From Collection Webpages to Digital Exhibition Narratives: A Topic-Structural Analysis of Online Exhibition Texts from the Palace Museum

Abstract

As museums increasingly migrate cultural interpretation into digital environments, online exhibitions are no longer merely supplementary interfaces for displaying collection information. They have become narrative infrastructures through which museums reorganize objects, histories, spaces, and visitor expectations. Taking the Palace Museum as a representative case, this article examines eight official online exhibition and digital display texts, including the Digital Gallery, Bronze Gallery, Architecture Gallery, Clock Gallery, Painting and Calligraphy Gallery, Treasure Gallery, Ceramics Gallery, and Theatre Gallery. Through a lightweight digital humanities approach combining thematic coding and narrative-structural analysis, the study investigates how museum webpages transform object-centered descriptions into public-facing cultural narratives. The findings suggest that the Palace Museum’s online exhibition texts are structured around five recurring interpretive frames: historical memory, craft knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, courtly life, and cultural identity. Rather than functioning as neutral labels or simple online catalogues, these texts actively mediate between collections and audiences by producing coherent, accessible, and culturally authoritative narratives. The article argues that online exhibition texts should be understood as a crucial component of digital curatorship and as an important object of digital humanities inquiry.