Science Museum Group Journal Issue 22

In this special tenth birthday issue of the Science Museum Group Journal we look back at the achievements of the last decade and forward to an exciting future of change and development. Retiring Head of Research at the Deutches Museum, Helmuth Trischler, reflects on what it has taken to create an integrated research museum; Will Law and Will Sims look back at the history of a Rhodesian Railway carriage formed through the lens of colonial history and argue for new research to centre stories of African users and workers; Paul Craddock argues that historians should use film as a research methodology especially when exploring embodied knowledge while Elizabeth Edwards, Costanza Caraffa and Ruth Quinn share a conversation on how to think about photography collections in ‘non-art’ museums. In a new article format – the downloadable toolkit, Geoff Belknap et al describe a project that used digitisation and crowdsourcing to give communities power over museum decisions and share findings and processes for others to use. One of the most fertile formats for the journal over the last decade has been the object biography and here Christine Fergerson’s article on the Cottingley fairies scandal illustrates how a close examination of physical objects can cast new light on old assumptions. Looking forward to the future of the Journal itself Tim Boon puts forward a manifesto for what Open Access publishing may look like over the next decade. And finally, ten authors from across the fields of museums, culture, and academia chose one thing from the last decade that stands out for them. Ten authors, ten things, ten years to celebrate.

