étrusques et romaines. The online presentation in the collection portals
include subsequently a section titled ‘Description’ (incl. Object name/title, description/features,
inscriptions); a section titled ‘Physical Characteristics’ (incl. Dimensions, Materials and techni­
ques), one on ‘Places and Dates’ (incl. Date, Place of origin, Date of discovery, place of discovery),
a ‘History’ (incl. Collector/previous owner, commissioner/archaeologist/dedicatee, acquisition
details, acquisition date, owned by, held by), a ‘Location of the object’ (Current location), an
‘Index’ which includes keywords for different aspects (e.g. category, name, materials, techniques,
description/features, imagery, language, period, places, nature of text), a ‘Bibliography’, and
a ‘curated list of related objects’.5 This data summarises key information about the object adding
references to further literature: therefore, it contains less information than published articles and
reports, in a non-narrative format leaving the reader to eventually construct the object biography
with this information. Furthermore, as a central object in the Louvre collection, the statue receives
more attention on the museum webpages, through dedicated sections6 presenting its history in
a more detailed and narrative format.7
6 C. ZUANNI

Besides individual museum portals, collection data can also be aggregated on national or
international portals. For example, in the case of France, Joconde8 and Moteur Collections9 are
the national portals for museum collection data, and those data are subsequently accessible through
the portal Pop Culture.10 While the previous portal, Atlas, allowed Louvre’s objects to be aggregated
on such platforms and on Europeana,11 the European platform for cultural heritage, the new portal
does not yet seem to have been mapped and aggregated on national and international aggregators.
In this moment, when it comes to the data curated by the museum, the Victory of Samothrace
online surrogates seem therefore to stop within the remits of the Louvre collections portal, its
website, and the information shared on its social networks.
Beyond the museum’s own digital initiatives, the statue is present on a variety of other websites.
A first instance is Wikipedia: in October 2003, a Wikipedia page in English12 was created to
document this statue (with the online encyclopaedia having itself started in 2001), and it has
since had over 910 edits. The French Wikipedia page was created a year later, in 2004, and has
since had around 650 edits.13 Incidentally, it is clear, observing these multi-author records and the
history of their edits, that these pages have their own life-histories. They present participative and
evolving versions of the life-history and characteristics of the statue, as interpreted in different
moments in time, with different Wikipedia editors proposing slightly different interpretations or
adding information to the record. Thus, it could be suggested that each edit is a witness of an
interaction with the statue and the establishing of a network of people negotiating its history and
interpretation. Furthermore, the statue has also obtained an identifier within Wikidata,14 the
knowledge graph of the Wikimedia Foundation, which is increasingly relied upon also in digital
heritage to work with linked data. Also in this case, it could be suggested that the decision to create
such an identifier is a statement about the perceived importance this statue received in
a determinate moment, expanding its life-history in the digital sphere.
The statue is then discussed and presented on multiple websites, and in the last 15+ years it has
also been shared multiple times on social media platforms. The richness of the material and its
ephemerality does not allow for a comprehensive analysis within the scope of this paper. As an
example, it could be noted that on Instagram, in summer 2022, a simple search through the hashtags
#nikesamothrace, #victoryofsamothrace, #victoiredesamothrace results in ca.15.000 posts, showing
different version of the statue. Even within this limited sample, the variety of results documents
multiple encounters and interpretations of the statue: from various photos of this well-known
museum object, to 3D prints, tattoos, art installations, drawings and paintings inspired by the
statue, other exhibitions with references to it (e.g. the Brussels’ exhibition ‘Comics at the Louvre’),
cake and other objects with decorations inspired by it, screenshots from the movie ‘Funny Face’
with Audrey Hepburn on the stairs in front of the statue, other photos from the Louvre or tourist
spots in Paris, replicas of the statue in public spaces, references to the current conflict in
Ukraine, etc.
Even such a short overview shows how the Victory of Samothrace is framed in different ways:
direct reproductions of the statue (i.e. photos taken in the museum), artistic interpretations of it
(e.g. drawings), uses of the statue in popular culture (e.g. movies), commentary on socio-political
events (i.e. Ukrainian conflict), and synecdoche for the whole Louvre’s visit or Paris’ tourist
experience. While all this data is witness of individual encounters with the Victory of
Samothrace, not all of this material does necessarily contribute to its biography due to its repeti­
tiveness and scarcity of context and additional commentary. However, as I will argue below, this
data is representative of a moment in this object life-history, and a sample of the data could be
included in its biography: for example, a selection of tourist posts, documenting their engagement
with the statue, or a selection of posts about the music video ‘Apes*it’ by the Carters, as witnesses of
pop culture engagement and criticism of museum collections (Mendes and Julian 2021).
In conclusion, the Victory of Samothrace is a well-known museum object, which has inspired
many and diverse digital representations. The richness of this data has allowed discussing a variety
of possible digital surrogates and relationships for museum objects. The next sections will attempt
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 7

