Natalia Grincheva
Holder of several prestigious international academic awards, including Fulbright (2007-2009), Quebec Fund (2011–2013), Australian Endeavour (2012–2013) and SOROS research grant (2013-2014), Dr. Grincheva traveled around the world to conduct research on digital diplomacy. Focusing on new museology and social media technologies, she has successfully implemented a number of research projects on the “diplomatic” uses of new media by the largest museums in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Her research appeared in a number of prominent international academic journals, including Journal of Creative Communications , Curator, The Museum Journal , Hague Journal of Diplomacy, Global Media and Communication Journal, Museum and Society , and others. Among her most influential publications is award winning short format book Psychopower of Cultural Diplomacy in the Information Age that received 2013 Digital Humanities (DH) Research Award in the category “Best DH short publication.” Currently, she is working on two publication projects contracted by Routledge. The first book, Branding the Global Guggenheim: Cultural Diplomacy in the Neoliberal Age, will be published in 2017, it will explore franchising museum practices as new avenues for contemporary institutional diplomacy. The second monograph forthcoming in 2018, Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age, will contribute to the ‘Museum Meanings’ Routledge series. It will explore online museum spaces as sites of social activism and digital diplomacy through six case studies of the world museums, including the British Museum, the Australian Museum, Europeana Collections and others. Her current research interests include deep mapping and digital visualization of museum multiple impacts upon their neighborhoods, cities and societies in a larger global context. She is working on the research project that aims to employ Geographic Information Technologies to develop a digital mapping research tool which can visualize time-space development of museum “soft power,” defined as an institutional ability to attract large and diverse audiences and generate economic capital. This project received 2017 Museum Computer Network Award for developing innovative solutions to enhance museum transparency and strengthen proactive management in global museum PR and international programming.
Personal website: https://grincheva.com
Personal website: https://grincheva.com
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Building on scholarship that highlights how museums can constitute and regulate citizens, construct national communities, and project messages across borders, the book explores the political powers of museums in their online spaces. Demonstrating that digital media allow museums to reach far beyond their physical locations, Grincheva investigates whether online audiences are given the tools to co-curate museums and their collections to establish new pathways for international cultural relations, exchange and, potentially, diplomacy. Evaluating the online capacities of museums to exert cultural impacts, the book illuminates how online museum narratives shape audience perceptions and redefine their cultural attitudes and identities.
Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age will be of interest to academics and students teaching or taking courses on museums and heritage, communication and media, cultural studies, cultural diplomacy, international relations and digital humanities. It will also be useful to practitioners around the world who want to learn more about the effect digital museum experiences have on international audiences.
The book offers a comparative analysis across a range of case studies in order to demonstrate that museums have gone global in the era of neoliberal globalisation. Grincheva focuses first on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which is well known for its bold revolutionising strategies of global expansion: museum franchising and global corporatisation. The book then goes on to explore how these strategies were adopted across museums around the world and analyses two cases of post-Guggenheim developments in China and Russia: the K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong and the International Network of Foundations of the State Hermitage Museum in Russia. These cases from more authoritarian political regimes evidence the emergence of alternative avenues of museum diplomacy that no longer depend on government commissions to serve immediate geo-political interests.
Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy will be a valuable resource for students, scholars and practitioners of contemporary museology and cultural diplomacy. Documenting new developments in museum diplomacy, the book will be particularly interesting to museum and heritage practitioners and policymakers involved in international exchanges or official programs of cultural diplomacy.
This article explores the overlooked role of museums in the international arena as playing a dual role in cultural diplomacy. It explores the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to illustrate an emerging ‘hybrid’ form of diplomacy that cannot be strictly defined as ‘state’ or ‘non-state’. Although the article documents strong ties between the Hermitage Museum and the Russian government, it also reveals the Hermitage’s growing capacity to build productive bilateral cultural relationships with foreign partners, bypassing governmental control. Specifically, the article looks at the international network of Hermitage Foundations as a successful museum international outreach and fundraising campaign that significantly contributes to the Russian government’s efforts in cultural diplomacy. This case offers new empirical findings from the non-Western context, exposing the growing role of museums in contemporary diplomacy.
