Experimental Museology scrutinizes innovative endeavours to transform museum interactions with the world. Analysing cutting-edge cases from around the globe, the volume demonstrates how museums can ...design, apply and assess new modes of audience engagement and participation. Written by an interdisciplinary group of researchers and research-led professionals, the book argues that museum transformations must be focused on conceptualizing and documenting the everyday challenges and choices facing museums, especially in relation to wider social, political and economic ramifications. In order to illuminate the complexity of these challenges, the volume is structured into three related key dimensions of museum practice - namely institutions, representations and users. Each chapter is based on a curatorial design proposed and performed in collaboration between university-based academics and a museum. Taken together, the chapters provide insights into a diversity of geographical contexts, fields and museums, thus building a comprehensive and reflexive repository of design practices and formative experiments that can help strengthen future museum research and design. Experimental Museology will be of great value to academics and students in the fields of museum, gallery and heritage studies, as well as architecture, design, communication and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to museum professionals and anyone else who is interested in learning more about experimentation and design as resources in museums.
Based on an overview of Anglo-American stocktaking of media and communication studies, this article situates Nordic media studies as a third route staked out between academic binaries of ...administrative and critical approaches. The key argument is this: Nordic media studies displays distinctive features of development that are shaped by Nordic welfarist ideals from the 1970s and 1980s rather than by international trends in the academy. Furthermore, these ideals are worth holding on to if the field of media studies is to thrive with quality and relevance in a globalised, connected, and deeply datafied platform society. I take media studies – not communication studies – as my point of departure, since this is the most feasible umbrella term when studying current modes of communication that are technologically mediated in ways that can be stored, shaped, and shared across time and space.
Museums today find themselves within a mediatised society, where everyday life is conducted in a data-full and technology-rich context. In fact, museums are themselves mediatised: they present a ...uniquely media-centred environment, in which communicative media is a constitutive property of their organisation and of the visitor experience. The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication explores what it means to take mediated communication as a key concept for museum studies and as a sensitising lens for media-related museum practice on the ground. Including contributions from experts around the world, this original and innovative Handbook shares a nuanced and precise understanding of media, media concepts and media terminology, rehearsing new locations for writing on museum media and giving voice to new subject alignments. As a whole, the volume breaks new ground by reframing mediated museum communication as a resource for an inclusive understanding of current museum developments. The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication will appeal to both students and scholars, as well as to practitioners involved in the visioning, design and delivery of mediated communication in the museum. It teaches us not just how to study museums, but how to go about being a museum in today’s world.
"This book adds to the international research literature on contemporary Nordic childhoods in the context of fast-evolving technologies. It draws on the workshop program of the Nordic Research ...Network on Digital Childhoods funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) during the years 2019–2021. Bringing together researchers from Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland, the book addresses pressing issues around children’s communication, learning and education in the digital age. The volume sheds light on cultural values, educational policies and conceptions of children and childhood, and child–media relationships inherent in Nordic societies. The book argues for the importance of understanding local cultures, values and communication practices that make up contemporary digital childhoods and extends current discourses on children’s screen time to bring in new insights about the nature of children’s digital engagement. This book will appeal to researchers, graduate students, educators and policy makers in the fields of childhood education, educational technology and communication."
The key claim of the article is that the Covid pandemic has offered museums important new opportunities to foster more, and more diverse, citizen engagements; and such engagements may be key to ...sustainable museum innovation in the future. The claims are underpinned by first mapping the characteristics of two leading paradigms in existing museum interaction with the world: a technology paradigm and a personalisation paradigm. Second, the article provides three empirical examples on how museums may apply participatory designs to foster more inclusive and diverse citizen engagements. The examples are based on case studies conducted at a Danish R&D programme, Our Museum. By way of conclusion, it is discussed how and why citizen engagements can catalyse sustainable museum innovation.
This article explores how we may study children's digital content creation as creative processes of production. Based on a case study of 6-16-year-olds' filmmaking in an out-of-school context, the ...analysis identifies three interlaced categories marking the production processes: Social interaction, semiotic negotiation and practice-based learning. Results demonstrate that joint creation of new film narratives unleashes students' playful exploration, trains multimodal skills, and catalyzes modes of reflexivity that are germane to complex problem-solving. In conclusion, it is argued that digital content creation needs added pedagogical attention as a means of advancing children's democratic rights of expression as societal resources, not as individual requisites.
Globally connected and commodified digital means of communication offer a wealth of information across age-bands and across formal and informal sites of learning, yet few students obtain systematic ...training in transforming this information to knowledge that is tailored to their level of understanding and to the settings of learning. This gap between access to unsorted and often unsolicited information across boundaries of space, learning and generation and training in the formation of valid knowledge poses a threat to democratic societies that are based on informed citizens’ joint debate and decision-making. This article addresses the gap between students’ information access and their knowledge formation and discusses the challenges and possible solutions with empirical focus on the transition between upper-secondary and tertiary education. Globally connected social network sites (‘social media’) are key information sources for many students. Owing to their commodified, algorithmic and non-transparent character, these sites offer little guidance in terms of validation and verification of claims. I propose Media and Information Literacy (MIL) as an important means of minimizing the gap between information access and sound knowledge formation. This is because MIL goes beyond training of access to digital technologies and information search and retrieval. It also trains skills in applying communication technologies for validation, critique and knowledge production. I discuss the challenges posed to education to apply (MIL) as a key pathway to minimizing the gap in order to advance public value and societal resilience and suggest that educational systems shift their focus from teaching to learning in tandem with more inclusive approaches to where learning takes place.
This article suggests how we should study media and information literacies (MIL) and do so at a time, when young people nurture these literacies through multiple media practices and across spaces of ...learning. Our basic argument is this: in order to gain a robust knowledge base for the development of MIL we need to study literacy practices beyond print literacy and numeracy, and we need to study these practices beyond formal spaces of learning. The argument is unfolded with particular focus on ethnic minority youth since this group routinely figures as under-achieving in studies of school literacy, such as Programme for International Student Assessment. Based on a brief overview of literacy studies in view of digitization and a critical examination of recent studies of youthful media practices and ethnicity, the argument is illustrated through an empirical analysis that draws on results from a nationally representative survey of media uses among Danes aged 13-23 years. The analysis demonstrates that ethnic minority youth offer the most serious challenge to existing literacy hierarchies found in formal education. We discuss the implications of these results for educational policy-making and for future research on MIL, advocating inclusive approaches in terms of media for learning and spaces of learning.
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