to develop a framework for considering these data within an object digital life-history, considering
the significance of these digital networks of relationships around the original for an object
biography.

Expanding object life-histories in the digital sphere

The previous sections have suggested that traditional object biographies could be expanded by
considering the multiple instances of an object in the digital realm. As in the case of the Victory of
Samothrace, museum objects can have multiple and diverse surrogates – and this section will
discuss their contribution to an object biography, as they emerge from digitisation programmes,
dissemination initiatives, and within audiences’ digital engagement with the museum.
While the potential of digitisation and catalogues for documenting an object biography has been
researched, I argue that also the choices museums make in recording the information about an
object should be analysed as part of its life-history. Similarly, online presentations and digital
engagement activities have been seen as conveying object biographies, rather than constructing and
expanding object life-histories. And, lastly, also user-generated content has been studied in the
context of visitor studies, but has not been considered as worthy of being included in an object
biography. The following sections will discuss these steps in the digital life on an object – digitisa­
tion, mediation, and engagement –, to observe how each of these processes expands an object life-
history and could become part of its biography.
At the same time, reproductions raise questions around the relationship between originals and
replicas, in relation to the authenticity of the reproduction and its standing as a different, indepen­
dent object. Digital surrogates find themselves in this liminal space, with the potential of being
understood through their relation to the original or the possibility of being framed as new, born
digital objects, with their own biographies. This paper considers these surrogates as independent
objects, worthy of their own biography, but it also aims to highlight their roles in witnessing,
documenting, and expanding the original object’s life-history, thus deeming them worthy of
inclusion in its biography.

From cataloguing to digital surrogates

Objects are recorded in a museum database, and a digital surrogate is often produced (either in 2D
or in 3D): this data attempt in different ways to capture and document information about the
object’s life-history.
Museums’ Collection Management Systems (CMSs) allow recording the information regarding
an object. This data can further be modelled according to standards such as the CIDOC Conceptual
Reference Model,15 Wikidata,16 the Europeana Data Model,17 LIDO (a CIDOC-CRM application
by ICOM),18 and following shared thesauri, such as the Getty Vocabularies (AAT, TGN, CONA,
ULAN, IA)19 or Iconclass.20 The use of such standards allows the development of linked data
solutions, and subsequently data visualisation research connecting disparate collections. However,
the affordances of the databases, the challenges of digitising museum archives and enriching object
records with relevant information (Barr, Saunders, and Budrovich 2016), and the objective itself of
these databases lead to datasets which do not capture the richness of an object life-history.
On the one hand, this is a challenge in information modelling, with recent research in digital
humanities exploring how ‘Connected data, digital objects, virtual museums, linked databases and
digitally mediated ways of interacting with objects have bought new ways of exploring and telling
object itineraries’ (Dunn et al. 2019, 8). Event-based models allow recording the subsequent
moments characterising an object’s ‘itinerary’: even a standard geared towards the exchange of
descriptive metadata, like LIDO, allows the modelling of events, so to record more information
relating to different stages of an object’s life. It is therefore possible to model its production as an
8 C. ZUANNI

