Organizing Knowledge in Museums: A Review of Concepts and Concerns (original) (raw)

Digital Futures II: Museum Collections, Documentation, and Shifting Knowledge Paradigms

Collections, 2004

Documentation forms the basis in which museum collections are ascribed meaning. Practices, many of which are rooted in nineteenth century empiricist modes of thinki ng, have not been revised at the speed that ideological, practical, and tech nological transformations are taking place in other areas of museum practice. At this point an op portunity exists fo r radical changes not only in the manner objects are documented, but also the way they are perceived as forms of evidence. This article, drawing on the findings of the Knowledge Objects project and the writing of leading museum theorists, and historians revisits the acquisition and documentation process. It proposes the incorporation of new principles, practices, and structures that acknowledge objects as polysemic entities-as holding multiple meanings; the meaning of narratives and classificatory systems as products of cultural, disciplinary, museum, and curatorial opinion; the role of a diverse range of users in the cycle of knowledge making and the responsibilities of curators and collection managers as knowledge experts and brokers.

Introduction: On the Properties of Things: Collective Knowledge and the Objects of the Museum

museum and society, 2019

In a world of escalating claims on public funds-and on the public's attention-museums are increasingly under pressure to combine their original functions as sites of cultural knowledge and memory with enhanced strategies for social engagement. In response, museums are finding creative ways to challenge disciplinary divisions and to establish collaborative, teambased projects that involve multiple stakeholders: public, private, academic, and political. 'On the Properties of Things: Collective Knowledge and the Objects of the Museum' began as a two-day event, held in Toronto in October of 2018, that was designed to engage academics, museum administrators, and cultural workers who are developing new, connective ways of engaging with the museum as both an institutional structure and an idea, and who are considering the deeper roles of museums in the history of knowledge and the future of knowledge practices. 1 Through themed conference presentations and roundtables, workshops, and creative exercises, some of which were held in collaboration with the Aga Khan Museum, the event facilitated cultural and disciplinary exchanges that fruitfully inform how we understand museums and their objects. To that end, we invited national and international researchers and museum professionals dedicated to challenging received ideas about knowledge, culture, and disciplinary boundaries. Our participants included directors and curators of national museums with cultural and scientific mandates, as well as academic researchers with a history of parapublic institutional collaboration. The title we chose evokes the encyclopedic tradition that comprised the first texts of pan-disciplinary knowledge in the classical and medieval eras. As a collection of information about the material and immaterial world, the classical encyclopedia had an analogous structure and function to the modern museum: to provide a comprehensive circle of knowledge, wherein all human understanding might be contained, managed, and accessed. These texts formed the root of western collection practices, and as these practices shifted from medieval compiling of texts about the world to modern collecting of materials of the world, concepts of knowledge, truth, value and identity were shifted to the museums and the material objects within them. These concepts constitute the first order of the 'properties' that we wish to consider, but we mean also to raise broader questions of property: of ownership, transmission and territory, of duration and durability, in the face of impermanence and change (which may be material, sociopolitical, and/or historical in nature). These questions of property need to be problematized in the current era of decolonizing, opening up, and pluralizing museums. Early encyclopedic traditions fostered connections between material culture, the natural world, and textual knowledge. Acknowledging these connections also allows us to address the 'poetics' of objects in ways that recognize their dual status as made things (artifacts, poems, museums) but also as things that make knowledge and are formative agents in the development of knowing subjects. Poetics, however, are always culturally and historically determined, and therefore their properties-in all senses of the word-are often contested. The main title of the event also recognizes that objects in and of the museum, as noted above, have various properties that derive from their materiality, their cultural history, and their knowledge-building capacity. Those properties are inseparable from relationships of power: whose property, one might justifiably ask, are they? We approached these questions through the principle of 'collective knowledge,' in the terms of our subtitle, whereby we challenge the historical, disciplinary boundaries of museum cultures (be they scholarly, curatorial, administrative, pedagogical, scientific, artistic or literary). In so doing, our aim was to forge connections between realms usually held apart: the arts and sciences, research and education, Eurocentric and Indigenous knowledges and practices, past and present, and between the academic and the public sphere.

Engines of Knowledge in the First Information Age The Museum and the Exhibit

My focus is on what I have termed, after Ian Hacking's idea, engines of knowledge. This notion of engines includes not just tools and methods but institutions and processes that we have come to take for granted, even, in sociological terms, naturalised. The machine metaphor refers to the capacity of these things, singularly or taken together, to produce new practices, concepts and ideas. Amongst these knowledge factories were the institutional formats of the university, museum, library, the hospital and, in organisational formats, the many associations and societies that emerged to formalize, authorize and regulate knowledge development and outputs. In this piece I look at the museum as an archetypal knowledge factory of the Victorian era that formalised, institutionalised and then diversified itself on the basis of a range of earlier prototypes. The normalization of the museum and its role in modern state formation have become so commonplace that it was only with the emergence of museological theory from the 1970's onwards that the sector began to unpack its own forms of knowledge production and validation. From Curiosity Cabinet to Knowledge Factory The museum is both an ancient idea and a relatively modern institutional form. The original museum in classical thought referred more to a place for philosophical contemplation and discussion, more university than a collection of artifacts or exhibit space. Early modern examples include Ole Worm's (1588 –1654) scientific curiosity collection in Copenhagen or the opening of the Ashmolean art museum in Oxford (1683). The British Museum was established in the 1750's based on Hans Sloane's collection of curiosities. Diderot proposed a national museum for France in his Encyclopédie in the 1760's. This 18 th century developmental phase became an increasingly international phenomenon in the 19 th century as the growth of knowledge expanded at a phenomenal rate, and the instruments and methods for knowledge production were increasingly universalised. We also need to consider the variety of museums that has emerged since this time with a small number of types expanding into dozens of variations and thousands of institutions worldwide. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) currently lists 20,000 formal members and many more institutions qualify as informal museums. People are familiar with the wunderkammer or curiosity cabinets that preceded what we now think of as the modern museum. These were often collections of interesting objects that had their own story but did not follow what we now think of as a modern taxonomical logic. While some debate exists on this transition from curiosity cabinet to museum, what I suggest here is that a formalization, even regularisation, of the entity known as the museum began to take place during the 19 th century, and with that formalization, a specific understanding emerged of the kind of knowledge produced in and through museums and their activities, including the individuals who produced and authorized that knowledge. In addition, the formalisation of the purpose or role of the museum as a producer and authorizer of specific knowledge types emerged at this time.

