Online Museum Collections and Social Media: Modes of Knowing About, With, and Through Digital Image Curation

Museums increasingly digitize collectioart;s to expand public access and foster engagement beyond institutional spaces. Katharina Geis explores how digital museum images are used, shared, and curated across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Drawing on ethnographic research--including participant observation and 90 interviews--she examines how digital infrastructures and social contexts shape curation practices. By tracing how users search for, edit, and share images, the study reveals how digital image curation becomes a way of knowing about, with, and through artefacts in everyday life.

Katharina Geis (Dr. phil), born in 1992, is a cultural anthropologist and museologist specializing in digital museum practices, with a particular focus on online collection databases. She studied museum studies, European ethnology, and English and American studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg and Newcastle University. She completed her doctorate at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin within the DFG-funded project ＂Curating Digital Images: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Affordances of Digital Images in Heritage and Museum Contexts＂. Her research examines the impact of digital infrastructures on museum practices and public engagement with cultural heritage.