Museums and the History of Computing examines the critical role that cultural organizations, such as museums and galleries, play in shaping ‘digital heritage’: the cultural heritage surrounding computer technology.
Focusing on digital technologies as objects and practices that museums collect, exhibit, and preserve for the future, this book highlights how and why museums play a crucial role in preserving the rich heritage of the digital world, constructing powerful narratives that help make it relevant to the public. It demonstrates that the museum can be a powerful means of safeguarding and interpreting ephemeral and continually changing digital technology, offering new pathways for rethinking the very meaning of digital objects and practices in contemporary societies. It provides practices and strategies for the preservation and exhibition of computing artifacts and ways to accommodate and respond to narratives about histories of computing that circulate in the public arena. Bringing together leading museum and university researchers and practitioners, and mobilizing cross-cutting debates and approaches in areas such as museum studies, cultural heritage, history of technology, anthropology, and media studies, this book challenges us to think critically about what ‘digital’ is when examined not only as a tool but as a cultural object deserving of attention and a place within the museum.
Museums and the History of Computing is for museum studies students and researchers as well as museum practitioners – especially those with an interest in digital technology and heritage. It will be of interest to researchers and students interested in histories of computing and digital media and in digital media studies.
Introduction; PART I: Lives narrated through computer history; Chapter 1. Unseen connections: Exhibiting the global stories of cellular telephony at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History; Chapter 2. Lives on shelves: Constructing histories of computing in the museum store; Provocation no. 1: Imparting the history of ‘intangible things’; PART II: The life inscribed on computer technology; Chapter 3. Restorations, replicas, and emulations in a museum of computing; Chapter 4. Social media enters the museum: Collecting WeChat at the Victoria & Albert museum; Provocation no. 2: All of this belongs to us; PART III: Living computing history collections; Chapter 5: Mediators, media and meaning: Curating digital objects at the science museum ; Chapter 6: Unsettling the narrative: Quantum computing in museum environments; Provocation no. 3: Why is the computer different?; PART IV: Lived practice of computing history; Chapter 7: The CHM stack: Experimentation for digital and computing heritage; Chapter 8: Beyond Point and Click: Calling out expediency in museums’ histories of computing; Provocation no. 4: Decolonizing Computing Histories in Museums
Simone Natale is an associate professor at the University of Turin, Italy, and an editor of Media, Culture and Society. He is the author of Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test (Oxford University Press, 2021). Petrina Foti is a museologist and scholar focused on the rise of digital information and technology and the resulting impact on both museums and the wider world. She is the author of Collecting and Exhibiting Computer-based Technology: Curatorial Expertise at the Smithsonian Museums (Routledge, 2018). Ross Parry is a professor of museum technology at the University of Leicester, and the inaugural Director of its Institute for Digital Culture. He is co-founder the UK’s Museum Data Service, and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication (Routledge 2019).
