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During the pandemic, the idea that digital adoption would revolutionise audience engagement became widespread in the museum sector. This paper explores whether this is true, utilising tools and debates from the digital humanities to analyse the online content and audiences of a representative sample of 315 museums in the UK.

Digital project teams are by definition comprised of people with various skills, disciplines, and content knowledge. Collaboration within these teams is undertaken by librarians, academics, undergraduate and graduate students, research assistants, computer programmers and developers, content experts, and other individuals. While this diversity of people, skills and perspectives creates benefits for the teams, at the same time, it creates a series of challenges which must be minimized to ensure project success. Drawing upon interview and survey data, this paper explores the benefits, challenges, and patterns of interaction associated with these types of project teams. It will conclude with a series of recommendations focused on harnessing the advantages while minimizing the challenges.

In this paper, we present the first year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefront of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance –specifically as it pertains to our first year goals of laying a research foundation for this endeavour. We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for funding a research cluster grant, which has made our research network possible, and the generous co-sponsorship of our institutions and research partners.

In this 2009 article, we present details of the first year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance—specifically as it pertains to our first year goals of laying a research foundation for this endeavour.&nbsp

This paper discusses the need to preserve interfaces for early DH projects. It is a slightly expanded version of the abstract that will appear in the conference book of abstracts. The full version of the paper has been published by Digital Scholarship in the Humanities at https://academic.oup.com/dsh/articleabstract/ doi/10.1093/llc/fqz081/5670586. I am therefore not able to upload that paper to this repository, for copyright reasons. But please do read the full paper if you have access to it.

Emergent mobile technologies offer museum professionals new ways of engaging visitors with their collections. Museums are powerful learning environments and mobile technology can enable visitors to experience the narratives in museum objects and galleries and integrate them with their own personal reflections and interpretations. UCL‟s QRator project is exploring how handheld mobile devices and interactive digital labels can create new models for public engagement, personal meaning making and the construction of narrative opportunities inside museum spaces. The use of narrative in museums has long been recognised as a powerful communication technique to engage visitors and to explore the different kinds of learning and participation that result. Many museums make extensive use of narrative, or storytelling, as a learning, interpretive, and meaning making tool. This chapter discusses the potential for mobile technologies to connect museums to audiences through co-creation of narratives, taking the QRator project as a case study. The QRator project aims to stress the necessity of engaging visitors actively in the creation of their own interpretations of museum collections through the integration of QR codes, iPhone, iPad, and Android apps into UCL‟s Grant Museum of Zoology. Although this chapter will concentrate on mobile technology created for a natural history museum, issues of meaning making and narrative creation through mobile technology are applicable to any discipline. In the first instance, the concern is with the development of mobile media in museums followed by a discussion of the QRator project which stresses the opportunities and challenges in utilizing mobile technology to enhance visitor meaning making and narrative construction. Finally, this chapter discusses the extent to which mobile technologies might be used purposefully to transform institutional cultures, practices and relationships with visitors.