Ana-Maria Herman – författare

Digital media technologies have provided an occasion not only for novel ways to display and exhibit collections, but also for new politics to arise as museums and urban settings change. While some believe these changes are driven by humans, others see digital media technologies at the heart of these changes. Reconfiguring the Museum offers a third explanation that considers both the social and technical together and thereby captures the experimental nature of introducing novel digital media technologies to museums, and the uncertainty, messiness, contingency, and complexity involved. In this sociotechnical case study of a novel augmented reality app – first designed to exhibit collections from the Museum of London across the sprawling capital city, and later remade for the McCord Museum to display collections throughout Montreal – Ana-Maria Herman reveals how the app introduced unexpected new relations between the museums, their collections, advertising agencies, sponsors, technology companies, corporations, urban spaces, and end users. She shows how museum practices related to curating, designing, building, visiting, and modifying exhibitions were transformed, and how, in such unsettled arrangements, what we think of as old cultural politics can unexpectedly re-emerge, while new digital politics – related to big data, surveillance, and automated processes – may not necessarily materialize.A detailed account of emerging actors and practices involved in making digital exhibitions, Reconfiguring the Museum offers practical considerations for museum, culture, and heritage practitioners charged with creating digital displays and accounting for their success or failure.

Mobile Heritage explores how diverse digital technologies (such as apps, GPS, games, social platforms, NFTs, drones, AR, MR, and AI, among others) have allowed for new types of mobilities and introduced a novel set of practices, interventions, and politics for heritage collections, archives, exhibitions, entertainment, conservation, management, commerce, education, restitution, activism, and regulation.The volume is not a ‘how to’ book. Instead, it critically examines this emerging landscape and its unsettling of existing relations between heritage and knowledge, value, identity, power, sense of place, community, nationhood, and ownership – thus outlining a new set of issues, implications, and consequences. The volume brings together case studies from around the world and each chapter considers mobility matters associated with tangible and intangible cultural heritage (relating to art, film, music, games, manuscripts, traditional knowledge, architecture, cities, and more) and the involvement of a variety of actors in digital heritage practices and interventions (such as artists, activists, communities, museums, non-profit organisations, educational institutions, enterprises, and governmental agencies). The contributors are scholars and practitioners drawing on various disciplines and fields of study, including archaeology, museum studies, media studies, computing, art history, cultural studies, anthropology, gender studies, mobility studies, and law. Mobile Heritage positions mobility as a critical tool for understanding the changing (digital) heritage landscape, making this volume an essential read for students, academics, and practitioners engaged in this area.