The Impact of Digital and Interactive Media on Museums

The Impact of Digital and Interactive Media on Museums:

While technology has always influenced how the past is studied and portrayed, the technological revolution of interactive, networked digital media represents a massive change that is greater than any other since the invention of the printing press. The effects of this have only been felt for the most part over the last decade. In the arena of historical studies, a major effect has been to dramatically enhance public access to, and appreciation of, stories of the past. This is made possible because we have access to such vast stores of information. Faced with such a wide choice of information we can plainly see the contradictions, inconsistencies, silences and gaps, which have been long the subject of critical and cultural theories including, for example, poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches. In the last decades of the twentieth century these new critical perspectives had a major impact on how history was written in books or shown on film. They also influenced how history would be displayed in museums and galleries, and more broadly, the role it now plays in society.

Digital history is a term used to refer to all aspects of the study and appreciation of history, heritage and material culture that involve digital rather than other conventional media in its presentation, storage and access. It can also refer to a standalone text, in the sense of a digital history of a particular topic. In this sense it does not refer to a genre but to the digital means of delivery itself. Digital history can be found in physical settings, including in museums or galleries as interactive displays. Digital history can also be found on fixed media such as CD-ROM or DVD or online via the internet, most commonly in the form of databases of historical information and digitized material. Digital history comes in different sizes, from large institutional projects aimed at giving world-wide access to resources for the study of history. It may include personal histories, which could be self-published on YouTube. Digital history highlights trends across diverse areas of specialized activity that are increasingly relevant to museum practice as museums experiment with digital modes of presentation and communication including virtual exhibitions and other online extensions of the physical visitor experience. The increasingly visual, dynamic and multi-textual character of history in the digital history environment is aligning it more closely with the idea of the museum as a place of ‘visual technology’ where objects are exhibited in such a way that they can tell stories that transport the viewer into other worlds, and into the past.

The museum offers the viewer a particular specialization of knowledge. It is a storage device that stems from the ancient art of memory. Since classical times, the art of memory depended on developing a mental construction that formed a series of places in which a set of images that made striking impressions on the mind were stored. Using this device, and orator trying to remember a speech, for example, located specific images as cues to parts of his speech in the rooms of his imaginary place system. By the nineteenth century, the museum had become such a memory device and its rooms were places to stop or look around, to visually observe the contrasting features, the arbitrary analogical relationships that arranged the history into self-enclosed periods, schools, and styles. The many new digital tools and resources that people now have for communicating, storing, retrieving and sharing information are having a major impact on the traditional patterns of doing research and disseminating research across all academic disciplines and in professional settings, including in museums.

References:

Kelley, K. (2007, December). The next 5,000 days of the Web [Speech]. Speech delivered at the EG 2007 Conference, Los Angeles. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html

Fiorina, C. (2000, August). Digital renaissance, medieval policy [Speech]. Speech delivered at the Aspen Summit 2000: Cyberspace and the American Dream VII, Aspen, CO. Retrieved from http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/speeches/fiorina/ceo_aspen_00.html

History in Motion: Digital Approaches to the Past
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/Arthur.pdf