Curating Viking objects through customized scrolling: How search engines personalize historical narratives

Abstract

The stories that museum objects convey change on social media. This narrative shift is analyzed through the development of social media methods that track the dissemination of the Viking helmet from the Swedish History Museum to personalized YouTube search engine result pages (SERPs). Social media methods are used to compare the narratives and meanings produced on YouTube SERPs with the narratives and meanings sanctioned by the Swedish History Museum. The hermeneutic process at the core of the methodological approach reveals how personalization algorithms targeting user identities through IP addresses influence the meanings of objects, which are mediated and commercialized via social media SERPs. This research demonstrates that personalized search engine result pages have an algorithmic impact on the narratives of objects that counters the social justice goals integral to contemporary museum practices. The meaning curation of museum objects is not customized to individual preferences and identities. Museums advance selected interpretations of objects to endorse a variety of vantage points so that the fixity of identity categories can be questioned.