Teaching Museum Digital Practice in 2023
The Master of Arts in Museum Studies program at George Washington University responds to the evolving museum profession by combining hands-on training with future-focused theoretical engagement. Students who enrol in the program gain foundational knowledge about the state of museum work today, practical skills and the ability to critically engage with developments in the field.
In Museums and Technology, we take on an ambitious project to realize these goals. Across the 14-week semester, the class creates a publication about the state of digital practice in museums in 2023. Each student is responsible for creating a publishable piece that explores a specific research area related to the overall topic of museums and technology. Submissions can synthesize current readings and practice around a broad area, or dive deeper into a single technology or case study related to the theme of digital practice and its impact on the museum.
This is the fourth iteration of this publication project. The first, produced in 2019, was designed by Dr Suse Anderson, and informed by her experience co-editing several digitally-informed publishing projects, including CODE|WORDS Technology and Theory in the Museum, which brought together leading museum thinkers and practitioners to explore the impact of digital technology on the nature of museums, and Humanizing the Digital: Unproceedings from the 2018 MCN Confererence, which responded to the MCN annual conference. Each of these museum tech projects marked a specific moment in time within the sector. Likewise, it is intended that each annual publication in the The State of Museum Digital Practice series will stand as a marker of each cohort of students and their concerns and interests in a specific timeframe.
The first two versions of this publication (produced in 2019 and 2021) buttressed the global coronavirus pandemic, with its huge disruptions to museum practice, education and daily life. The 2022 publication came from a world still in the earliest grapplings with the implications of the pandemic, but already showing signs of concern with different kinds of issues, and new possible futures for museums in their relationships with technology.
In 2023, we find students starting to consider new kinds of emerging technologies… Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has started to appear as a player in the imaginations of several students as they think about the present and future of digital technologies in museums, including considering the role of AI in provenance research or meditating on the ethical considerations of AI-enabled historic storytelling. Others imagine a possible future where volumetric holograms play a role in historic landscape reconstruction or where 3D digital exhibitions fill a kind of nostalgic craving in those looking for a lost past. As a group, this cohort is ambitious, creative and speculative, asking many of the same kinds of questions of technology as prior generations, but set against within a changing techscape.
Each student is responsible for defining and researching their topic and writing their paper. Suse Anderson, Associate Professor in Museum Studies is responsible for compiling the final book. Because the project is produced quickly, the editorial hand is only lightly felt, so there may be inconsistencies in style, formatting and approach.
We hope you enjoy this publication, produced by the fall class of 2023.