The Invisible History of Museum Computing
The Invisible History of Museum Computing

Author: Paul Marty

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2025-01-21

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1538183854

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Invisible History of Museum Computing uses engaging quotes from a one-of-a-kind collection of oral histories gathered by the authors from more than fifty current and former museum technology professionals working in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia to shine a light on the invisible, behind-the-scenes work of museum computing. This book provides a critical analysis of key trends in museum computing that collectively drove the museum technology profession forward from the 1960s to the present day, and offers an “annotated history” of museum computing that shares engaging quotes from the museum technology professionals who participated in this oral history project, places their memories in the appropriate historical context, and uses their personal stories to tell the history of museum computing from the perspective of the very people who lived through it. Filled with a positive spirit of inspiration, innovation, and boundless enthusiasm, this book brings to life the history of museum computing in a way that has never been done before as it explores the overarching trends that influenced the field of museum computing over the past sixty years and explains why that history continues to matter today as museums move forward into their digital future.

Museums and the History of Computing
Museums and the History of Computing

Author: Simone Natale

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-26

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 1040127843

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Museum Collections and Today's Computers
Museum Collections and Today's Computers

Author: Robert G. Chenhall

Publisher: Greenwood

Published: 1988-08-24

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With the advent of the computer, electronic cataloging of museum collections is becoming a reality. This book is a useful guide to starting a computer cataloging project. It lays out the rudiments of computer retrieval, database organization, and image processing. It does not purport to dictate a particular computer system, since museums have individualized needs, but it offers case studies and examples to help museums make informed decisions. The glossary and bibliography of the book are also helpful. Museum libraries and academic collections supporting museum and computer studies will appreciate this introductory text. ARBA Written for museum executives, curators, and computer programmers and librarians with museum clients, this book offers a detailed exploration of the use of computers to record and control the physical objects that comprise museum collections. Equally applicable to collections contained in major museums and to those residing in the far more numerous small museums, Museum Collections and Today's Computers show how computers can be effectively and cost-efficiently used to perform a number of museum activities, including accession, registration, cataloging, inventory control, lending, exhibiting, and research. Throughout, the authors focus on the unique nature of museum collections and the special needs that result from uniqueness.

Collecting and Exhibiting Computer-Based Technology
Collecting and Exhibiting Computer-Based Technology

Author: Petrina Foti

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-11-05

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1351174320

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Computer technology has transformed modern society, yet curators wishing to reflect those changes face difficult challenges in terms of both collecting and exhibiting. Collecting and Exhibiting Computer-Based Technology examines how curators at the history and technology museums of the Smithsonian Institution have met these challenges. Focusing on the curatorial process, the book explores the ways in which curators at the institution have approached the accession and display of technological artifacts. Such collections often have comparatively few precedents, and can pose unique dilemmas. In analysing the Smithsonian’s approach, Foti takes in diverse collection case studies ranging from DNA analyzers to Herbie Hancock’s music synthesizers, from iPods to born-digital photographs, from the laptop used during the filming of the television program Sex and the City to "Stanley" the self-driving car. Using her proposed model of "expert curation", she synthesizes her findings into a more universal framework for undertanding the curatorial methods associated with computer technology and reflects on what it means to be a curator in a postdigital world. Collecting and Exhibiting Computer-Based Technology offers a detailed analysis of curatorial practice in a relatively new field that is set to grow exponentially. It will be useful reading for curators, scholars, and students alike.

History of Computing: Learning from the Past
History of Computing: Learning from the Past

Author: Arthur Tatnall

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-08-13

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 3642151981

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

History of Computing: Learning from the Past Why is the history of computing important? Given that the computer, as we now know it, came into existence less than 70 years ago it might seem a little odd to some people that we are concerned with its history. Isn’t history about ‘old things’? Computing, of course, goes back much further than 70 years with many earlier - vices rightly being known as computers, and their history is, of course, important. It is only the history of electronic digital computers that is relatively recent. History is often justified by use of a quote from George Santayana who famously said that: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. It is arguable whether there are particular mistakes in the history of computing that we should avoid in the future, but there is some circularity in this question, as the only way we will know the answer to this is to study our history. This book contains papers on a wide range of topics relating to the history of c- puting, written both by historians and also by those who were involved in creating this history. The papers are the result of an international conference on the History of Computing that was held as a part of the IFIP World Computer Congress in Brisbane in September 2010.

Computing Legacies
Computing Legacies

Author: Peter Krapp

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-12-03

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0262549832

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A media history of simulation that contextualizes our digital heritage and the history of computing. In Computing Legacies, Peter Krapp explores a media history of simulation to excavate three salient aspects of digital culture. Firstly, he profiles simulation as cultural technique, enabling symbolic work and foregrounding hypothetical literacy. Secondly, he positions simulation as crucial for the preservation of cultural memory, where modeling, emulation, and serious play are constitutive in how we relate to our mediated history. And lastly, despite suggestions that we may already live in a simulation, he interrogates how simulation can serve as critique of the computer age. In tracing our digital heritage, Computing Legacies elucidates inflection points where quantitative data becomes tractable for qualitative evaluations: modeling epidemics for scientific study or entertainment, emulating older devices, turning numerical calculations into music, conducting espionage in virtual worlds, and gamifying higher education. Simulation, this book demonstrates, is pivotal not only to high-tech research and to archives, museums, and the preservation of digital culture but also to our understanding of what it is to live and work under the technical conditions of computing.

Museums in a Digital Age
Museums in a Digital Age

Author: Ross Parry

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 1135666245

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The influence of digital media on the cultural heritage sector has been pervasive and profound. Today museums are reliant on new technology to manage their collections. They collect digital as well as material things. New media is embedded within their exhibition spaces. And their activity online is as important as their physical presence on site. However, ‘digital heritage’ (as an area of practice and as a subject of study) does not exist in one single place. Its evidence base is complex, diverse and distributed, and its content is available through multiple channels, on varied media, in myriad locations, and different genres of writing. It is this diaspora of material and practice that this Reader is intended to address. With over forty chapters (by some fifty authors and co-authors), from around the world, spanning over twenty years of museum practice and research, this volume acts as an aggregator drawing selectively from a notoriously distributed network of content. Divided into seven parts (on information, space, access, interpretation, objects, production and futures), the book presents a series of cross-sections through the body of digital heritage literature, each revealing how a different aspect of curatorship and museum provision has been informed, shaped or challenged by computing. Museums in a Digital Age is a provocative and inspiring guide for any student or practitioner of digital heritage.

Reflections on the History of Computing
Reflections on the History of Computing

Author: Arthur Tatnall

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-11-28

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 3642338992

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is a collection of refereed invited papers on the history of computing from the 1940s to the 1990s with one paper going back to look at Italian calculating/computing machines from the first century to the 20th century. The 22 papers cover a wide range of computing related topics such as specific early computer systems, their construction, their use and their users; software programming and operating systems; people involved in the theory, design and use of these computers; computer education; and conservation of computing technology. Many of the authors were actually involved in the events they describe and share their specific reflections on the history of computing.

Perspectives on Soviet and Russian Computing
Perspectives on Soviet and Russian Computing

Author: John Impagliazzo

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-09-06

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 364222816X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book contains a collection of thoroughly refereed papers derived from the First IFIP WG 9.7 Conference on Soviet and Russian Computing, held in Petrozavodsk, Russia, in July 2006. The 32 revised papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions; many of them were translated from Russian. They reflect much of the shining history of computing activities within the former Soviet Union from its origins in the 1950s with the first computers used for military decision-making problems up to the modern period where Russian ICT grew substantially, especially in the field of custom-made programming.