The article explores a series of blockbuster exhibitions of DreamWorks Animation developed by the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) in collaboration with one of the largest Hollywood producers. Curated by ACMI, this blockbuster exhibition was designed to provide a behind-the-scenes look into collaborative processes involved in DreamWorks animations. This exhibition travelled across the Asia-Pacific in 2015-2017 and was hosted by a number of museums, such as the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand, the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, and the National Taiwan Science and Education Centre in Taiwan. It displayed over 400 unique objects from the studio's archive 'of rare and never before displayed material' , such as drawings, models, maps, photographs, posters, and other artworks. The article explores the highly favourable reception to the DreamWorks Animation blockbuster in different cities in Asia. It employs a geo-visualization of Asian engagement with the blockbuster exhibit to reveal and explain local and global mechanisms of 'attraction' power, generated by DreamWorks in different Asian countries. Contributing to the special issue, this article engages with two aspects of it: the form, cultural digital mapping; and the content, the nature of media pop culture exemplified through the traveling blockbuster.
The article proposes, justifies, and tests a new methodological framework to measure museum ‘soft power’ by employing geo-visualization as a new method empowered by the rapid development of digital humanities. This research not only demystifies the buzz term of ‘soft power’ that is frequently applied in relation to contemporary museums and their international cultural engagements but also develops an evaluation framework to assess museum capacities to exert global impacts. Specifically, the article draws on the academic
scholarship outlining a plethora of approaches for ‘soft power’ evaluation, including Resources, Outputs, Perceptions, and Networks evaluation models. It argues for a new integrative approach that can comprehensively combine different methods to construct a more advanced tool to measure museum ‘soft power’. The article draws on preliminary results of developing a digital mapping system to assess museum soft power. It shares findings from the pilot project, Australian
Center of the Moving Image (ACMI) on the Global Map, designed in
collaboration with the ACMI in Melbourne.
This article explores the ‘GuggenTube’ phenomenon, which was the result of a collaboration between Google and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to celebrate the five‐year anniversary of YouTube. It proposes a case study of the 2010 YouTube Play creative video contest, which featured worldwide user‐generated content to promote pop video culture in museums. Although it was implemented almost a decade ago, YouTube Play remains one of the few online museum projects with such a large global scope and outreach. The online platform attracted thousands of online participants and millions of followers from around the world. It engaged online audiences in numerous debates on the roles and responsibilities of contemporary museums as well as the meaning and function of art. Through digital ethnography, I will analyse the communicative space of YouTube Play, so as to understand the expectations of online users as to their museum experience in the age of digital interactivity. I will argue that the experimental nature of YouTube Play raised much concern among audiences and questioned its cultural value while involving online visitors in truth‐seeking conversations on contemporary arts. In addition, the facilitating role of YouTube Play, which posed important questions for deliberation and led to thought‐provoking dialogue among international online audiences, will be highlighted in the present article.
Applying a systems thinking approach, this chapter looks at the Guggenheim Foundation as an open system that continuously interacts with the external environment and constantly “adjusts to a new equilibrium if a change occurs in the way the parts are arranged” within a larger context.12 Understanding global economic reality as external environment in which museums operate, the chapter looks at the Guggenheim as a complex system within a larger economic reality, going far beyond the US context. It explores how stepping outside the local borders by developing a franchising network across different countries expanded the Guggenheim’s opportunities and brought fundraising practices to a new global level. The chapter analyses the Guggenheim example to demonstrate that staying attuned to global economic changes, or in other words, adequately adjusting the museum’s system to changes in a larger environment, has a profound impact upon institutional development. The Guggenheim case illustrates how a strategic reconfiguration of fundraising approaches in the twenty-first century can help large and internationally known museums to tap into resources available for them in the global context.