event (and thus document entities and relationships relevant to it, e.g. dates, people, places,
documents, etc.), and model as subsequent events its retrieval, musealisation, and exhibition(s).
On the other hand, while the recording of an object life-history would require a high-level of
granularity in this data, the recording of an object in a museum collection management system
requires a trade-off with the level of generalisation needed for the consistent and coherent descrip­
tion of all its objects. A CMS is primarily a tool for the everyday management of information about
the objects, thus the expansion of such data for encompassing a richer and detailed set of sources for
an object biography represents a challenge for this system. As Geismar noted, ‘the facilities of
metadata to embed multiple forms of knowledge within the same object are often muted [in
museum digital projects]’ (Geismar 2018, 77). Ideally, a broader application of linked open data
within museums, combined with open datasets, could support novel forms of investigation in the
collections, with the possibility of querying the museum records, accessing the information, and
visualising object networks and biographies in different ways (Windhager et al. 2019). However, the
museum database affects our possibilities in carrying out this type of research, with the search
criteria (and, eventually, API endpoints) made available to the user and the vocabularies used to
describe objects shaping our ‘idiosyncratic engagement’ (Geismar 2012, 277) with the database.
Consequently, both data wrangling and licencing conditions play a crucial role (Booth, Navarrete,
and Ogundipe 2021) in developing digitally-driven research with museum collections and objects
data.
If the above paragraphs refer to the documentation of an object life-history within metadata,
I would argue that the act itself of creating such records (and modifying, linking, and analysing
them) constitute an event in the object’s life. The ways data are structured inevitably include an
interpretation and a choice in the model and the vocabulary used to describe an object, as Johanna
Drucker pointed out ‘data’ are ‘capta’ (Drucker 2011). A notable example of our agency in
structuring these records is the fact that common standards for cultural heritage, and – crucially
- vocabularies, have been developed on the back of Western art history and archaeology. Not only
we lack the language for representing non-Western artefacts, but often provenance histories are also
not fully represented in the data (Luther 2020). In this sense, the call from Hicks to trace the
necrographies of anthropological collections finds resonance in the need for documenting these
histories of loss also in their digital records, by modelling these events in our data and expanding
our vocabularies to better represent different cultures. As Geismar commented in observing the
digital representation and information of a rambaramp (a mortuary effigy),
It seems that digital systems often become analogues of their non-digital counterparts – map­
ping, and replicating, older representational frameworks, overwriting the capacity of the digital for
radical transformation, connectivity and multiplicity with the representation of singular, teleologi­
cal, narratives. (Geismar 2018, 78)
This replication of non-digital frameworks in the digital records, rather than building on the
potential of data systems for proposing different perspectives on the objects constitute a challenge
that needs to be overcome also for presenting richer object biographies. At the same time, the
process of entering information about an object within a database should become part of its
biography, since it documents the history and meaning of the object within a specific cultural,
social, and technological context, and the interpretation and relationship established by the registrar
or researcher who recorded the data.
Furthermore, digital records can include digitised replicas of an object, as an image or a 3D
model. There is a notable body of literature in digital heritage dealing with the values and challenges
of heritage visualisation, especially in relation to questions of authenticity (Di Giuseppantonio et al.
2018; e.g. Jeffrey 2015; Jones et al. 2018; Latour and Adam 2010). In addition, it should be noted that
this discussion can also benefit from research on analogue replicas (e.g. Foster, Blackwell, and
Goldberg 2014; Foster and Jones 2020), and projects, such as the ReACH project at the Victoria and
Albert Museum,21 which drew on the Convention for promoting universally reproductions of works
of art for the benefit of museums of all countries proposed in 1867 by Sir Henry Cole, with the aim of
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 9

