Museum Digital Social Futures is an Australian Research Council Linkage Project that investigates the ways museums and galleries and their audiences understand each other in an increasingly digital world.

Our project has explored the mundane interactions visitors have with museum media and the techniques museums and galleries deploy to capture insights into their visitors. We have worked closely with ACMI in Melbourne, Australia's museum of screen culture, the Australian Museum and Gallery Association and a range of industry partners to understand the changes in the cultural sector across multiple scales.

Digital, mobile and social media have transformed the ways museums and audiences interact. Audiences can rely on a range of digital media to gain valuable information about museums before, during and after their visits. In a post-pandemic context, the uptake and engagement of the digital continues to be a complex and uneven process.

While much important research has been done to map how audiences interact with digital media and artefacts, less attention has been paid to how audiences form relationships with museums in their everyday lives—especially their homes. We have spent three years conducting an ethnography of a museum's audience to better understand the ways visitors come to know about cultural offerings and the values they think museums and galleries should embody.

As the cultural sector is increasingly asked to do more with less, it has never been more important to understand the dialogues between museums and galleries and their audiences.