Energising connections in museum collections

Gooday, Graeme; Little, Kylea; Musesengwe, Bernard; Tailford, Cameron

Energising connections in museum collections

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Journal article

Creator (person)

Gooday, Graeme

Little, Kylea

Musesengwe, Bernard

Tailford, Cameron

Date published

January 25, 2023

Abstract

The task of inter-connecting artefacts within the broad category of ‘energy’ across multiple heritage collections raises very significant challenges. Energy per se is itself invisible, manifested only in a bewildering diversity of technological mediations of its acquisition, storage or transformation from one form to another (e.g. chemical to thermal, or electrical to motive). And while energy usage via such technology is easily linked to industrial growth and global prosperity, it is also entangled in multiple stories of human and environmental destruction over many centuries, albeit unevenly distributed over social class and global location. How then can the Congruence Engine project draw some coherent stories together from heritage collections that hold energy-related artefacts of so many kinds? Our paper explores how the Congruence Engine’s Energy team will approach this task by taking as our starting point two specific collections of Newcastle’s Discovery Museum: steam turbines and coal mining. Focusing on that particularly convenient pair of preliminary case studies enables us to look ahead to how we can bring the Congruence Engine project’s digital humanities tools more fully to bear in linking such energetic heritage to other (at least part) digitised collections of films, photographs, songs and journals, etc. In so doing, we highlight the need to address the broader cultural landscape of energy, often involving emotional human stories, that bring meaning to museum audiences’ engagement with energy’s material culture. And in contrast to traditional museum narratives of energy history as the technocratic ‘conquering’ of nature, we consider how the Congruence Engine project could help to bring in a complementary approach: memorialising energy history instead as a human drama entangled with many forms of human loss.