Museums are pretty strange. They exist simultaneously as a conceptual space, an actual physical place and as a kind of practice, which means there is constantly a sense of redrawing the borders of what a museum is, and why a museum is. Because the context in which museums exist is always fluctuating, museums too are… [Read more…]
February 1, 2012
I’ve started thinking a lot about Big Data and what it could mean for museums in a time when, as Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford write “The era of Big Data has begun.” The two have put forward an excellent and provocative paper about some of the weaknesses and problematics associated with the use of… [Read more…]
January 14, 2012
Monday’s post, asking whether the physical space of the museum should still be the most important one, brought all kinds of new readers to the blog, and has started the richest discussions on museumgeek to date. While I had been trying to get a little more into the heads of those who are not enthusiastic… [Read more…]
January 9, 2012
When, a couple of weeks ago, I asked what your dangerous idea about museums is, one of the responses really stuck out for me. Damien wrote: I do not think we should hasten into the virtual world. There is a place for online content and catalogues, without a doubt, but museums need to be physical… [Read more…]
January 2, 2012
The first provocative article I read in the new year was Should we erase painful memories?. The author, Alison Winter, interrogates the role that memory has in the creation of our selves, and how trauma can affect our personalities and experiences of life – and what it could mean for our private and social selves… [Read more…]
December 27, 2011
A number of years ago, I acquired the book What is Your Dangerous Idea?, in which significant thinkers addressed the question “What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?” According to the book’s preface, the question comes from psychologist Steven Pinker, who wrote: The history of science is replete with discoveries… [Read more…]
December 25, 2011
If you are a museum person who is reading this, I am hoping by now that you have seen Hey girl. I love museums. My awesome friend Erica had one of her own images posted on it the other day, and that has kicked off a little Ryan Gosling creativity amongst the other geek gals… [Read more…]
December 24, 2011
This time last year, as the days crawled towards the start of 2011, I had very few expectations for what the year would bring. I knew that I’d been accepted for my PhD, and that I’d received a scholarship – and I knew I’d been accepted for Museums and the Web 2011. But little did… [Read more…]
December 3, 2011
I had the exceptional good fortune at MCN2011 of coming away with dozens of unanswered questions, and more than a handful of lovely people with whom to try to figure out the answers. My hands have barely left my keyboard in the last couple of weeks, as I’ve tried to capture ideas, exchange emails and… [Read more…]
November 22, 2011
I wrote this post on the plane on the way home from MCN2011, trying to wrangle some sense from the myriad of stimulating and interesting conversations and sessions. It captures my first takeaways from the conference, and is something I will no doubt expand on in coming weeks. This was a very interesting conference. Much… [Read more…]
February 15, 2012
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