This article reports on research that analysed a number of sustainable development reports by international organisations which consolidate findings from different countries, to produce evidence of the powerful role of culture in sustainable development of various communities. The research looked at reports on sustainable development through cultural activities published between 2010 and 2013, which together provide an overview of about 80 sustainable development projects. Drawing on analysis of the development indicators approaches utilised by the reports’ authors, this article identifies the main challenges that cultural practitioners and policymakers face when trying to measure changes achieved through cultural support in developing communities. The paper illuminates various inconsistencies in the employment of qualitative and quantitative indicators of development, confusions between development indicators and cultural activities, and misunderstandings of cultural sustainability. These key mistakes lead to incorrect measurement of development changes. This article provides recommendations for how to address these problems in order to develop a more robust framework for development evaluations.
This study identifies, analyses and compares media content produced by Russian and Chinese TV channels surrounding the events of the fifth BRICS summit in Durban, South Africa, in 2013. The study utilizes a comparative frame analysis to deconstruct and explain media messages communicated by Russian and Chinese media representing national identities of the countries through the BRICS summit diplomacy. The study discusses important questions with regard to the cultural, political and economic contexts that shape the perceptions of the roles and ambitions of Russia and China on the world stage. The major findings clearly demonstrate that Russian and Chinese media adopted different rhetorical frames to portray their national identities through the media coverage of the fifth BRICS summit. These positions imply an interior (in the case of China) or a straightforward (in the case of Russia) approach to communicate a form of ‘collective resistance’ to the global arena, where the countries seek larger global recognition and appreciation.
This study aims to explore the influence of social media platforms employed by the internationally recognized museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, in the development and implementation of its famous online participatory project—the World Beach Project. The research looks at the behaviour, size and geographic distribution of international audiences present in various social media spaces of the V&A, particularly in relation to the project. The research intends to assess the influence of social media on the global audience by evaluating online audience engagement with the project through quantitative research, behavioural study and qualitative enquiry. The article consists of two major parts. The first section proposes and explains a theoretical model of online influence—understood in this project as international audience’s engagement with and in the social media spaces of the museum. Drawing on traditional museum visitor studies research and emerging methodological approaches utilized in the online world, this part of the article tries to identify and explain the main metric components of the online audience’s engagement. The second part of the article tests this model and provides detailed analysis of the online project explored in this study through its online outreach across different social media platforms.
This article explores the discourse around the events of the Fifth brics Summit, as constructed through Russian media coverage across three channels: Russia Today (rt); Channel One Russia (1tv ru); and Russian Television International (rtvi). Through comparative analysis of how the brics Summit was portrayed by different channels, the article aims to highlight the influence of the Russian political discourse, the national media ecology, and the television companies’ missions and agendas in shaping Russia’s image within the brics Summit’s media coverage. The study explores this image through the lens of Russian public diplomacy and tries to evaluate the Russian government’s effectiveness in communicating its political messages to national and international audiences.
Building on scholarship that highlights how museums can constitute and regulate citizens, construct national communities, and project messages across borders, the book explores the political powers of museums in their online spaces. Demonstrating that digital media allow museums to reach far beyond their physical locations, Grincheva investigates whether online audiences are given the tools to co-curate museums and their collections to establish new pathways for international cultural relations, exchange and, potentially, diplomacy. Evaluating the online capacities of museums to exert cultural impacts, the book illuminates how online museum narratives shape audience perceptions and redefine their cultural attitudes and identities.
Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age will be of interest to academics and students teaching or taking courses on museums and heritage, communication and media, cultural studies, cultural diplomacy, international relations and digital humanities. It will also be useful to practitioners around the world who want to learn more about the effect digital museum experiences have on international audiences.
The book offers a comparative analysis across a range of case studies in order to demonstrate that museums have gone global in the era of neoliberal globalisation. Grincheva focuses first on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which is well known for its bold revolutionising strategies of global expansion: museum franchising and global corporatisation. The book then goes on to explore how these strategies were adopted across museums around the world and analyses two cases of post-Guggenheim developments in China and Russia: the K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong and the International Network of Foundations of the State Hermitage Museum in Russia. These cases from more authoritarian political regimes evidence the emergence of alternative avenues of museum diplomacy that no longer depend on government commissions to serve immediate geo-political interests.
Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy will be a valuable resource for students, scholars and practitioners of contemporary museology and cultural diplomacy. Documenting new developments in museum diplomacy, the book will be particularly interesting to museum and heritage practitioners and policymakers involved in international exchanges or official programs of cultural diplomacy.
This article explores the overlooked role of museums in the international arena as playing a dual role in cultural diplomacy. It explores the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to illustrate an emerging ‘hybrid’ form of diplomacy that cannot be strictly defined as ‘state’ or ‘non-state’. Although the article documents strong ties between the Hermitage Museum and the Russian government, it also reveals the Hermitage’s growing capacity to build productive bilateral cultural relationships with foreign partners, bypassing governmental control. Specifically, the article looks at the international network of Hermitage Foundations as a successful museum international outreach and fundraising campaign that significantly contributes to the Russian government’s efforts in cultural diplomacy. This case offers new empirical findings from the non-Western context, exposing the growing role of museums in contemporary diplomacy.
The article explores a series of blockbuster exhibitions of DreamWorks Animation developed by the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) in collaboration with one of the largest Hollywood producers. Curated by ACMI, this blockbuster exhibition was designed to provide a behind-the-scenes look into collaborative processes involved in DreamWorks animations. This exhibition travelled across the Asia-Pacific in 2015-2017 and was hosted by a number of museums, such as the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand, the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, and the National Taiwan Science and Education Centre in Taiwan. It displayed over 400 unique objects from the studio's archive 'of rare and never before displayed material' , such as drawings, models, maps, photographs, posters, and other artworks. The article explores the highly favourable reception to the DreamWorks Animation blockbuster in different cities in Asia. It employs a geo-visualization of Asian engagement with the blockbuster exhibit to reveal and explain local and global mechanisms of 'attraction' power, generated by DreamWorks in different Asian countries. Contributing to the special issue, this article engages with two aspects of it: the form, cultural digital mapping; and the content, the nature of media pop culture exemplified through the traveling blockbuster.
The article proposes, justifies, and tests a new methodological framework to measure museum ‘soft power’ by employing geo-visualization as a new method empowered by the rapid development of digital humanities. This research not only demystifies the buzz term of ‘soft power’ that is frequently applied in relation to contemporary museums and their international cultural engagements but also develops an evaluation framework to assess museum capacities to exert global impacts. Specifically, the article draws on the academic
scholarship outlining a plethora of approaches for ‘soft power’ evaluation, including Resources, Outputs, Perceptions, and Networks evaluation models. It argues for a new integrative approach that can comprehensively combine different methods to construct a more advanced tool to measure museum ‘soft power’. The article draws on preliminary results of developing a digital mapping system to assess museum soft power. It shares findings from the pilot project, Australian
Center of the Moving Image (ACMI) on the Global Map, designed in
collaboration with the ACMI in Melbourne.
This article explores the ‘GuggenTube’ phenomenon, which was the result of a collaboration between Google and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to celebrate the five‐year anniversary of YouTube. It proposes a case study of the 2010 YouTube Play creative video contest, which featured worldwide user‐generated content to promote pop video culture in museums. Although it was implemented almost a decade ago, YouTube Play remains one of the few online museum projects with such a large global scope and outreach. The online platform attracted thousands of online participants and millions of followers from around the world. It engaged online audiences in numerous debates on the roles and responsibilities of contemporary museums as well as the meaning and function of art. Through digital ethnography, I will analyse the communicative space of YouTube Play, so as to understand the expectations of online users as to their museum experience in the age of digital interactivity. I will argue that the experimental nature of YouTube Play raised much concern among audiences and questioned its cultural value while involving online visitors in truth‐seeking conversations on contemporary arts. In addition, the facilitating role of YouTube Play, which posed important questions for deliberation and led to thought‐provoking dialogue among international online audiences, will be highlighted in the present article.
