Browse results
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Light as material/lighting as practice: urban lighting and energy
This article uses case-studies of public realm lighting design to argue that deciphering energy consumption requires equal attention to both the material properties of light and the interlinked practices through which social spaces come to be lit.
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Location, location: a polemic on photographs and institutional practices
This essay explores the ambiguous status of photographs in museums and the impact of institutional thought-landscapes on that status. Which photographs are understood as ‘important’ and thus collectable and which are not, and under what conditions?
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Review: The thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: the (mostly) true story of the first computer, by Sydney Padua
A review of the popular, comic-style illustrated book by Sydney Padua that fictionalises the lives of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage and their invention of the first computer.
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Made real: artifice and accuracy in nineteenth-century scientific illustration
This essay draws on the Science Museum’s pictorial collections, in particular the excellent holdings of astronomical and meteorological images, in order to look again at the construction of objectivity, this time from the point of view of making and reproducing images.
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Making Material and Cultural Connections: the fluid meaning of ‘Living Electrically’ in Japan and Canada 1920–1960
This article explores how the process of aligning material and cultural ‘connections’ was crucial to defining different historical trajectories of domestic electrification in Canada and Japan. Detailing how connections were made and modified reveals the divergent and fluid meaning of living electrically across space and time.
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Moments of danger
This article takes an exhibition I co-curated for the Science Museum and National Science and Media Museum as the starting point for a reflection on the relationships between neoliberal politics, the histories of photography, and the social meanings of science and technology.
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Museums theme – Adventures in Museology: category building over a century, and the context for experiments in reinvigorating the Science Museum at the turn of the twenty-first century
Acting as an introduction to articles in this issue on a museums theme, this paper discusses the long-term history of science museums and the conjuncture of the late twentieth century which precipitated innovations in various science museums described in the collection.
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Museums theme – Beyond the Black Box: reflections on building a history of chemistry museum
An examination of the development of a history of chemistry museum from the perspective of the curatorial team, including the stumbling points, challenges and successes. The article looks at critical elements in exhibition development including audience and artefact selection.
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Museums theme – making Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine
The author outlines the development and intellectual underpinnings of the Dibner Award-winning exhibition Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine (Medical Museion, 2009). Deep connections between biotechnologies, technologies of the self, and the technology that is an exhibition are examined.
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Museums theme – Science vs technology in a museum’s display: changes in the Vienna Museum of Technology with a focus on permanent and temporary exhibitions and new forms of science education
This article focuses on the development of the displays and the content of the Vienna Museum of Technology as a whole, and on new educational approaches in cooperation with schools in particular.