fostering the circulation of plaster casts, to suggest a new Declaration for the circulation of digital
reproductions in 2017. In this context, it should also be acknowledged that digital reproductions
benefit people who would otherwise not be able to visit the site of the physical object and can
become witnesses of an object, preserving its memory, after the destruction or loss of the original
(Jeffrey, Love, and Poyade 2021).
Whereas previous research has investigated and debated whether the aura can be transferred
from an original to a digital surrogate, I would suggest that a similar blurriness is also emerging in
relation to the transfer of an object biography to digital records. Jeffrey remarked how many digital
representations, presented online without authorship information, break the chain of proximity
between original and digital copy: only by overcoming this dehumanisation of the digital object, he
argues,
it is possible for the digital record or representation to once again become part of the biography
of the original and represent, if in no other meaning of the word, an authentic response by a creative
individual or group, to the original (Jeffrey 2018, 52). Indeed, traditional object biographies have
accounted for creative responses to objectsfor example, in the case of artists inspired by the
encounter with archaeological objects, and therefore creative digital responses should also be
considered part of the network of relationships surrounding an object. To summarise, two ways
in which digital objects can become part of an object biography emerge: as representing the
analogue object in the digital sphere or as a creative engagement with it, in both cases witnessing
new relationships and conveying an interpretation of the original.
As I have argued elsewhere (Zuanni 2020, 2021), this leads to questions about the ontological
status of digital objects, both as information objects pointing to an analogue object and as
independent objects, only apparently immaterial (given the materiality of the digital supports on
which they are recorded). They both represent and substitute the original and its life-history, while
simultaneously developing an own independent life as digital records, created with determinate
technologies, with a set of associated metadata, and establishing their own network of agencies
(from the authors of the digital replica to the database managers, and the developers and admin­
istrators of the systems they are hosted on) and affordances. I consider digital reproductions as
independent objects, with their own life-histories, documentation, and digital preservation needs.
They are, however, related to the original, as a source of inspiration and information (reproduced
with different degrees of accuracy), and they add a new relationship and event to its life-history (i.e.
the encounter that led to the creation of the reproduction). As such, digital surrogates are both
deserving of their own biographies, which could uncover histories of digitisation and technology,
and of being included in the analogue object own biography, to include the meanings and values
emerging from the encounter with the original. For example, as it has been discussed in the case of
the Victory of Samothrace, the tracing of its life-history in the digital sphere has highlighted the
different collection portals by the Louvre over the past two decades (Atlas and Collections), as well
as the metadata currently available via its Collections webpage: those are both witnessing the
technological changes of the Louvre’s infrastructure and the interpretations of the statue in
a given moment.
In conclusion, in this section, I have argued that object biographies are both recorded and made
anew in cultural heritage digitisation. The information we have about an object is embedded in
metadata schemas and in 2-/3D visualisations. The database, its data model and vocabulary, does
not only record and mediate an object life-history, but it also represents an interpretation of the
object in a defined spatio-temporal context (the museum database and the record creators).
Therefore, the act itself of creating such digital records implies a curation of the available informa­
tion combined with the affordances of the schema or visualisation method chosen for its repre­
sentation. The authors of this digital record do not passively record an object, but are both editing
and contributing to the further development of an object history, and to the creation of a new, born
digital, object. The next section, will move on to discuss what happens in the case of more
interactive digital presentations for a broader public.
10 C. ZUANNI

