„Training the Archive“ ist ein Kooperationsprojekt zwischen dem Ludwig Forum Aachen, dem Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund sowie dem Visual Computing Institute der RWTH Aachen University. Das Projekt widmet sich visuellen Archiven und der Frage, wie in diesen Sammlungen neue Zusammenhänge mittels ‚Machine Learning‘ hergestellt werden können. Ziel ist die forschungsbasierte Entwicklung einer Software, die Kurator:innen und Künstler:innen neue Zugänge zu digitalisierten Bildsammlungen ermöglicht. Francis Hunger, einer der beteiligten Forscher erläutert im Gespräch einige Bedingungen, Determinanten und Kontextualisierungen dieses Projekts.

Die Covid-19-Pandemie belegt eindrucksvoll die Relevanz von virtuellen Museumsräumen, welche den Zugang zu Kunst- und Kulturartefakten auch in Zeiten physischer Einschränkungen ermöglichen. Neben der unstrittigen Relevanz solch virtueller Angebote steht als weiteres wichtiges Kriterium deren Akzeptanz, die im Wesentlichen von Kriterien wie Usability und User Experience abhängt. Bislang gibt es für die Umsetzung von benutzerfreundlichen Virtual Environments (VE) nur generische Design-Guidelines, wie etwa die Heuristiken-Sammlung von Sutcliffe und Gault 2004. In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir im Rahmen einer heuristischen Evaluation die Anwendbarkeit dieser allgemeingültigen VE-Heuristiken auf virtuelle Museumsräume. Dazu wählen wir sechs exemplarische virtuelle Ausstellungen aus und evaluieren sie bzgl. der bestehenden Heuristiken. Im Ergebnis entstehen so einerseits Best Practices zur konkreten Umsetzung virtueller Museumsräume. Andererseits diskutieren wir anhand konkreter Beispiele die Grenzen der bestehenden Heuristiken. In der Folge benennen wir zwei Heuristiken, die für den Anwendungsbereich virtueller Museen nicht geeignet scheinen. Weiterhin ergänzen wir zwei Heuristiken, welche aus den Anwendungsbeispielen abgeleitet werden konnten und argumentieren für einen weiteren Ausbau spezifischer Heuristiken und Best Practices für virtuelle Museumsräume, um so systematisch die Wissensvermittlung im Sinne des Public-History-Ansatzes zu verbessern.

This dissertation investigates the interplay between a selected set of museum practices, such as online strategies, digitisation of artwork reproductions, and crowdsourcing, through a theoretically grounded perspective. Existing discourse and debate on the museum's movement from an exclusively physical, to a digital or hybrid presence display an excessive interest in advocacy, usually focusing on small examples of successful practices which are then argued as somehow empowering or resolutive, usually from a 'social justice' point of view. Conversely, in those same discourses little attention is paid to the macro-context within which these cases take place: current debates lack an articulation of how museum practices reflect ongoing trends and paradigms on a culture-wide level, and also eschew non-advocative, neutral discussion of the politics, discourses and power relations that such practice entail. I suggest that the contemporary constructivist, digital museum can be better contextualised if we frame emergent digital museum praxis within a framework that resorts to well-established, and well-described theoretical paradigms that can be observed in other cultural and social contexts as well. The advantage of such an approach is that museum practice, and the museum as an institution, can then be seen in continuity with current macro-trends, rather than as isolates whose usefulness and sustainability begins and ends within the museum's precinct. This dissertation begins this proposed shift in point of view by addressing emergent museum practices such as the drafting of digital strategies; the creation of digital reproductions of artworks for online display; and crowdsourcing in the context of theoretical frameworks such as the utopian imagination; ontology of digital-beings; and contemporary labour practices. While not comprehensive, and exploratory in nature, this dissertation contributes to the discipline by providing a new, more in-depth point of view on 'hot' practices, encouraging a contextualisation of the museum that goes beyond the museum itself, into a theoretical and interdisciplinary field that takes advantage of ideas developed within digital humanities, labour critique, informatics and cultural studies.

