Disrupting museums/heritage practice through new and emerging technologies.

Summary

This project accelerates the impact our research is having on the policies, practices and principles underpinning heritage and museum work in the UK - impacts that are leading to increased playfulness, reflexivity and the pursuit of social justice.

Project aims

Museums and heritage sites in the United Kingdom continue to operate within a period of austerity which has seen their funding mechanisms undermined and their relevance comprehensively challenged (Nielsen 2015, Simon 2016).

Such institutions have looked increasingly precarious in their capacity to respond to our challenging geopolitical climate and to help create reflective societies.

This context, coupled with significant technological change, has meant new ethical challenges and the need for different professional literacies (Marstine 2011, Kidd 2014, 2018a,b, Kidd and Cardiff 2017).

PI Kidd has been working with the sector since 2005 to explore what these new literacies might look like for institutions taking an active role as participants in civil society and as social justice agents (Kidd 2011, Kidd et al. 2014).

This project will extend digital cultural heritage practice in partnership with yello brick and Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Wales. It explores new patterns of playfulness, promotion and infrastructure within digital heritage work, and seeds more productive explorations of the boundaries between fact and fiction.

• Full public launch of Traces.
• Key recommendations for immersive heritage work.
• Blog posts, and a social media promotions campaign for Traces.
• Publications and conference presentations.
• 2 workshops/salons delivered by Alison John for key people in the field.