CfP: Artefacts XXIX: New Digital Practice for Science and Technology Collections | Science Museum Research Centre, London
The Artefacts Consortium is an international network of museum professionals and scholars of the history of science, technology, and medicine who promote the use of objects in research. Annual Artefacts meetings, each organised under a pertinent theme, provide a collegial venue to gather to discuss exciting work being done with collections in museums and universities across the globe.
Call for Papers
How are digital techniques changing museum practice: for objects, for museum workers, for audiences? With digital approaches: Is it becoming easier for the objects and documents within collections to be found, researched and displayed? Is the texture of day-to-day museum practice changing? Are visitors and researchers enabled to have new kinds of experience in museums or online, or use collections in new ways?
This year’s Artefacts conference will be held October 13th-16th at the Science Museum Research Centre, London, back-to-back with the final conference of the Museum’s Congruence Engine digital collections-linking research project.
Artefacts
For the traditional Sunday-Tuesday Artefacts conference days, we are inviting contributions on the theme of new digital practice in science and technology museums. We are looking for contributions (papers, panels, demonstrations, etc) that reveal the ways in which science museums internationally are embracing the affordances of new digital techniques. For example:
• Collections as data
• Uses of machine learning (ML) and other artificial intelligence (AI) techniques with catalogue data
• Online complements to exhibitions
• Novel uses of new media -visual or sonic - in exhibition and gallery contexts
• Virtual- and augmented-reality techniques
• Digital means to enable access to reserve collections
• How museum work is changing because of digital techniques
• Histories of electronic, digital and new media practice in museums
Please submit an outline of up to 300 words per individual paper or up to 1000 words for whole sessions by 1st June to: research@sciencemuseum.ac.uk We plan to send acceptances no later than mid-August.
Congruence Engine
Tuesday 15th and Wednesday 16th will be the associated Congruence Engine end of project conference, which is primarily to report the research, findings and recommendations from the project. This exciting major three-year project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Towards a National Collection funding stream has been experimenting with using machine learning and other computational techniques to link collections of all kinds for the sake of better curation of science collections and to ease historical work using those collections for historians of all kinds. Themes will include:
• The ‘social machine’ approach to creating linked industrial collections.
• AI and machine learning for data enhancement and collections linkage
• Taxonomies, thesauruses and ontologies for linking collections.
• Spatial and geospatial approaches to collections linkage
• Narrative sources and collections linkage
• Responsible and ethical digital collections research
• New historiographies and new curatorial practices
The conference will also see the launch of the Science Museum Group’s Digital Research Cluster; plenary sessions will address some of the broader issues and opportunities of the current digital moment.
Attendees are warmly encouraged to attend both sides of the conference.
Organisers: Tim Boon, Nayomi Kasthuri Arachchi, Max Long, Arran Rees, Nina Webb-Bourne
Contact Information
Call for Papers
How are digital techniques changing museum practice: for objects, for museum workers, for audiences? With digital approaches: Is it becoming easier for the objects and documents within collections to be found, researched and displayed? Is the texture of day-to-day museum practice changing? Are visitors and researchers enabled to have new kinds of experience in museums or online, or use collections in new ways?
This year’s Artefacts conference will be held October 13th-16th at the Science Museum Research Centre, London, back-to-back with the final conference of the Museum’s Congruence Engine digital collections-linking research project.
Artefacts
For the traditional Sunday-Tuesday Artefacts conference days, we are inviting contributions on the theme of new digital practice in science and technology museums. We are looking for contributions (papers, panels, demonstrations, etc) that reveal the ways in which science museums internationally are embracing the affordances of new digital techniques. For example:
• Collections as data
• Uses of machine learning (ML) and other artificial intelligence (AI) techniques with catalogue data
• Online complements to exhibitions
• Novel uses of new media -visual or sonic - in exhibition and gallery contexts
• Virtual- and augmented-reality techniques
• Digital means to enable access to reserve collections
• How museum work is changing because of digital techniques
• Histories of electronic, digital and new media practice in museums
Please submit an outline of up to 300 words per individual paper or up to 1000 words for whole sessions by 1st June to: research@sciencemuseum.ac.uk We plan to send acceptances no later than mid-August.
Congruence Engine
Tuesday 15th and Wednesday 16th will be the associated Congruence Engine end of project conference, which is primarily to report the research, findings and recommendations from the project. This exciting major three-year project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Towards a National Collection funding stream has been experimenting with using machine learning and other computational techniques to link collections of all kinds for the sake of better curation of science collections and to ease historical work using those collections for historians of all kinds. Themes will include:
• The ‘social machine’ approach to creating linked industrial collections.
• AI and machine learning for data enhancement and collections linkage
• Taxonomies, thesauruses and ontologies for linking collections.
• Spatial and geospatial approaches to collections linkage
• Narrative sources and collections linkage
• Responsible and ethical digital collections research
• New historiographies and new curatorial practices
The conference will also see the launch of the Science Museum Group’s Digital Research Cluster; plenary sessions will address some of the broader issues and opportunities of the current digital moment.
Attendees are warmly encouraged to attend both sides of the conference.
Organisers: Tim Boon, Nayomi Kasthuri Arachchi, Max Long, Arran Rees, Nina Webb-Bourne
Contact Information