Abstract
The Museum is a perspicuous site for analysing the complex interplay between social, organisational, cultural and political factors which have relevance to the design and use of ‘virtual’ technologies. Specifically, the introduction of virtual technologies in museums runs up against the issue of the situated character of information use. Across a number of disciplines (anthropology, sociology, psychology, cognitive science) there is growing recognition of the ‘situatedness’ of knowledge and its importance for the design and use of technology. This awareness is fostered by the fact that technological developments are often associated with disappointing gains for users. The effective use of technology relies on the degree to which it can be embedded in or congruent with the ‘local’ practices of museum users. Drawing upon field research in two museums of science and technology, both of which are in the process of introducing virtual technologies and exploring the possibilities of on-line access, findings are presented which suggest that the success of such developments will depend on the extent to which they are informed by detailed understanding of practice-practices that are essentially socially constituted in the activities of museum visitors and the daily work of museum professionals.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bennett, T., The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995).
Berger, P. and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1961).
Burgin, V., Between (Oxford: Blackwell in association with the ICA, 1986a).
Burgin, V., The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986b).
Button, “Going up a Blind Alley”, in P. Luff, N. Gilbert and D. Frohlich (eds.), Computers and Conversation (San Diego: Academic Press, 1990), pp. 67–90.
Chen, H., T. Ng, J. Martinez, and B. Schatz, “A Concept Space Approach to Addressing the Vocabulary Problem in Scientific Information Retrieval: An Experiment on the Worm Community System”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48 (1997): 17–31.
Coulter, J. and E.D. Parsons, “The Praxiology of Perception: Visual orientations and practical action”, Inquiry 33 (1990), pp. 251–272.
Danto, A.C., “The Museum of Museums”, Beyond the Brillo Box (New York: 1992).
Donato, E., “The Museum's Furnace: Notes Towards a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pechuchetí”, in J. Harrari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979).
Douglas, J.D. ed., Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).
Divall, C., “Theories and Things: Using the History of Technology”, in L. Fitzgerald and G. Porter (eds.), Museums, Collection and Interpreting Domestic Artefacts (Manchester: Science and Industry Curators Group, 1994).
Durkheim, E., The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976).
Eglin, P., “Leaving Out the Interpreters Work; A Methodological Critique of Ethnosemantics Based on Ethnomethodology”, Semiotica, 17 (1976): 339–369.
Frake, C., Language and Cultural Description (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).
Francis, D., “Negotiation, Decision-Making and Formalism”, in J. Wagner and K. Ehlich (eds.), The Discourse of Business Negotiation (Berlin: Mouton-De Gruyter, 1995).
Fraser, N. and Woofitt, R.C., “Orienting to Rules”, in N. Gilbert (ed.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Complex Systems, Ethnomethodology and Interaction Analysis (Boston: American Association for Artificial Intelligence, 1990), pp. 69–80.
Garfinkel, H., Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967).
Hemmings, T. et al., “Hype and Reality in the Virtual Museum: Some Initial Problems”, Proceedings of the EVA Conference (London: The National Gallery, 1996).
Hughes, J., Randall, D. and Shapiro, D. “CSCW: Discipline or Paradigm? A Sociological Approach”, in L. Bannon and M. Robinson (eds.), Proceedings from Second European Conference on CSCW (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).
Jirotka, M. and J. Goguen, Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues (London: Academic Press, 1994).
Kopytoff, I., “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditisation as Process”, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Landow, G.P. ed., Hyper/text/Theory (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
MacDonald, S. and G. Fyfe, eds., Theorising Museums (Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review, 1996).
MacDonald, S. and R. Silverstone, Rewriting the Museums Fiction Taxonomies, Stories and Readers, CRICT Discussion paper No. 7 (Brunel University, 1990).
MacDonald, S. and G. Gyfe, Theorising Museums (Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review, 1996).
Mackenzie, D., 1996, “Beyond Hypertext: Adaptive Interfaces for Virtual Museums”, Proceedings of the EVA Conference (London: The National Gallery, 1996).
Porter, G., “Seeing through Solidity: A Feminist Perspective on Museums”, in S. Macdonald and G. Fyfe (eds.), Theorising Museums (Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review, 1996), pp. 105–126.
National Heritage report, January 1997, A Common Wealth: Museums and Learning in the UK.
Sledge, J., “Points of View”, in D. Bearman (ed.), Multi-Media Computing and Museums (Pittsburgh: AMI, 1995).
Sola, T., “Museum Professionals — the Endangered Species”, in P. Boylan (ed.), Museums 2000 (London: Routledge, 1992).
Star, S., Leigh, and Griesemer, J.R., “Institutional Ecology, Translations and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39”, Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387–420.
Suchman, L., Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Twidale, M., Randall, D. and Bentley, R., “Situated Evaluation for Cooperative Systems”, Transcending Boundaries: Proceedings of CSCW '94 (Chapel Hill: ACM Press, 1994).
Vergo, P., The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hemmings, T., Randall, D., Francis, D. et al. Situated Knowledge and the Virtual Science and Industry Museum: Problems in the Social-Technical Interface. Archives and Museum Informatics 11, 147–164 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009007316752
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009007316752