Post-Medieval Archaeology

ISSN: 0079-4236 (Print) 1745-8137 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypma20

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age

By H. Geismar. 141 pages, illustrated. London: UCL Press,
2018. ISBN 9781787352834 (hbk). Open Access: https://
doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352810

Christina J. Hodge

To cite this article: Christina J. Hodge (2019) Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age, Post-
Medieval Archaeology, 53:3, 434-435, DOI: 10.1080/00794236.2019.1659647

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00794236.2019.1659647

Published online: 17 Oct 2019.

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434 REVIEWS
Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age. By H. Geismar. 141 pages, illustrated. London: UCL Press, 2018. ISBN
9781787352834 (hbk). Open Access: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352810.

In Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age, Haidy Geismar presents a slim, thoughtful volume that explores
today’s museums as settings that bridge traditional analogue and innovative digital experiences. It is accessibly
written and relevant to those thinking critically about the shifting potentials of material culture and heritage in
our contemporary world.
The preposition in this volume’s title is significant. If it presented lessons ‘of’ or ‘from’ the ‘digital age’, it
would suggest a focus on impacts of digital technology on museology; that is, on the nature of new digital
objects in museums and lessons learned via case studies of such technology at work in museum contexts. While
Geismar does touch upon many digital projects, her message is at once broader and more powerful. These case
studies are really about how the physical — analogue, experienced things and settings — can be used to think
critically about the virtual. Via personal reflections drawn from a career in museum anthropology, Geismar
‘explores the interface of digital and analogue media within museum practices and technologies’ (p. xv). Old-
fashioned tangible things deliver, as promised, lessons ‘for’ our digital age. On display, in storage and online,
artefacts prompt critical reflections on what the ‘digital’ itself means and does, not only in museums, but also at
large in the world. Museums emerge as significant sites for the contextualization and historicization of digital
modes of knowledge production. Geismar concludes that the physical and the virtual are not oppositional.
Rather, they are complementary and part of the long history of human/object entanglements.
Far from losing their potency in our virtual age, anthropology museum collections (and, by extension, other
assemblages of heritage and memory) are conceptualized as a new kind of ‘contact zone’: sites of integration
and interrogation where digital and analogue come together. There, digitized modes of knowledge production
can usefully be challenged by traditional regimes of value not just in spite of, but because of, how problematic
those politicized regimes can be. In turn, through unique affordances, digital and hybrid digital/analogue experi-
ences highlight taken-for-granted aspects of traditional exhibition-based museology. This perspective further
suggests how we might use museum-based projects to integrate trans-disciplinary practices, such as those in
digital archaeology, digital anthropology, geographic information systems and digital humanities, which often
remain siloed, despite allied interests and complementary methodologies.
‘Object lessons’ are ‘arguments about the world made through things’ (p. xv), a unifying method across
museology, archaeology, material culture studies and any meaning-making embracing a material or ontological
turn. Tangible things are the classic subjects of object lessons. While Geismar uses collected items including a
box, a cloak and an effigy in this way, she argues that digital and hybrid digital/analogue ‘things’ perform the
same functions. Indeed, an object lesson of the volume overall is that all digital (and many analogue) things are
hybridized because they are experienced by embodied humans in a physical world, however mediated that
world is by new technologies. There is a temptation to conceive of digital knowledge as immaterial. Through
its historicized and critical view of museums’ pedagogical projects, this volume proposes instead that ‘the
digital’ is the most recent turn within a longer history of material ‘museum object lessons’.
Geismar’s Introduction is an important component of her argument. In it, she defines key terms and probes
the fraught boundaries between tangible/virtual and ‘in real life’/‘on display’ as presented in museums. Whether
disseminated via touch screens in the galleries, online or on a mobile device, digital interfaces are just the most
recent in a long history of ‘reality effects’ that offer museum staffs’ subjective interpretation to museum audien-
ces as consumable fact. The first chapter, ‘Ways of knowing’, applies this idea and rejects the taken-for-granted
notion that anthropological museums are orderly or systematic or that they operate for the greater good. The
argument that museums are political spaces is not new. Here, however, it provides important context for the
object lessons in the chapters that follow; most importantly, by linking the consequences of digital objects with
those of earlier technologies of museum display such as dioramas, typological arrangements and life groups.
The chapters that follow are each inspired by a physical object. From them, Geismar derives complex les-
sons about how museums operate, how digital technologies alter the affordances of these operations and what
not to take for granted within digital realms. She contemplates in turn a box, a pen, an effigy and a cloak. These
choices are inspired. Each item is transcultural and operates on multiple registers: as a tangible thing ordering
the world and as a conceptual metaphor for museum processes of representation. Geismar does not always
explicate these meanings, trusting her readers to recognize the implications for themselves.
