Here we ask for your comments on the following issues:
- If technologies do not respect national boundaries, then how might national museums use these technologies?
- Are the narratives that can be delivered onsite different from those delivered online?
- Are technologies making us think more fundamentally beyond nationhood, nationalism and territory?
- Do technologies mean that national museums can be more inclusive?
Sunday, 6 April 2008
What are the implications for representation and interpretation in our national museums?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
In the research project I'm developing at the National Natural History Museum in Lisboa, i'll try to unveil the biographies of some 'lost' objects and recharge them as part of a larger context: the European Scientific Culture through its Scientific and Didactical Instruments. This particular museum was once simultaneously an Education site with classes and didactical collections of instruments and naturalia.
We can ask ourselves what may happen to the boundaries of this museum if these objects become part of an 'online communtity of artefacts' that is, necessarily, transnational.
I hope that the potential of the technologies nowadays available for this kind of smaller scale museum is trans-forming in a way that allows its importance and its particular contents to be better known to all and also to the portuguese, even reinforcing national feelings. Making way to a new meaning and place in society for this worn-out 19th century institution.
What do you think?
Yes, what is more 'transnational' than natural history, where ecological principles necessitate looking a things within a network of relationships, not situated within national borders.
But I am curious how scientific instruments instill nationalist feelings? Pride that a scientist is Portuguese? Is the creation of science knowledge, in these cases, the action of individuals or the research of a community of scientists?
This web site:
http://www.guimet-grandidier.fr/html/4/index/index.htm
provides an interesting example of online resources (in this case Chinese ceramics in a French collection) interpreted using traditional French ceramic art history) AND Chinese language access. In this case the Chinese is not a translation of the French, but rather a non-parallel information 'universe'. Based in objects, that is same resource, but different and culturally relevant access points.
Post a Comment