Museum + digital = ?

Abstract

This chapter argues that very particular definitions 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. The emergence of digital technologies in museums is in fact part of a long-standing trajectory of networking, classifying and forging representations of relationships between people and things. 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 discursive tropes of access and accountability are also hallmarks of a continually emergent ‘new museology’ that has documented a shift of interest in museums away from objects and toward people, society and experience.

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