New Media and the Museum(IAT888), 2012
Digital technologies have transformed the ways in which museums create access to their collections, how curators do their work, and the ability of publics to participate in the collective writing of local, cultural, and national histories. This course explored histories and theory of museums, and the shifts enacted by the use of new media to organize and exhibit physical and digital collections. Lectures, presentations, and individual research projects related literature in museum studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and new media to developments associated with digital archives, virtual museums, social media and new media exhibition practices, including mobile applications, tangible interfaces, virtual reality, and augmented reality.
Students participated in the production and evaluation of digital assets being created for the Museum of Vancouver’s exhibition Neon Vancouver, Ugly Vancouver. This virtual exhibit and mobile application, called The Visible City: Illuminating Vancouver’s Neon, creatively represent multiple layers of Vancouver’s historical, geographic, visual and material life as a platform for tracing the establishment, demise, and revitalization of Vancouver’s famous neon signs. Based on the evaluation and critique of the Neon exhibit’s digital assets, students will propose individual research projects that draw on their particular skills and apply them to theoretical issues and debates raised in the course readings, in the Museum of Vancouver case study, and in individual research initiatives.
While I only had the opportunity to teach this course once, it was central in creating a teaching collaboration with the Museum of Vancouver that still continues. I learned how to organize curriculum with curators, and find ways to bring students’ work into the museum—in this case, final research papers were presented conference-style in a public event at the Museum of Vancouver at the end of the semester as public programming associated with the Neon Vancouver exhibit and their geolocative app.
In conjunction with the course syllabus, I designed a blog for the course that was used for weekly student contributions to class discussion. These included sharing their seminar presentations ahead of class, presenting their response papers and case studies, commenting on assigned readings, sharing interesting news related to museums and new media.
The blog became a way to trace emerging interests in the course, by tagging posts and contributing the shared experience of the course material and what it allowed us all to learn.
