Read the summary and the most important questions on Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age | 9781787352834 | Heidy Geismar

• 0 Introduction

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• What is an object lesson?

  
  Arguments about the world made through things, not just as communicating vehicles, but sites of meaning animated by their materiality

• Why are museums perfect sites for object lessons?

  They are curated spaces, often curiously set apart from our everyday lives, in which we, the public, are invited to learn very particular things about the world.

• How are object lessons both ontological and epistemological?

  They tell us something about what there is & they help us interpret and explain what there is.

• What is meant by the techniques and technologies of display?

  Stuff like holograms, virtual reality and interactive touch screens which create 'real life' inside the collection as much as is done so by the materiality of the artefacts.

• How is the museum a contact zone?

  It's a place where old museum collections and new technologies come together and where multiple communities are drawn together, within unequal power relations, around collections

• What is meant by ‘reality effects’?

  The use of objects to mimetically create an understanding of the real.

• 1 Ways of knowing

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• How does the Victorian Age relate to the teleological history of the museum?

  The intensive collecting enabled by European Imperial expansion, legitimating the colonial nation and modelling citizenship across the divides of both race and class along the way, is often presented as the apotheosis of this history.

• Referencing S. Greenblatt, what are simmilarities and differences between resonance and wonder?

  • Resonance: the power of the object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world.
  • Wonder: the power of the displayed objects ... to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness
  • Both: Parallel ways of experiencing and learning about the world

• How does Geismar relate the Pitt Rivers and the American Museum of Natural History as two distinct models of anthropological theory?

  In Pitt Rivers, hundreds of years of human history are compressed into an object lesson of Darwinian-inflected cultural progression from primitive to modern, allowing us to imagine the world from the point of view of a Victorian collector living in Oxford
  
  In American Museum of Natural History groups presented a series of new arguments about cultural differences, and about the contemporaneity of diverse human experiences

• How does the new museology of the 1980s-90s relate to a sensuous engagement with collections?

  
  The intimacy of touch, smell and other kinds of sensuous engagement with things provides another way into collections to the usual focus on text and visual narrative as read from the contents of glass display cases. Re-situate museums as sites of cultural production as well as cultural representation, with everyday visitors, rather than scholars, at their core