From digital surrogates to engagement

Museum collections management systems and digital asset management systems are internal tools,
not accessible for the broader public (unless plugins for online publications are enabled and
configured within the system, and with the notable exception of smaller and open source platforms,
e.g. Omeka).22 The data held by museum databases about an object become visible when this
information is published online and curated in different digital presentation formats (Stevens 2017).
Besides online collection portals, the need of presenting the objects in a way easy to navigate,
accessible, and addressing a broad spectrum of audiences, has led to online presentations, which
might reduce the complexities of some object biographies, as it also happens in museum exhibi­
tions. Audiences might navigate these resources with their own agendas and interests, or simply
serendipitously exploring the digital offer of a museum (Coburn 2016; Whitelaw 2015). Objects can
embed multiple temporal and spatial dimensions – having travelled from their places of production,
through their exchanges, to the museum. However, most graphical representations privilege only
some of the possible information about the object and cannot be interpreted as objective, but rather
as the result of specific choices (Drucker 2011). Still, museum websites present a broader variety of
narratives and perspectives than those that can be encompassed by a museum label, including
timelines, maps, thematic groupings of the objects, digital exhibitions, blog posts, and other
interactive webpages. Museums also rely on a series of external platforms and tools to further
disseminate information about their objects: a prime example in this period is the use of proprietary
3D viewers (e.g. Sketchfab).23
In parallel, applications in the galleries, on mobile, or on interactive screens also convey stories
and perspectives on the objects, facilitating the museum visit. These apps capture the narrative
around an object in a given time and context, often catering to selected audience segments or to the
needs of a time-limited exhibition. An analysis of museum apps and the relationships they foster
with the visitors would require a longer discussion on various aspects of museum engagement and
in-gallery digital experiences, which is not possible within the limits of this paper. However, it
should be noted that such analysis would also prove challenging, due to the lack of sufficient visitor
data in these regards and to the fact that many apps are difficult to maintain in the long-term and
often not enough documented. Thus, while it is possible to observe trends and histories of in-gallery
interpretive media since the 1990s (Samis 2018), it is more difficult to trace the representation of an
object’s life-history within museum applications, due to their ephemerality. For example, in the case
of the Victory of Samothrace, it would be difficult to find other online narratives and witnesses of its
presence in the Louvre’s digital applications, besides its current presentation on the Louvre’s
website and in its mobile application, its discussion in the ‘Tous mécènes!’ portal and, potentially,
in older CD-ROMs from the 1990s. Despite the challenges in researching these digital surrogates as
part of an object life-history in the digital sphere, it is important to highlight how webpages and
applications have a crucial role in expanding an object’s reach, mediating its biography and
fostering new encounters with it, in turn further developing its life-history.
To conclude this section, I noted how the online publication of museum data can take different
forms, to a certain extent dependent on the affordances of the initial recording system, the capacity
and willingness of a museum to share its data, and the choices of the narratives to be presented in
different areas of the website and in digital interpretation applications in the galleries. The digital
surrogates, their information and presentation can explicitly be constructed to mediate an object
biography to a broader audience, in turn fostering new relationships the object itself and expanding
its life in the digital sphere. At the same time, as argued in the previous section, each digital record
and representation of an object, as well as each museum digital projects, is rooted in specific
contexts. Thus, as traditional museum histories excavate archives to reveal histories of institutions,
collections, and objects, histories of museums’ recent past need to excavate the subsequent digital
records and information, both in internal systems and on public platforms. This data would be
witness of different curatorial approaches to the framing and narration of an object and could
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 11

therefore reveal aspects of an object’s life-history and contribute to its biography. Subsequently,
audiences encounter this data and, through these digital representations and formats, engage with
the object, further expanding its possible interpretations and relationships, as it will be discussed in
the next section.

