The Digital Museum Conference
University of Edinburgh, September 19-20, 2024
What is the relationship between the digital and the museum? This question is at the heart of a 4- year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project, Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India (DiMuse), from which this 2-day workshop emerges. We ask this question to tease out the multiple ways in which collections and objects housed in museums can be remediated and remade in new contexts. It enables us to think through what the ‘digital’ and the ‘analogue’ are, particularly in light of how the object, now transformed through printing, 3D imagery, video, sound, photography, and sophisticated photogrammetry tools, evoke complex questions around what the ‘object’ embodies and how various audiences respond to them.
- How do these objects engage with the senses, and what role does time and collective memory play to illuminate the layered digital-as-process?
- What can ‘digital repatriation’, as ethnographic method, tell us about the role museums play as distributive institutions rather than conserving locations?
- How do digital objects interact with people outside the museum space and how do people in turn find (multiple) meanings in these encounters?
- What responses are triggered when the digital collection is returned ‘home’ and is circulated via social media and other forms of online dissemination?
- How does digitising museums and their collections facilitate new modes of online interaction with them?
- To what extent can working with digital methods help to create more ethical relationships between museums and the communities from which their collections have been derived?
- How can digital methods help to activate Indigenous knowledge and agency?
The conference brought together world-leading scholars working on the creative intersection between museums and curation, digital culture, ethnography, object histories, and with a strong community interface. The conference saw papers by:
Haidy Geismar, University College London
Jelena Porsanger, RDM – The Sámi Museum in Karasjok
Paul Basu, University of Oxford
Mark Elliot, University of Cambridge
Joshua A. Bell, Smithsonian
John Harries, The University of Edinburgh
Mridu Thulung Rai, PhD candidate, University College London
Thupten Kelsang, V&A South Kensington.
Cara Krmpotich, University of Toronto
Gwyneira Isaac, Smithsonian
Noel Lobley, University of Virginia
Nathaniel Majaw, St. Anthonys, Shillong
Tarun Bhartiya, Independent Filmmaker
Following the conference, the project team travelled to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford to view the Gaidinliu Collection. For team members such as Reaearch Associate Lanchamei Monica Golmei, this marked their first opportunity to handle the collection in person.
As a researcher interesed in Rongmei weaving practices, Lanchamei also spoke at length with the PRM curatorial team about the shawls and body cloths in the Gaidinliu Collection.