This thesis looks at Tibetan material culture in Scottish museums, collected between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines how collectors used Tibetan objects to construct both Tibet in the western imagination and to further personal, organisational and imperial desires and expectations. Through an analysis of the highly provenanced material available in Scottish museums, collectors will be grouped in three categories: missionaries, military personnel and colonial collectors. These are not only divided by occupation, but also by ideological frames of reference. The historical moments in which these different collector groups encountered Tibetan material culture will provide a framework for an examination of the ways that collectors accessed, collected, interpreted, used and displayed objects. Within the framework of post-colonial theory, this thesis seeks new ways of understanding assumptive concepts and terminology that has become embedded in western analysis of Tibetan material culture. These include Tibetan Buddhism as a 'religion', 'Tibetan art', 'Tibetan Buddhist art' and the position of Tibetan 'art' versus 'ethnography' in western hierarchies of value. These theoretical concerns are scrutinised through an anthropological methodology, based on the concept of 'object biography', to create an interdisciplinary model for examining objects and texts. Using this model, I will demonstrate that collectors, whilst giving Tibetan material culture a variety of social roles, invested these categories with a range of values. Yet despite this heterogeneity, the mosaic of knowledge produced about Tibet by these varying encounters, established and then cemented British understandings of Tibetan material culture in specific ways, constructed to assist in the British imperial domination of British-Tibetan relations. I will argue that on entering the museum, these richly textured object biographies were 'flattened out', and the information embedded within them that gave traction to interpretations of British-Tibetan encounters was hidden from view, requiring this study to make visible once more the heterogeneity, richness and significance of Tibetan material culture in Scottish museums.

New digital technological possibilities allow physical museum artefacts to be transferred into a virtual environment using 3D computer models with rich information content for educational purposes. However, although several museum websites have applied relevant educational theories to learning activities in these 3D environments, these alone are not enough to develop 3D museum environments without consideration of virtual visiting styles in the learning context. This research addresses the relationship between visiting styles and the design of 3D museum environments based on pedagogic approaches for learning efficacy. Relevant literature on the nature of web-based museum systems was reviewed. Three stages of primary research (a critical review, observations and interviews) were also conducted in this study. The critical review examined the use of 3D technologies in current museum websites in terms of informational aspects and the learning context. The observation studies identified the relationship between visitor behaviours and associated learning activities within 3D museum environments. The interviews further elicited experts’ views and were used to test the research hypotheses. A theoretical design reference model was developed. Initially based on the Reeves multimedia design model, the model consists of three phases: analysis, design and assessment. A prototype 3D exhibition was created based on the theoretical model and two pedagogic approaches. Evaluation of this showed that the design of the exhibits with rich multimedia formats had the potential for more effective visitor learning. The two pedagogic approaches encouraged the related visiting style(s), leading to a deeper engagement with the content and ultimately improving learning efficiency.

This thesis is about four historical collections of Haida argillite carvings now at the National Museum of Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museums and the Perth Museum and Art Gallery. Since the early nineteenth century Haida artists have carved argillite, a carbonaceous shale, into objects featuring Haida and European-inspired motifs, for trade or sale to non-Haida others. Scots Colin Robertson, William Mitchell, James Hector and John Rae acquired argillite as part of broader collections from the Northwest Coast of Canada made during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Each of these men was employed by, or affiliated with the Hudson’s Bay Company. This thesis questions how the meanings and statuses of these objects, collected and deposited in Scottish museums between the 1820s and 1860s, have changed over the nearly two centuries of their existence. Research at these three museums, and at British and Canadian archives, provided the material that shed light on the historical circumstances of the approximately 30 objects constituting these collections. Semi-structured interviews with Haida carvers, community members and experts, and with museum curators elicited insights into the ways these objects are made meaningful today. The thesis examines the collections in four key contexts. First, it explores the ways in which they have been displayed and interpreted at the three museums, shedding light on the trajectories by which museums have represented the objects of others. Secondly, it describes the context in which the argillite carvings were produced, circulated and collected by sketching the social and political character of the Northwest Coast as it transformed through the decades of the fur trade to European colonization. How these objects transformed in status and value according to the agendas of their collectors is the third context, which reflects the character of relationships between Indigenous peoples and newcomers. Finally, I resituate these collections in the context of contemporary Haidas’ perspectives on the value and meaning of argillite carving(s), and propose that these objects can be understood as “inalienable commodities.” The argillite carvings in these Scottish museum collections are objects of exchange, produced and circulated in the contact zone of the mid-nineteenth century Northwest Coast. As such, they are windows into relationships between Indigenous and European people during this period. Collected as curiosities but remade into objects of science, biography and art, this study traces their shifting statuses as they have moved through various regimes of value. This thesis therefore characterizes the exchanges that have occurred around these objects as ongoing and dynamic.