Philosophy and Museums: Essays on the Philosophy of Museums. Reviewed by Elisa Caldarola, Università di Padova.

This volume collects fifteen essays debating the value of museums, the ontology and epistemology of exhibited objects, and museum ethics. The essays stem from talks originally given at a conference at the University of Glasgow in 2013 by philosophers working both within and outside the analytic tradition, museum scholars, and museum practitioners. The collection succeeds in showing that we need a philosophy of museums to improve our understanding of such institutions. In the opening essay, Mark O'Neill describes a number of questions calling for the engagement of philosophers with museums:

The Museum as Information Space: Metadata and Documentation

Although museums vary in nature and may have been founded for all sorts of reasons, central to all museum institutions are the collected objects. These objects are information carriers organized in a catalogue system. In this chapter, the museum will be conceived as an information space, consisting of an information system related to different methods of reasoning. We will highlight the new possibilities offered by digital technology and the changes brought by the way in which visitors come into contact with objects. Our central claim is that the visitor moved from being onsite within the museum's information space to being outside the museum in the online information space of the Internet. This has fundamental implications for the institutional role of museums, our understanding of metadata and the methods of documentation. The onsite museum institution will, eventually, not be able to function as an institutional entity on the Internet, for in this new information space, objects, collections and museums, all function as independent components in a vast universe of data, side by side at everyone's disposal at anytime. Potentially, users can access cultural heritage anytime, anywhere and anyhow.

2014 (Hg.) Transforming Knowledge Orders: Museums, Collections and Exhibitions. Morphomata Series Nr. 16.Paderborn: Fink Verlag

The history of museums is closely connected not only with the history of collecting and collections, but also with the history of science and the humanities. Collections and exhibitions reflect scientific theory and scholarly practice, and in turn shape them. Hence, museums transmit and disseminate, yet also produce knowledge. On the one hand, they visualise and stabilise orders of knowledge through assembling, classifying and fixing objects in exhibitions; on the other hand, new academic paradigms and political changes lead to rearrangements of facts and artefacts in museum storerooms and displays. This volume brings together case studies from various historical and cultural contexts that illuminate such dynamics. Its point of departure is transcultural collections and exhibitions such as cabinets of curiosities and ethnographic collections, whose attempts to inventorise and display the world testify to the desire for, but also the difficulties in establishing and maintaining orders of knowledge. A particular focus is on transformative moments in the history of museums, in particular on the early 1900s, when science and technology museums were established, and on more recent times, which have seen the refurbishment of numerous art and ethnographic museums.

Museum Theory. The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy

2015

Museum Theory is the first volume of a four volume set of International Handbooks of Museum Studies. Edited by myself and Kylie Message, the book is organised around the central idea of conjunctures – between theory, practice and context. It therefore looks at ideas about museums, the relationships between various disciplines and knowledge production in museums, and at practice -the latter in terms of the application of theory in museum contexts as well as thinking about practice as a form of 'doing theory'. Contributors come from many different countries. They include early career scholars as well as internationally renowned figures and they come from practice as well as academia. The range of museums discussed is also wide and from around the world.

Digital Futures I: Museum Collections, Digital Technologies, and the Cultural Construction of Knowledge

Digital Futures I: Museum Collections, Digital Technologies, and the Cultural Construction of Knowledge, Curator , 46, 3, July 2003, 2003

Digital technologies and their uses within museum collections have until recently been explored primarily from a technical viewpoint. Increasingly, museum professionals are moving beyond technologically-driven reasoning to entertain new ways of conceptualizing both collections and information. This is leading to knowledge models beyond those already imagined. This paper considers the synergy between theoretical ideas in the academy and the computer ontologies that have been brought to bear on collections information. Drawing on user research findings from the Themescaping Virtual Collections project and the work of leading literary and media theorists, the paper examines how user needs and digital technologies are reformulating our understanding of museum collections and the relationships between museums and audiences. DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AND NEW STYLES OF INFORMATION The knowledge connection-Media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1964, xi) challenged technologically deterministic arguments to account for the emergence of new technologies (notably print, and, more recently, television). McLuhan stated: "We become what we behold that we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Viewing the world in terms of embedded knowledge structures, he argued, enables the development of tools that emulate new social and theoretical ideas. New ways of perceiving encourage social transformation. These tools-and the technological innovations they reflect-offer possibilities beyond those originally imagined. In the current technological context, poststructuralism and postmodernism are the theoretical structures that enabled multimedia and the Internet to emerge as forms of information architecture. Multimedia, hypertext, hypermedia and the Internet might be described as the ultimate postmodern media set. The intellectual characteristics of post-325 Fiona Cameron (fiona.cameron@arts.usyd.edu.au) is a research fellow in history in the