Museums and Digital Culture: New perspectives and research

This richly illustrated book offers new perspectives and research on how digital culture is transforming museums in the 21st century, as they strive to keep pace with emerging technologies driving cultural and social change, played out not only in today’s pervasive networked environment of the Internet and Web, but in everyday life, from home to work and on city streets. In a world where digital culture has redefined human information behavior as life in code and digits, increasingly it dominates human activity and communication. These developments have radically changed the expectations of the museum visitor, real and virtual, the work of museum professionals and, most prominently, the nature of museum exhibitions, while digital art and life in a digitally saturated world is changing our ways of seeing, doing, our senses and aesthetics. Overall, this book creates a new picture of the 21st-century museum field. As museums become shared spaces with their communities, local, national and global and move from collection-centered to user-/visitor-centered institutions, they are assuming new roles and responsibilities tied to new goals for engaging their audience, conveying meaning through collections, creating learning experiences and importantly, connecting to daily digital life and culture integral to the museum ecosystem. Our studies of recent exhibitions at museums leading change are used to exemplify new directions, while they point to a reimagined vision for museums of the future at the heart of which is the integration of digital culture and visitor experience and participation in real and virtual space

O Renascimento Digital de Leonardo da Vinci a Alan Turing

The Italian Renaissance started a rebirth of culture and knowledge not experienced since Roman times. Leonardo da Vinci was arguably the leading polymath of the era. We are now in the throes of a Digital Renaissance, arguably started by Alan Turing in England. The information revolution that we are now experiencing is as disruptive as any change since the Renaissance. This paper draws some parallels between these two periods and speculates on the future of digital developments.   Keywords – Computational culture, Digital culture, Digital identity, Information revolution, Italian Renaissance.    O Renascimento Italiano iniciou um reaparecimento de uma cultura e conhecimento não experimentados desde os tempos romanos. Leonardo da Vinci foi, sem dúvida, o principal polímamo da época. Agora estamos no auge de um Renascimento Digital, indiscutivelmente iniciado por Alan Turing, na Inglaterra. A revolução da informação que estamos experimentando agora é tão disruptiva quanto qualquer mudança desde o Renascimento. Este artigo traça alguns paralelos entre esses dois períodos e traz algumas especulações sobre o futuro do desenvolvimento digital.  

Learning On Location Curriculum and International Contexts

This is a presentation (of 10 slides) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 in the session sponsored by the Curriculum SIG titled "Preparing Students for the International Information Society: Studying the Global Context in LIS" at the 2005 ALISE Conference, Boston, MA. The experiences of the students and the instructor in the first Summer Institute in Florence-2004 "Florentine Art and Culture, Resources and Documentationâ offered by Pratt-SILS are candidly discussed. As part of this course students had access four libraries in Florence: Uffizi, the Biblioteca Nazionale, the Medici and Harvard's Berenson Library. Cultural Informatics is explored

Global Cultural Conflict and Digital Identity: Transforming Museums

This paper looks at key elements of global culture that are driving a new paradigm shift in museums causing them to question their raison d’être, their design and physical space, recognizing the need to accommodate visitor interaction and participation, and to reprioritize institutional outcomes and goals reexamining their priorities. As heritage sharing in online spaces reaches across national, political, and social boundaries on platforms and networks, this has been driven by museum engagement with Internet life during the pandemic. Museum relationships and interactions with communities both local and global continue to challenge core values and precepts, leading to radical changes in how museums define their roles and responsibilities. In this new cultural landscape, museums are responding to human digital identity in a tidal wave of human interactions on the Internet, from social media to online sharing of images and videos. This is revealing shared perspectives on cultural conflict as being tied to freedom of expression of one’s heritage embedded in digital identity

Museums and Digital Culture: From Reality to Digitality in the Age of COVID-19

Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as digital and social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. From interdisciplinary perspectives across digital culture, art, and technology, we investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture, looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We focus on human digital behavior, experience, and interaction in museums in the context of art, artists, and human engagement with art, using the observational perspectives of the authors as a basis for discussion. Our research shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation, about which this paper presents a landscape view of its characteristics and challenges. Our evidence shows that museums will need to be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched, underscoring the central importance of an inclusive integrative museum model between physical and digital reality