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This open access book explores the multiple forms of curatorial agencies that develop when museum collection digitisations, narratives and new research findings circulate online. Focusing on Viking Age objects, it tracks the effects of antagonistic debates on discussion forums and the consequences of search engines, personalisation, and machine learning on American-based online platforms. Furthermore, it considers eco-systemic processes comprising computation, rare-earth minerals, electrical currents and data centres and cables as novel forms of curatorial actions. Thus, it explores curatorial agency as social constructivist, semiotic, algorithmic, and material. This book is of interest to scholars and students in the fields of museum studies, cultural heritage and media studies. It also appeals to museum practitioners concerned with curatorial innovation at the intersection of humanist interpretations and new materialist and more-than-human frameworks.

Museum Digitisations and Emerging Curatorial Agencies Online: Vikings in the Digital Age

1. Introduction.- 2. Curatorial Challenges: discussion forums and fragmented narratives.- 3. Tales of the Viking Helmet: Narrative Shifts from Museum Exhibitions to Personalised Search Requests.- 4. Viking Jewellery on Pinterest: Drifting digitisations and shared curatorial agency.- 5. Technospheric curation and the Swedish Allah ring: Refiguring digitisations and curatorial agency as ecological compositions, and eco-curating as planetary inhabitations.- 6. Conclusion