I am enthralled by the real-time application of digital humanities platforms expanding access to limited collections during community quarantines! Some particular projects that have caught my eye right now:
Digital collections from Parisian museums:
https://kottke.org/…/paris-museums-put-100000-images-online…
Kids’ and adults’ coloring books from the collections of 113 museums:
http://www.openculture.com/…/download-free-coloring-books-f…
Digital tour of medieval Montmajour Abbey:
http://www.abbaye-montmajour.fr/Explorer/Visite-virtuelle
The Uncensored Library of Minecraft:
https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en
10 historic homes you can virtually tour:
https://www.housebeautiful.com/…/historic-homes-you-can-vi…/
Digitized collections from European museums, galleries, and libraries:
https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en
Online archive of World War I material culture:
https://lwf.web.ox.ac.uk/home
Free online courses in Humanities, Digital Sciences, Math, Language, etc:
https://www.freecodecamp.org/…/ivy-league-free-online-cou…/…
And of course, my own work:
https://www.digitalmappa.org/showcase-projects
Railway Ministry To Launch Digital Museums At 22 Stations On August 15
Railway Ministry To Launch Digital Museums At 22 Stations On August 15
Existing colour digital multi-media screens at stations would be used for project. (Representational)
Mumbai:
The Railway Ministry has decided to launch “digital museums” at 22 stations on Independence Day to showcase its history after the Prime Minister’s Office objected to the public transporter investing money in developing separate railway museums.
Let’s get the painful truth out of the way: museums are borne out of classist ideals, found in the projection of wealth in wunderkammer’s kept by rich aristocrats and the style of the “gentlemanly hang” meant to educate the elite masses in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain. Even up to the current decade, many cultural institutions still prioritize collection/protection over education instead of approaching these goals as hand in hand.
Yet, there are still movements to “break down the walls” of the museum and increase accessibility and outreach. Digital museums, tours, exhibits and online catalogues have been jumped on as a solution. Increasingly, interest in art and museums are driven by word of mouth on social media outlets like Instagram and Tumblr. Despite this many professionals fret that digital expansion and allowing collections to leave the physical walls of the museum will lead to visitor disinterest in the “real thing.” On the contrary, most visitors use digital museum sources as a jumping off point:
Even in the latest phases of the digital era there is still reassuring evidence that people want access to the ‘real thing’. They like to read about things on-line, to identify collections through catalogues and other materials. If anything, these virtual experiences appear to spark a stronger desire to commune with the actual objects and to have access to original sources.
Good museum programming now has to prioritize community engagement and partnerships. Visitors want to feel connected, either by being reached on a personal level or via physical contribution to an exhibit. The “Pop Up Museum” movement out of the Santa Cruz Museum of History and Art incorporates visitor inclusion in a new and exciting way.
Pop up museums are “temporary exhibits created by the people who show up to participate” and are often partnerships with local organizations that lead to the cultivation of relationships with people who may not consider themselves “museum visitors.” Allowing visitors to take control of their personal narratives moves museums into the position of knowledge collaborators instead of just knowledge repositories.
In order to continue to best meet the needs of the public and keep up with the increasing rapidity of information consumption, museums must think about their impact outside their physical space. Cultivating community partnerships and designing programming that meets the needs and interests of multiple different groups (across educational, age, and class lines) are going to be important steps in keeping institutions relevant.
Other Resources
Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0
Duncan, Carol. 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. New York: Routledge Press.
Tate Museum. nd. “Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities.” Online exhibit.
In 2010 the Museum of Copenhagen installed “The Wall”, a large touch-screen multimedia installation placed at various locations throughout Copenhagen. It allowed the public to explore the cultural history of the city through browsing the images, records and information provided by the museum, as well as upload their own.
For the third year, the Federal Office of Culture (FOC) and Les Urbaines Festival present Post Digital Cultures. Gathering artists, curators, researchers and philosophers, the symposium will discuss the current state of contemporary cultural production in relation to new technologies.
“On the last day of the symposium Post Digital Cultures, on December 7, 2013, the Museum of Post Digital Cultures was introduced. As an online platform, it is meant to collect, preserve, exhibit, and research the issues addressed during the symposia.
Mirroring a museum irl (in real life), the mission of the Museum of Post Digital Culture is to build a collection and to make it available to the public. Consisting of texts, films, sounds and artworks, the museum gathers individual and subjective positions, and does not aim to draw an exhaustive map of historical references but rather to build a specific identity shaped by the donated contributions.
Since 2014, the Museum of Post Digital Cultures has been inviting guest curators to temporary 'take over' the online museum. Bringing their own expertise and network, each guest curator 'rehangs' the museum's collection and bring new donations, temporary sharing their vision of what an online museum should be.”
my name is Katerina Cepakova, and I’m from Prague, Czech Republic. I’m in my second year of master’s degree studies at Charles University, my major is curiously called New Media Studies. A week ago, I came to Copenhagen as an exchange student to study Information Science and Cultural Communication.
I got my bachelor’s degree in Art History, so I’m naturally very interested in museums and art galleries. I worked for several galleries (commercial and non-profit) that focused on contemporary art.
My best experience so far was when I worked for a post-internet (watch out, buzzword!) gallery Plevel, where I co-curated some of the later exhibitions. There I became very interested in new media, especially internet-focused art. My bachelor thesis was about the influence of the internet on contemporary art and art world, which was of course a ridiculously large topic :3 But it was somehow successful and thanks to that I got to write an article about the word “post-internet” later for a nice cultural magazine.
Last year I started my own gallery project, Kurzor_gallery, with a friend and a brilliant artist Kristyna Lutzova. We held five one-night exhibitions and two screenings in her art studio. The online presentation of the project was just as important as the actual events.
I’m very much interested in presentation of art online, digital remediation and ways, how to engage online users. I’m probably going to focus on the phenomenon of online galleries in my master’s thesis.
For all these reasons, the course Digital Museum Mediation and Museology is perfect for me.