Applying a systems thinking approach, this chapter looks at the Guggenheim Foundation as an open system that continuously interacts with the external environment and constantly “adjusts to a new equilibrium if a change occurs in the way the parts are arranged” within a larger context.12 Understanding global economic reality as external environment in which museums operate, the chapter looks at the Guggenheim as a complex system within a larger economic reality, going far beyond the US context. It explores how stepping outside the local borders by developing a franchising network across different countries expanded the Guggenheim’s opportunities and brought fundraising practices to a new global level. The chapter analyses the Guggenheim example to demonstrate that staying attuned to global economic changes, or in other words, adequately adjusting the museum’s system to changes in a larger environment, has a profound impact upon institutional development. The Guggenheim case illustrates how a strategic reconfiguration of fundraising approaches in the twenty-first century can help large and internationally known museums to tap into resources available for them in the global context.
This article reports on research that analysed a number of sustainable development reports by international organisations which consolidate findings from different countries, to produce evidence of the powerful role of culture in sustainable development of various communities. The research looked at reports on sustainable development through cultural activities published between 2010 and 2013, which together provide an overview of about 80 sustainable development projects. Drawing on analysis of the development indicators approaches utilised by the reports’ authors, this article identifies the main challenges that cultural practitioners and policymakers face when trying to measure changes achieved through cultural support in developing communities. The paper illuminates various inconsistencies in the employment of qualitative and quantitative indicators of development, confusions between development indicators and cultural activities, and misunderstandings of cultural sustainability. These key mistakes lead to incorrect measurement of development changes. This article provides recommendations for how to address these problems in order to develop a more robust framework for development evaluations.
This study identifies, analyses and compares media content produced by Russian and Chinese TV channels surrounding the events of the fifth BRICS summit in Durban, South Africa, in 2013. The study utilizes a comparative frame analysis to deconstruct and explain media messages communicated by Russian and Chinese media representing national identities of the countries through the BRICS summit diplomacy. The study discusses important questions with regard to the cultural, political and economic contexts that shape the perceptions of the roles and ambitions of Russia and China on the world stage. The major findings clearly demonstrate that Russian and Chinese media adopted different rhetorical frames to portray their national identities through the media coverage of the fifth BRICS summit. These positions imply an interior (in the case of China) or a straightforward (in the case of Russia) approach to communicate a form of ‘collective resistance’ to the global arena, where the countries seek larger global recognition and appreciation.
This study aims to explore the influence of social media platforms employed by the internationally recognized museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, in the development and implementation of its famous online participatory project—the World Beach Project. The research looks at the behaviour, size and geographic distribution of international audiences present in various social media spaces of the V&A, particularly in relation to the project. The research intends to assess the influence of social media on the global audience by evaluating online audience engagement with the project through quantitative research, behavioural study and qualitative enquiry. The article consists of two major parts. The first section proposes and explains a theoretical model of online influence—understood in this project as international audience’s engagement with and in the social media spaces of the museum. Drawing on traditional museum visitor studies research and emerging methodological approaches utilized in the online world, this part of the article tries to identify and explain the main metric components of the online audience’s engagement. The second part of the article tests this model and provides detailed analysis of the online project explored in this study through its online outreach across different social media platforms.
This article explores the discourse around the events of the Fifth brics Summit, as constructed through Russian media coverage across three channels: Russia Today (rt); Channel One Russia (1tv ru); and Russian Television International (rtvi). Through comparative analysis of how the brics Summit was portrayed by different channels, the article aims to highlight the influence of the Russian political discourse, the national media ecology, and the television companies’ missions and agendas in shaping Russia’s image within the brics Summit’s media coverage. The study explores this image through the lens of Russian public diplomacy and tries to evaluate the Russian government’s effectiveness in communicating its political messages to national and international audiences.