This practice-based doctoral research project is an artist’s response to the ‘unique status’ ascribed to human remains in the DCMS Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums (2005): as objects, in scientific, medical/anthropological contexts, or subjects, which may be understood in associative, symbolic and/or emotional ways. It is concerned with the circumstances in which human remains were collected and interpreted in the past, and with the legacies of historical practice regarding their presence in museum collections today. Overall, it aims to contribute to public engagement concerning these issues. Taking the form of a Comparative Study the project focuses on the late nineteenth century, when human skulls were collected in great numbers for comparative anatomical and anthropological research, while in wider society the fashion for incorporating human hair into mourning artefacts became ubiquitous following the death of Prince Albert in 1861. William Henry Flower’s craniological work at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, where he amassed a vast collection of human skulls that he interpreted according to theories of racial “type” (in which hair was identified as an important distinguishing characteristic), is investigated, and its legacy reviewed. His scientific objectification of human remains is presented for comparison, in parallel, with the emotional and associative significance popularly attributed to mourning hairwork, evidenced in accompanying documentation, contemporary diaries, literature, and hairworkers’ manuals. Combining inter-related historical, archival- and object-based research with subjective and intuitive elements in my practice, a synthesis of the artistic and academic is developed in the production of a new “archive” of The Wildgoose Memorial Library - my collection of found and made objects, photographs, documents and books that takes a central place in my practice. Victorian hairworking skills are researched, and a new piece of commemorative hairwork devised and made as the focus for a site-specific presentation of this archive at the Crypt Gallery St. Pancras, in which a new approach to public engagement is implemented and tested, concerning the legacy and special status of human remains in museum collections today.

For many years, meanings and interpretations of artefacts that are taken to represent African culture including the Ife bronzes have been predominantly produced and fixed by a team of western curatorial experts (Ciolfi, 2012). Such museum practices have prevented visitors and the people being represented by the artefact from participating in the process of interpretation and meaning-making. In the particular case of the ‘Ife bronzes’, the previous meaning and implications of the Ife ‘bronzes’ as part of ‘the cradle of the world’, according to Yoruba oral traditions, are yet to be given the amount of attention they deserve. For a long time the interpretations and meanings produced by curators were drawn from the writings and accounts of earlier western travellers, explorers and colonial officials whose culture affected how the Ife bronzes have been perceived and interpreted (Coombes, 1997: Vogel, 1999). Today despite the impact of ‘the new museology’, strong traces of such biased interpretations and meanings are still evident in the framing of the Ife bronze head, exhibited at the British Museum Sainsbury African gallery as a ‘funerary object’ in postcolonial times. Such narratives highlight ‘relations of power and not relations of meanings’ (Foucault, 1980:114). These contemporary exhibitionary frames highlight the need for interpretations and meanings that will consider how changing roles, ownership, usage, political situations and geographical location have affected and will affect the Ife bronzes. In this thesis I carry out this work, documenting the social life of the Ife bronzes from pre-colonial Ife to postcolonial digital British Museum. I argue that there is a need for a new space that will encourage rewriting, revising and representing the Ife bronzes in a more capacious way to depict their changing meaning as they journeyed through time. This theory is in line with Hall (1997) and Foucault’s (1980) theories that meanings and interpretations are not static but are affected by time and changing context. The thesis therefore explores the multifaceted political, economical and sociocultural implications of the Ife bronzes. Despite these wider implications of Ife bronzes, they are still only too often shrouded in narratives that tend to validate the supremacy, civilisation and intellectual ‘supremacy’ of the West instead of substantiating the ingenuity, civilisation and intellectual capabilities of Africa. Digitisation is critically considered as offering a potential new space for representing Ife bronzes in a new light that might allow meanings with postcolonial ideology to emerge. Focusing on different periods involving the Ife bronzes (the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial) the thesis explores the potentials of digital representation. The thesis concludes that digital representation but only combined with a critical contextual approach, have the potentials of initiating a more thorough decolonisation of the Ife bronzes through an inclusive participatory culture.

