DAIM

The project is funded by PRIN 2022 and is led by Professor Paola D’Alconzo, as PI and coordinator of the research unit of University of Naples; the other research units are at the Universities of Pisa, Roma Tre and Udine. The project originates from the observation that the museum, an organism in constant transformation according to cultural and social contexts, has increasingly focused on communicating its contents, rather than explaining its history and highlighting its syntax and stratifications, reading the museum organism as a whole. Especially at the level of dissemination, in spite of new modalities of fruition and public engagement, has often been left in the shade the meaning of the museum as the result of cultural, institutional, economic processes, resulting in different elements (collections, environments, layouts, arrangements, modalities of visit and fruition) that have gradually integrated to constitute the ‘forms’ of museums. Even in the recent decisive shift to digital and social media, as well as in the projects planned in view of the digital transition envisaged by the PNRR, communication has been declined mainly as a presentation of individual works. In a scenario already oriented towards a revision of the role of the museum (ICOM General Conference 2019), the Project therefore intends to reconstruct and make available to the public a visual history of Italian museums, thanks to the creation of a Digital Atlas of Italian Museums (DAIM), a digital archive of visual documents available in open access, at the service of a broad spectrum of user research and functional to the development of virtual exhibitions, easy to manage and adoptable by museums even without expert technical staff; the DAIM will also allow the production of material and digital prototypes for the narration of museum history, to be used in situ and remotely.