From engagement to user-generated data

The previous sections have discussed ways museums mediate, enhance, and expand object life-histories
and biographies, by digitising artefacts and their information, publishing collections catalogues and
online portals, and disseminating further representations and narratives through their websites, and
beyond. This section moves away from the museum’s server, to explore other representations present in
the digital sphere, e.g. on Wikipedia, on personal blogs and websites, on news sites, on educational and
commercial portals, and particularly on social media platforms. All this content, not controlled by the
museum, is produced by different stakeholders, with diverse agendas and levels of expertise and
accuracy. As such, it documents and propagates a variety of different meanings associated with the
represented museum objects. At the same time, as discussed in the previous sections, all these born
digital objects have their own life-histories, whose biographies can also be narrated.
The participatory turn in museums (Simon 2010) has often been discussed in relation to social
media platforms (Kidd and Sawyer 2011; Kidd 2014; Simon 2011). Throughout the 2010s it has,
however, become evident that social media use in museums is not necessarily conductive to better
engagement. Indeed, one of the great promises of digital technologies in museums has been the so-
called ‘opening-up’ of the collections, with the aim to transform museums in a more inclusive,
participatory, and transparent organisations. However, not everyone is included in disseminating
online information about a heritage object or in participatory projects, and highlighting these
marginalised groups contributes also to reveal the limits of objects online lives. Thus, studies on
social media audiences have emerged has a critical area of work for museum and heritage research.
Drawing on digital ethnographies (Hine 2000; Kozinets 2010; Pink et al. 2016) and data science
methods, different studies have researched social media users and their experiences in museums
(Arias 2018; Budge 2020; Budge and Burness 2018; Melcher and Zuanni 2021; Villaespesa 2013) and
in interacting with museums’ own social media (Zuanni 2017a; Tenkanen et al. 2017; Bakogianni
2021). In parallel, public relationships with the past and uses of heritage have also been researched
(Bonacchi, Altaweel, and Krzyzanska 2018; Richardson 2019; Zuanni 2017b). In short, user
generated data on social media has been used to research both visitors’ experiences in museums
and their engagement and attitudes to cultural heritage, and there is now a growing body of
literature exploring different methods and frameworks for researching heritage perspectives and
engagement on these platforms. I argue that, besides better understanding heritage audiences, user-
generated content on social media can also become part of an object biography, documenting some
of those ‘thousands unfinished events’ mentioned by Hicks (2020).
As in the example of the Victory of Samothrace discussed above, user generated content can be
extremely diverse, and encompass repetitive or simpler material (such as selfies witnessing
a museum visit). However, it still documents contemporary relationships surrounding heritage
objects and the meanings ascribed to them. Therefore, discrete collections of user generated content
relating to ‘episodes’ or recurring motives in the history of encounters between social media users
and objects could be considered as worthy of inclusion in an object documentation, representing
moments of its life-history. For example, it has been mentioned how screenshots of a music video
filmed in the Louvre (‘Apes*it’), with their social media commentary, could document a period in
which popular culture focused on issues of race representation and inclusion in museum collec­
tions. Similarly, images of the Victory of Samothrace posted on social media channels in support of
Ukraine in Spring 2022 could equally represent a contemporary framing of this statue. Some
museum objects might even be at the centre of short-lived, intense, social media debates – as it
was the case in 2013 for the so-called ‘spinning statuette’ in the Manchester Museum, a controversy
12 C. ZUANNI

that has already been considered as a potential expansion of its life-history and included in
a biography of the statuette (Zuanni 2018).
To summarise, more common social media content relating to an object could be sampled to
document engagement with the object in specific moments, while in parallel larger scale social
media debates could be collected as key moments in an ever-developing object life-history.
However, while I argue for the inclusion of such data in a discussion and potentially a record of
an object biography, I am also aware of the difficulties this approach would entail. This data is
ephemeral, situated across multiple and changing platforms, and it includes personal data of social
media users. Thus, its collection would require careful consideration of methods and ethics, while
its inclusion in an object biography raises multiple digital preservation challenges. Indeed, the
amount of data and the fact that it entails private data or images with no clear copyright status
represent a challenge for the harvesting, tagging, and preserving of this material. In parallel, there is
a lack of clear standards for the management and preservation of social media data – especially
within museums. While a discussion of the information modelling approaches that could be
adopted for social media goes beyond the scope of this paper, it should be highlighted that this
challenge involves both legal issues (compliance to platform terms and conditions; copyright and
data protection legislation) and modelling issues (the decision to treat the social media as a text and
image/multimedia object, and the data models for their representation and their inclusion in
museum systems), as well as digital preservation challenges.
Ultimately, despite the growing acknowledgement of the value of social media data for under­
standing heritage audiences, their role in relation to object life-histories and their potential in
enriching and expanding object biographies has still not been fully investigated. This section argues
that there is indeed a notable value in using this data to document contemporary relationships and
meanings surrounding heritage objects. However, future research needs to address the challenges in
managing this data, in order to enable a richer documentation of objects’ digital life-histories and
the development of object biographies inclusive of all these different encounters and voices.