Through creative practice research this thesis investigates the concept of touch and its application to museums with the process defined as ‘practice of touch’. The main practical outcome of this thesis is an interface between the museum visitor and an untouchable museum object as part of the object interpretation. The implementation of this idea is realised with the ‘Tactual Explorations’ project. The format of this project is a tactile exhibition consisting of virtual and conventional artworks combined. The subject of the study focuses on interaction between museum visitors and exhibits in order to create an accessible and tactile solution around museums’ ‘do not touch’ policy; without being limited to but being especially for blind and partially sighted visitors. The reason behind paying special attention to these members of the audience is the significance of the sense ‘touch’ in communicating with the world around them. While the main objective of this research is to gain more understanding of the concept of ‘touch’, on a deeper level it investigates whether or not a haptic interaction with untouchable visual information can be achieved with the aid of a creative interface between the museum visitor and an untouchable museum exhibit. By using this creative interface, the aim of the research extends to gaining a better understanding of touch through curating with information design and artistic methods. The purpose behind the idea is to form an inclusive museum experience free from assumptions of just one interpreter without rejecting the traditional methods of object interpretation. The practical outcome enhances dialogue with the existing information by paying special attention to tactile properties of a museum object through a set of artworks. The project is supported by other practical experiments in order to understand the value of visual/photographic information attached to an untouchable object and involve other scholars and artists in interpreting this information tactually. While accepting museums’ policy of ‘do not touch’, the praxis of this thesis is proposed as a method of interpretation that aims to bring in the ‘missing interactivity of touch’ through an engaging tactile exhibition of physical and virtual artworks made by various artists. In contrary to more common approaches of involving artists in interpreting museum objects, in this model created works are not inspired by the original, but directly based on its texture information in order to create haptic interaction, without using a direct replica or embossed copies. In other words, this interface is presented as an addition to the object’s formal interpretation, not to replace it. The research adopts creative practice research methodology in general; and realises it with a reflective and participatory approach borrowed from action research within interpretive research paradigm. The main research strategy deployed is practice-led. Rather than staying in the boundaries of qualitative research, the study takes guidance from the manifesto of performative research which is declared as an alternative to the qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, by offering creative approaches to conducting a research project.

隨著資訊及通訊技術的快速發展，智慧家庭技術日漸成熟，使得人們的家居生活環境更加便利。由於智慧家庭中技術多元，不同廠商所生產的設備互不相通，導致其操作及安裝程序複雜，影響人們的使用意願，使得目前智慧家庭的願景仍不普及。本論文主要為利用CWMP結合OAuth建立出一個功能完整的智慧家庭服務管理架構，同時兼顧服務使用者與服務供應者的需求，整合家庭內部與外部之間的互動，提供遠端購買模組、佈署服務、監控、計費以及自動偵錯與恢復等管理功能，亦加入了授權與認證規範，期望能提供更完善的管理架構，使得每個家庭雖然由不同的服務與設備組成，但皆能透過同一種技術進行管理，以利智慧家庭維運技術的發展。 / With the rapid development of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), smart home technology has become more and more mature. The applications of smart home technology are still not popular because home devices are usually made by different vendors and thus are not compatible. As a result, the management and setup procedures of these smart home products are complicated. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a CWMP and OAuth based operations management architecture that supports remote purchasing of services and components, deployment of services, diagnosis, billing of service usage and autonomic failure detection and recovery of services. The architecture uses OAuth for supporting security functions of users’ private information. It is expected that the proposed architecture can facilitate the practical applications of smart home technology and provide a reference design for designing operations management mechanisms for smart homes.