Caroline Wilson-Barnao

Caroline is the Director of Museum Studies at the University of Queensland. Formerly a communications professional with around 20 years of experience in the arts and not-for-profit sector, Caroline has a strong interest in exploring the impacts and possibilities of the use of digital and participatory media by the museum.

She is the author of ‘Museums as Platforms” which was released in 2022 and has a new coauthored book "Collecting Social Media: From object to content" due out later this year. She has written a range of related articles on the digitisation of cultural practices including “The quantified and customised museum: measuring, matching and aggregating audiences” (2020), “The logic of platforms: how on demand museums are adapting in the digital era” (2018) “How algorithmic cultural recommendation influence the marketing of cultural collections (2017) and “The personalisation of publicity in the museum” (2016).

Caroline is currently a member of the CPRA Queensland Board, the Digital Cultures and Society group, the Australian Research Node, the Museums Association of Critical Heritage Studies, and is an accredited HEA Fellow.

Research interests include

• Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMS)
• Digital Humanities
• Rapid Response and born-digital collecting
• Museums and soft power
• Museums and social change
• Historic urban/cultural landscape: identity, memory, and heritage
• Heritage and Cultural Tourism
• Urban space and media cities
• Gender and sexuality studies
• Social media
• Arts and culture policy

Caroline welcomes inquires from potential PhD students, and can offer sipervision in the following areas:

• museums/art/culture and digitaltransforantion
• born digital collecting
• digital cultures
• arts and culture policy
• cultural studies of museums and technology