Collection Details

Creator

Science Museum Group

Language

English

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Some of the metrics are blocked by your
consent settings
In conversation: photographic curatorship and photographic cultures in museums and research institutions
(2024-12-19)
Edwards, Elizabeth
;
Caraffa, Costanza
;
Quinn, Ruth
In this article, Curator of Photography and Photographic Technology, Ruth Quinn talks to Professor Elizabeth Edwards and Dr Costanza Caraffa, two leading thinkers on photography. As a historical and visual anthropologist, and former Curator of Photographs at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Professor Elizabeth Edwards has transformed perceptions of photographs as material objects. Dr Costanza Caraffa is Head of the Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Caraffa has developed leading approaches to the interaction between photographic, archival and academic practice, advocating for archives as places where research is generated, not only through the act of managing, categorising and re-categorising photographs.
Some of the metrics are blocked by your
consent settings
Challenging museum narratives: the case of a Rhodesia Railways carriage
(2024-12-19)
Sims, Will
;
Law, William
Science Museum Group (SMG) object 2005-7446 was built by a British rolling stock manufacturer in 1927. It was exported as a first-class passenger coach to British-administered Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and ran on the lines operated by the former Rhodesia Railways. But, in 1974, the carriage was on its way back to Britain, overseen by the artist, conservationist and railway enthusiast, David Shepherd. After being displayed at a series of locations across Britain, the carriage was acquired by the National Railway Museum, part of SMG, in the early 2000s. It was kept in storage until 2024. With the carriage now on display at SMG’s National Collections Centre in Wroughton, this article asks what stories it has the potential to tell. It argues that interpretation of the carriage since its repatriation has focused on the story of its return, while gaps in the knowledge of its operational life – including the experiences of passengers and the impacts of the railway’s labour hierarchy – have been overlooked. By tracing the carriage’s archival trail in Britain and consulting SMG’s technical files, this paper highlights the importance of foregrounding such untold narratives. It concludes to suggest ways forward for future research, interpretation strategies and the management of associated files.
Some of the metrics are blocked by your
consent settings
The research museum – a place of integrated knowledge production
(2024-12-19)
Trischler, Helmuth
Natural history museums have a longstanding history as sites of vital research based on their enormously rich collections, dating back to the late nineteenth century. Today they mostly position themselves as institutions of biodiversity research with their scientific programmes centre-stage and their public galleries as secondary activity. In contrast, museums of science and technology have long been struggling with their role in advancing the production and dissemination of knowledge based on object-oriented research. In his position as Head of Research at the Deutsches Museum, Germany’s leading museum of science and technology, from 1993 until his retirement in 2024, the author of this article has advocated for the inextricable integration of the fields of research, research infrastructure, and public mediation and communication. He has continuously sought to explore new avenues for realising the vision of the ‘integrated research museum’ that connects these three fields as closely as possible. In this article, he discusses the add-on value of integrating research into museums at various levels.
Some of the metrics are blocked by your
consent settings
Tracing embodied knowledge in the history of science and medicine: expanding the role of film in historical research
(2024-12-17)
Craddock, Paul
;
Harris, Anna
;
Barton, Cal Murphy
Tracing bodily knowledge in medical histories is a challenging task for researchers. Sensory, material and affective details are hard to find in archival sources and hard to put into words. Researchers have found different solutions to this challenge through techniques like re-enactment as well as visual methods such as photography and film, many of these being used in museum contexts. In this article we focus on film, as we believe it has more to offer for knowledge production than its current use in studies of history predominantly as an engagement tool in research communication, as a final research ‘output’ or ‘illustration’ for texts and objects. We suggest that film can be an important research method to: a) trace the research process; b) enhance collaboration especially in group projects; c) analytically help researchers to amplify sensorial details, through the possibility to rewind, freeze and focus on embodied action; and d) as a means of sharing research instead of text. Thus, extending from Lucien Taylor’s suggestion that ethnography could be conducted ‘filmically’, we argue that, like anthropologists, historians and museum specialists might also accommodate film as part of a serious research methodology, especially when it comes to respecting the integrity of embodied contributions to the history of science and medicine.
1 1
Some of the metrics are blocked by your
consent settings
Communities & Crowds: a toolkit for hybrid volunteering with cultural heritage collections
(2024-12-19)
Belknap, Geoffrey
;
Blickhan, Samantha
;
Wray, Lynn
;
Fitzpatrick, Alex
;
Anderson, Lincoln
This toolkit outlines the steps taken by the Communities & Crowds project to give ownership to local volunteers to identify photographs that reflect their interests; to digitise them to museum standards; and to share these collections with a global audience via an online crowdsourcing project. Communities & Crowds is an AHRC-funded collaboration between the NSMM (Bradford, UK), the Adler Planetarium (Chicago, IL), National Museums Scotland (NMS) (Edinburgh, UK), and Oxford University (Oxford, UK). It re-examines the role of the museum volunteer by combining participatory research methods and online crowdsourcing techniques to explore how local communities can collaborate with digital volunteers around the world to increase discoverability of, and access to, the collections that matter to them. The toolkit and accompanying downloadable templates are intended to be useable and reusable for any heritage organisation that wants to work with volunteers to find stories in photographic collections that matter to those audiences.
Some of the metrics are blocked by your
consent settings
Provocation: Journal experiments in overlay, data and provisionality
(2024-12-19)
Boon, Tim
The Science Museum Group Journal (SMGJ) has always been, across its ten years, a refereed and open access online journal free to publish and read. Being online rather than on paper always conferred potential benefits that we were keen to promote: the ability to feature very high-definition photographs, to draw on the Museum’s extensive image library, to embed sound and film files, to link elsewhere on the internet. It follows that, for much research – whether our own, or that of partners, or indeed for all publications on congenial subjects produced beyond our own practice – SMGJ is a good place to publish. A clear example is the special issue we produced to communicate the early concerns of researchers on the AHRC-funded Congruence Engine project: the combination of the capacity to publish very quickly – only a year into the project – whilst serving the funder’s Open Access requirement was ideal. Another example is the Material Cultures of Energy project special issue. Thus, we can say that over its ten-year life the Journal has been successful within the parameters that it originally set itself (to be a peer reviewed, open access, online journal able to surface the scholarship, practice and collections that are relevant to science museums everywhere). However, looking to the next ten years, this provocation argues that the Journal should do more.
Some of the metrics are blocked by your
consent settings
Ten out of ten: a review of the last decade
(2024-12-19)
Arnold, Ken
;
Bandelli, Andrea
;
Ellis, Rachel
;
Henderson, Jane
;
Henning, Michelle
In honour of the Journal’s tenth birthday, we asked a collection of authors with huge and varied experience of the cultural sector to think about the last decade and pick one thing that stands out for them. The brief was open and included books, exhibitions, digital innovation and general trends. The only restriction was that the contributions were short and were accompanied by a single image.
Some of the metrics are blocked by your
consent settings
Power at play in paranormal history
(2024-12-19)
Ferguson, Christine
This article presents a collective object biography and discussion of the Cottingley Fairy artefacts – cameras, photographs, watercolour sketches and print materials – held at the National Science and Media Museum. I demonstrate how the controversial paranormal claims made about the Cottingley cameras by Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner relied on the manipulation and obfuscation of key episodes in their history of use, a strategy that worked to distance the objects from each other and from their young female working-class operators Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright. My article seeks to both interlink and restore the lost episodes in the histories of these objects as a way of redressing the power imbalance between the plebeian producers and elite cosmopolitan popularisers of the world-famous fairy photographs. I suggest how a new curatorial approach to the materials might reject the familiar – and largely inaccurate – narrative of deliberate hoax and deception still widely attached to the case, and instead use them to tell a new story about the technological experimentation, artistic aspirations and social restrictions experienced by working-class girls in early twentieth-century Britain.
Some of the metrics are blocked by your
consent settings
Issue 22 Editorial
(2024-12-19)
Blatchford, Ian

Science Museum Group Journal Issue 22

Science Museum Group Journal Issue 22

Filters

Settings

Sort By

Results per page