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Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age by Haidy Geismar
The fundamental argument of this book is that we need to pay attention to the specific contexts, as well as materialities, of digital objects and that digital media in museums exist in a long-standing continuum or process of mediation, technological mimesis and objectification. In an exchange of comment in the journal Science, Franz Boas argued with his colleague O.T. Mason about the purpose and nature of museum collections. The debate emerged from the growing museological tension between the spectacular nature of individual objects and their contextualisation within academic and scientific knowledge systems. Boas, summarising his position later, noted: I think no word has ever been said that is less true than Dr. Brown Goode’s oft-repeated statement that a museum is a well-arranged col- lection of labels illustrated by specimens. On the contrary, the attrac- tion for the public is the striking specimen; and whatever additional information either the label or the surrounding specimens may be able to convey to the mind of the visitor is the only result that can be hoped for.
The Museum Imagination or A Reflection on the Status of the Object in Digital Culture
International Journal of the Arts in Society, 2012
As a large part of our communication processes are digitally mediated and the information we exchange in these processes is delivered in binary numeric form, the experience of tangible materiality becomes more and more rare. With the example of the collection of the Natural History Museum in Berlin we are tracing a parallel development towards a gradual virtualization of the material object in the arts and in the sciences. The paper describes the conceptual background and design decisions that were made to reflect on the status of the object in the Cine-Interactive “Venture to the Interior/Vorstoss ins Innere”, a real-time 3d experience exploring the idea of the museum as a place of cumulative knowledge construction.
Museum Reality: Digital, Virtual, Online, Analog
Tabula, 2022
In the present decade – and particularly in the wake of the recent pandemic – there can no longer be any doubt that museums must, beyond traditional ‘analogue’ practice, learn to work actively and progressively in virtual space. Despite the surge in digital content that came with museums’ taking their hours online, post-pandemic reopening has been followed by a measure of apathy, as evinced by research that – while affirming the presumed importance of a physical-virtual link – has simultaneously noted this surrounding uncertainty. The aim of this article is to respond to the question: on what is this seeming distaste for museum digitisation founded, and what has caused progress in the area to decline or stall? Other issues include whether museums’ non-physical – i.e. digital, virtual, and online – spaces can be defined as true dimensions of institutional practice; whether related practices are integral to museum complexity or, rather, merely accommodations made to globally changing consumer needs and info-communications trends; and whether the sometimes quiet, sometimes more radical curatorial relationship to museum artefacts has contributed to a concentration on objects’ metaphysical and immaterial meanings in the online environment.
Digital Anthropology (second edition), 2021
In the fi rst edition of this chapter, I drew on several examples to unpack the ways in which digital technologies are expanding our understandings of museum practices and our experience in museums. I argued that very particular defi nitions of accessibility, democratization and the social have been imported into museums inside of digital media and that the task of the digital anthropologist is to try to place these values and expectations about how digital media can work in museums in cultural and local context. I initially drew on Horst and Miller's defi nition of the digital from the original introduction to this volume as an ongoing process of translation and standardization, coded and underpinned by binary register and machine languages. Since then, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with fi xing any one defi nition of the digital as a catchall term to unite the diff erent projects that use digital media and technologies in museums. Indeed, in a recent book exploring the digital/analogue interface in relation to a number of diff erent collections, I polemically suggested, there is no essential quality of the digital that links all of these projects. Rather, by observing the digital as another kind of thing in the world, we may begin to understand how the digital encompasses a plethora of diff erent representational forms, techniques and technologies. (Geismar 2018: 112) In this updated chapter, I have revisited my discussion and updated my references and examples. I have also extended my focus on digital mediation in museums to include a discussion of digital materiality, an area that has generated signifi cant attention since 2012 and been a productive place to think about the nature of the digital within digital anthropology.
The Application of Digital Technologies in Museums
In this modern electronic era museum objects of both conventional and digital help us to understand our past and relevant for teaching and learning. Access of these objects is different in many ways. Therefore, it becomes a crucial task to handle these items for learning and teaching purposes. To fulfill these task museums, cultural heritage institutions pay more attention on museum objects to provide better understanding of them. Hagedorn-Saupe (2012) stated that digital medium and the digital reproduction of the objects in it open up completely new possibilities for users, both experts and general public, to work with the digital objects: the digital object reproduction can be adapted into one’s own digital-work space and can be studied, analyzed, commented and to some degree even “changed” (eg. when working and drawings). Hagedorn-Saupe clearly described the close relationship among digital objects and the user and how digital objects facilitate users to study them in user’s own work –places though they are expert or not. This gives a clear vision of future museums in digital environment. International Committee of Museums (ICOM) has defined that a museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment (ICOM, 2007). This definition has unpacked by Geser & Niccolucci (2012). According to them the application of digital technologies is widely recognized to be helpful in fulfilling its function in novel and effective ways. Further they described the conceiving a museum that does not avail of some of the technologies that are such a great part of our everyday life would be as anachronistic as thinking of a museum without electricity or heating. It is crystal clear that digital technologies have become a dynamic part of the museums and future museums have no life without that.