Museum without walls:

The museum is considered to be the ideal place for the highest level of preservation for cultural heritage. However, separated from its context, isolated from its meaning; the cultural heritage of various spaces and time is enclosed in a single place, a heterotopian space as defined by Foucault. After the advent of digital technologies, the meaning of museum has shifted using the virtuality, giving birth to a new concept of virtual museum. In the digital domain, peculiarities of museum, library and archive have merged into each other. As opposed to brick and mortar versions, these institutions are liberated in many aspects. Referring to Malraux, the digital heritage has become a separate
entity, detached from its original context, bringing new opportunities to the digital heritage data. In this specific example on underwater cultural heritage data, the musealization of nautical archaeology will both create a reference data for further academic researches and promote the dissemination of underwater cultural heritage. To accomplish this aim, this project proposes a framework of a virtual museum that incorporates the practices of collection, preservation, research, visualization and exhibit, thus offers new approaches to the preservation of cultural heritage.