Conclusion: expanding object biographies in the digital sphere

Object biographies are an established framework in heritage and museum studies. They have been
productively used to uncover the multiple relationships and meanings associated with heritage
objects throughout time. It has been argued that object biographies continue in the museum,
following the different curatorial interpretations of an object and visitors’ encounters with them.
This paper has proposed to expand further this framework, considering how digital methods and
tools are not only used to document an object life-history, through databases or digital interpreta­
tion apparata, but also how the process itself of digitising, recording in a database, presenting online
an object, and interacting with it through social networks, constitute further steps in its life-history,
in turn worthy of becoming part of its biography.
By combining an analysis of the methods chosen for digitisation with an acknowledgement of
the new representations of the object itself emerging from these processes, it could be possible to see
museums’ perspectives and relationships surrounding an object. In other words, as archival
research enables us to reveal past interpretations and episodes in an object’s biography, researching
databases records and digital images, would allow us to trace the history of the last decades of this
object. Similarly, as museum permanent display and temporary exhibitions present versions of an
object biography and facilitate its encounter with visitors, online collection portals and digital
exhibitions facilitate these encounters in the digital sphere. Thus, a curatorial interpretation – and
its experience by the visitors – enrich further the object’s life-history, both on site and online.
Finally, museum communication activities and, crucially, visitor experiences are increasingly
documented on social media platforms. Although this data cannot be entirely preserved (it would
indeed result in a repetitive and overwhelming dataset!), a selection of user-generated content could
contribute to document contemporary encounters with a heritage object.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 13

A major limitation to the realisation of the rich object biographies proposed in this
paper is, however, represented by the fact that current cataloguing standards focus mainly
on documenting the life of an object prior to its musealisation. There is instead a need for
the development of models recording in a richer and more granular way the histories of the
objects in the museum, through successive displays and digital representations, as well as
the linking of user-generated content.
At the same time, each digital surrogate and data constitute a new object: on the one
hand, they mediate and represent the original; on the other hand, they are born digital
objects, with their own characteristics. Thus, digital object biographies could even be
constituted through three main frames: 1) a representation of the original’s object biogra­
phy, with a distinctive interpretation rooted in the curatorial, social, and technological
context in which this same representation has been developed; 2) an expansion of the
original object’s life-history, through a new encounter and relationship with it, to be
eventually included in its biography; and 3) a new born digital object, with its own life-
history and biography. This paper argued that it is in the liminal spaces between original
and representation, in their relationships and references, that a new dialogue around object
biographies in the digital age could productively emerge.

Notes
1. http://web.archive.org/web/19990202062052/http://www.mistral.culture.fr/louvre/.
2. https://www.tousmecenes.fr/fr/.
3. https://collections.louvre.fr/.
4. https://collections.louvre.fr/.
5. https://collections.louvre.fr/.
6. https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore/the-palace/a-stairway-to-victory.
7. https://focus.louvre.fr/en/winged-victory-samothrace/archeological-and-artistic-context/discovery.
8. http://www2.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/joconde/fr/pres.htm.
9. http://www.culture.fr/Ressources/Moteur-Collections.
10. https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/.
11. https://www.europeana.eu/en.
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_Victory_of_Samothrace.
13. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoire_de_Samothrace.
14. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q216402.
15. https://www.cidoc-crm.org/.
16. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page.
17. https://pro.europeana.eu/page/edm-documentation.
18. https://cidoc.mini.icom.museum/working-groups/lido/lido-overview/.
19. https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/.
20. https://iconclass.org/.
21. https://www.vam.ac.uk/research/projects/reach-reproduction-of-art-and-cultural-heritage.
22. https://omeka.org/.
23. https://sketchfab.com/.

Acknowledgement
The authors acknowledge the financial support by the University of Graz.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
14 C. ZUANNI

Notes on contributor
Chiara Zuanni is an assistant professor in digital humanities, with a focus in museology, at the University of Graz.
She studied classics and archaeology and has a PhD in Museology. Her research focuses on the construction of
knowledge in museums, museums’ digital transformation, museum data, digital curation, and digital audiences.

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