A polyvocal approach to virtual heritage: An immersive case study

Large parts of museum collections, particularly in the Netherlands, are a legacy of the colonial past, guiding people’s societal perceptions of cultures and histories. There have been increasing efforts to ensure that museums acknowledge and reveal to visitors the multiple (e.g., cultural) meanings and contexts attached to objects in these collections. We address this as an effort to increase polyvocality. The present work contributes to the effort to emphasize, but objectively acknowledge, multiple (perhaps conflicting) perspectives attached to cultural resources. We provide a measurement to assess polyvocality amongst individuals and a case study including an adaptive, polyvocal exhibition design. The developed Virtual Reality (VR) exhibition curates the flag of Suriname (1975 - today), in which participants interactively encountered multiple perspectives on the flag’s colors and, in three different sceneries, learned how those relate to Suriname’s history. Our quantitative findings (obtained among a smaller sample of N = 20) revealed that the experience fostered a polyvocal mindset, which is supported by our qualitative analyses highlighting key polyvocal elements in the virtual environment. In sum, the present approach further explicates the polyvocality construct, proposes ways of assessing a polyvocal mindset, and recommends design principles to tailor polyvocality-enhancing VR applications.