Enhancing Museum Narratives: Tales of Things and UCL’s Grant Museum

Abstract

How do the examples in this chapter help us understand the practice of storytelling in the mobile media age? Written collectively by a group of academics, curators, and designers, this chapter looks at the utilization of mobile media for enhanced meaning making and narrative engagement in museums. Focusing on the collaborative project, titled QRator, this chapter analyzes the ways that QR codes have been incorporated into the Grant Museum as a means to increase the amount of information available about museum artifacts and, perhaps more importantly, involve the museum goers in discussing that content. Comparing the QRator project to other mobile museum projects, this chapter demonstrates the emerging trend to incorporate the “Internet of Things” into the experiences with historical objects. In the context of ubiquitous computing, in which devices are embedded into innumerable facets of daily life, objects can be connected with data in seamless and meaningful ways. This data can be contributed to, commented on, and altered by users as a means to bring historical objects to life and tie them into contemporary conversations about how objects become integral to the ways we practice modes of historicizing.

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