Object lesson chapters have a similar organization. They begin with a vignette describing Geismar’s encoun-
ter with the case study object. They continue with an extended meditation on experiences and issues the object
evoked for her in its museological context. Finally, Geismar returns to the object and an explicit discussion of
the lessons it provides for digital modes of museum knowledge production. A wooden storage box used in the
UCL Anthropology Collection, made obsolete after the glass lantern slides it once contained were digitized,
prompts consideration of materialities of cohesion and containment. Gesimar feels uneasy after the box’s
REVIEWS 435
destruction, even though it and its contents have been thoroughly recorded (a feeling familiar to many archaeolo-
gists, who have internalized the destructive nature of our chosen methodology). The Cooper Hewitt,
Smithsonian Design Museum presented its visitors with a technological marvel: a pen that they used digitally to
record and save physical encounters with objects in the galleries. As a hybrid digital/analogue interface tool, the
pen ‘emphasizes the importance of technologies of reproductions’ (59). In the agency it bestows to visitors, it
also subtly invokes the power of writing and inscription, which remain crucial to the construction of museum
authority. An ancestral effigy from Vanuatu is stored out of public view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For
Geismar, the figure prompts reflection on distinctions between representations of and interpretations of reality,
as well as how concealing and revealing work in culturally specific constructions of meaning. Finally, a Maori
cloak stored at UCL participated in community-led projects of digital recording, translation and circulation.
Discussed alongside other digital recording projects, it inspires reflection on the affordances of digital surrogacy.
Geismar tackles many significant issues by using object lessons to critique assumptive discourses about ‘the
digital’: that it is ‘uniform and ubiquitous’ and ‘the primary mode of cultural reproduction’; that it is reducible
to code, inherently logical or immaterial; that it is replicable and therefore inauthentic; and the digital network
are mere representations of a priori social networks, when in fact they constitute those networks as any material
culture constitutes social experience (p. 19).
Among the case studies are many practical insights. Geismar cautions, for example, against collapsing the
seemingly immaterial data-base object with the material technology that delivers that digital object and through
which we, as physical beings, experience it. She clarifies that ‘imagining the digital/analogue as a divide (rather
than a continuum) is not a particularly productive way of understanding the particular materiality, and historicity,
of digital practices and objects in museums’ (p. xviii). This argument is a provocative one. It suggests the digital
and distributed ‘museum 2.0’ of our imaginings is not as disruptive as we museum professionals might wish to
believe. One of Geismar’s key contributions is conceptualizing museums as vibrant contact zones for the digital/
analogue continuum, while retaining a concern with social inequalities (this framework easily can be extended to
heritage sites in general). Another is countering ‘the perception that digital reproductions are somehow more real
than other representational technologies’ (p. xxii). That is, these object lessons help reveal that the digital surro-
gates of tangible things (photographs, 3D models, etc.) are as much of an interpretation as any didactic display.
There are a few areas where supplemental reading can enhance the impact of this excellent volume. While it
might be useful to all sorts of museums, and it includes a design museum in the case studies, Museum Object
Lessons is grounded in practices and histories of museum anthropology. Pairing it with interdisciplinary
museum studies, for example, The Return of Curiosity: What Museums are Good for in the Twenty-first
Century by Nicholas Thomas (Reaktion Books, 2016) and/or ‘Re-placing Objects: Historical Practices for the
Second Museum Age’, by Ruth Philips (Canadian Historical Review 86:1 (2005), 83–110) would be product-
ive. Geismar warns against conceptualizing the digital as a utopian cure to museums’ problems of representa-
tion. I found myself wondering if, and how, one might also interrogate digital museology as a form of
heterotopic space. Given her interest in authenticity and mimesis, I also wondered how object lessons relating
to intangible cultural heritage (indigenous or otherwise) might productively complicate Geismar’s critique of
the perceived immateriality of digital knowledge production.
Geismar’s notion of ‘the digital’ is never specifically defined. It encompasses everything from the internet
of things, to collections management systems, to big data, to interactive technologies, to artificial intelligence,
to augmented realities. Given how slippery our colloquial concept of ‘the digital’ is, this choice may be inten-
tional. If material culture teaches us anything, however, it is that specificity matters. I imagine that Geismar’s
object lessons would lead to different insights when applied to collections management systems, or online exhi-
bitions, or 3D models, for example. I am also curious as to what insights she would derive by applying the
same object lesson across diverse digital realms. The overall message that museums can and should be used to
learn more about the operation of ‘the digital’ writ large is nevertheless an important one and usefully extended
to hybrid digital/analogue assemblages within archaeology and other material-oriented disciplines.
Colour illustrations enrich this volume’s arguments, although the quality of reproduction in print editions is
uneven. The endnotes are worth reviewing and are where readers will find the URLs for online resources men-
tioned in the text. The reference cited list offers a useful literature review, as it cites not only familiar works,
but also new literature relevant to object-based interpretation in the mode Geismar proposes.

Stanford CHRISTINA J. HODGE