what we mean by ethics and ethical practice when creating, using and sharing so-called digital heritage and cultural data emerged from my work with colleagues on the Towards a National Collection (Tanc) research programme funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRC).Specifically, it is a set of thoughts and responses to the excellent Ethics as Practice Report written by Ananda Rutherford, Anna-Maria Sichuan, Katrina Foxton and Sara Perry published in September 2024.| Curatorial Research Centre
On 26 July 2023, thanks to a connection made by Heather Lomas, MCC Museum Collections Officer, I was invited to join a panel to debate museums, heritage and 'culture wars' at Lord's Cricket Ground, St John's Wood, London.Cricket? Culture wars and museums? This post will make sense if you read to the end.| Curatorial Research Centre
Art museums and the organisations that support them frequently use language which promotes their benevolence and their commitment to equity. I will discuss why I have recently begun to experiment with machine learning to better understand how organisational texts like annual reports and policies adopt these biased languages, and how this might inform long-standing and systemic concerns about bias and discrimination in baked into societal AI.| Curatorial Research Centre
How do museums across the world deal with the heritage of imperialism, autocracy, totalitarianism and tyranny? In the words of Arundhati Roy “the project of domination [is] ongoing.”…| Curatorial Research Centre
Citizen Curators had two goals, to diversify the voices that interpret museum collections, and to be a credible start of an alternative pathway into museum work. Underlying these goals were the main causes of exclusion from curatorial opportunity that I had identified while establishing the Rural Diversity Network, namely, time and cost, particularly of travel.| Curatorial Research Centre
Community, engagement, co-curation are all interchangeable ideas with strong resonance in the international museum sector. These ideas are challenging the very notion of what a museum is, and for whose benefit they exist. This is the first in a series of articles that reveals the findings of four years of action research underpinning the Citizen Curators Programme 2017-21.| Curatorial Research Centre
Museums exist to hold collections in trust for the public, document them, research them, display and exhibit them, and make them available to others who wish to. But unlike libraries and archives, whose focuses are on recording and providing information and records [I know they have their moments], museums have largely failed to engage with, document and portray history as it was. Rather, through collecting and display they portray a kind of pseudo-history of what they wish society to remembe...| Curatorial Research Centre
The term ‘metaverse’, whether you capitalise it or not, is a concept. It’s not tightly defined, perhaps best viewed as an umbrella term that covers many technologies, philosophies,…| Curatorial Research Centre
Continuing our series on curatorial ethics, this article begins to consider the concept and actuality of ownership in public museums and galleries, as well as thinking differently about the ethics that surround them. What do museums really own and what does that mean for the rest of us?| Curatorial Research Centre
A disused Argos shop, one plug socket, gaffer tape, cable ties, string, bamboo, a lot of imagination and cooperation, led to over 1800 visitors enjoying the show over a fortnight in June. This interview with exhibition curator Tom Goskar explains how it happened.| Curatorial Research Centre
