digital history Archives

For generations, artefacts and information of all kinds have been assembled in diverse collections across the UK. Museum objects, archives, pictures, moving images and media, records of historical places, even datasets derived from state, commercial and individual activity, all have been catalogued and stored. Yet in most museums and galleries, only a tiny proportion of physical collections are shown in public displays, with vast stores kept in reserve for research, although researchers rarely come. Great repositories of cultural capital, the knowledge they hold has been largely untapped – until now.

For nearly half a century, heritage organisations have created digital inventories of their collections. Inspired by the prospect of combining these records so they may be explored together, the Congruence Engine research project set out to build digital bridges and pathways between collections dedicated to the UK’s industrial history for textiles, energy and communications. Launched in 2021, Congruence Engine navigated the generative AI revolution that commenced a year later. As a result, Emergent Histories is by turns a reflection on the historical and curatorial possibilities arising from collections, a digital history how-to manual, and a narrative of the tribulations of AI early adopters. It will be of interest to historians, curators, students – and to anyone who cares for the industrial aspects of our past.

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future.

Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.