About the book

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.

About the author

Haidy Geismar is Reader in Anthropology at UCL where she directs the Digital Anthropology Masters Programme and Centre for Digital Anthropology. She is also the curator of the UCL Ethnography Collections. She has long term fieldwork experience in the South Pacific and within museums in the Pacific, North America and Europe Recent publications include Moving Images (2010), Treasured Possessions (2013), and The Routledge Cultural Property Reader(with Jane Anderson, 2017).