Across our projects, the MLab is invested in the correspondences between online and offline interactions. For our research on scholarly exhibits, we collaborate with memory institutions, including libraries, archives, and galleries, to interpret collections through digital and analog approaches. This work is engaging because it underscores how contexts, media types, and interfaces influence the ways in which audiences interpret cultural materials. It also highlights the various modes through which culture is designed and archived. But for us—right now—it is perhaps most important because it insists on the relevance of physical place, local interaction, and tacit knowledge to a digital economy. Echoing the work of Jonathan Sterne, exhibits become a way of thinking about “convivial” media and computing in our current moment, interpreting and making culture through materials that persist beyond the ubiquitous attention accumulation of the present.
Our exhibits involve collaborations with University of Victoria Libraries, University of Victoria Fine Arts (the Audain Gallery), University of Washington Libraries, the Rutgers Digital Studies Center, and the Modernist Versions Project. This research (scheduled for 2012-17) is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and intersects with our ongoing digital fabrication and physical computing research. Online components of our exhibits are built using WordPress, Git, GitHub, CONTENTdm, and Scalar.
Our Exhibits
The following MLab projects involve exhibits: the Kits for Cultural History, the Crocodile Cafe Exhibit, the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit, and the Long Now of Ulysses. Additionally, some HASTAC Scholars at UVic are building exhibits with Scalar and other platforms.
Follow Our Research
To stay in the loop with our exhibits, follow the stream of posts below. We do our best to regularly publish logs of our work.
Please do not hesitate to either comment on a log or email maker@uvic.ca with suggestions.
Image above and left care of Danielle Morgan.
