Museum + Digital = ?

This chapter discusses and describes the effects of this kind of technological mediation on museum practice and experience. It focuses on the remediation of collections online and in the space of the museum catalogue and storeroom. The chapter also focuses on how digital projects ‘encode’ theories of digital sociality and how the digital coproduces not only representations of objects and social relations, but collections and sociality in museum worlds. Accounts of the digital as a new genre of museum practice are largely celebratory, applauding the democratic expansion of a commons of cultural information and objects to greater numbers of people. The digital museum is the ultimate ‘museum without walls’. There is an emphasis on the ways in which the digital enhances mutability and polyphony and can make connections in time and space that transcend the possibility of other kinds of museum matter, effecting a kind of ‘figurative repatriation’ and reconnection between museum collections, communities and individuals.

Art · Computer Science · Museums and Cultural Heritage