Beyond The Building: Creating and supporting communities based on

place

Rebecca Hawcroft, PhD candidate, University of Canberra

Does place matter…

in the digital space?

for collection

s?

for museums

?

What is place?

• A value attached to a location

• Enacted through events, walking, interactions, encounters

• Transient, ephemeral

Aram Bartholl

Place is…

memoryexperience

belonging

values

Identity / community

The Virtuous CircleBY

UNDERSTANDING

The historic environment,

people value it

BY VALUING it, they will want to care for it

BY CARING for it they will help people enjoy it

FROM ENJOYING the

historic environment

comes a thirst to understand

English Heritage (now Historic England)

Does place matter in the digital space..?• New ways of interacting

with places• Social networks no longer

dictated by proximity• Increased mobility• Virtual worlds• Global economics…

On Broadway: Daniel Goddemeyer, Moritz Stefaner, Dominikus Baur, and Lev Manovich

On Broadway: Daniel Goddemeyer, Moritz Stefaner, Dominikus Baur, and Lev Manovich

Flowing Data: Where People Run One million tweet map

Place in digital culture…

Place remains a key part of identity creation and community building within digital culture .

Does place matter for museums..?

• Global audiences• Increasing online

visitation• Transient and

amorphous digital communities

New York Times, August 7, 2014

The important difference between a road and a street

Charles Marohn, TEDx Talk, September 2011

www.strongtowns.org

Metropolitan Museum of Art A road

• Road • Street

A streetBrooklyn Museum

Town square

Walker Art Center;“…a communal atmosphere where participants felt connected to their values and interests. ”

DMA Friends

Strong community identity centered around visitation….

Portland Art Museum

• #captureParklandia

• Museum at the center of place based networks

Strengthening place attachment is a key strategy in supporting the collective identity of a visiting community

community

How can collections connect to places..?• Traditionally siloed

within central repositories

• Interaction mediated by curatorial and conservation restrictions

Digitized collections

• Networked objects

• Open to hyper complex relationships

Collections connect to many places• Links to the identities of

many communities• Global and local

connections• Participatory culture is

demanding more access

Spatialised searching

• Projects adding GIS coordinates to collection datasets

• Mapping of collections

• Add tate art maps and Ta papa

Aram Bartholl

Situated archives• Re-connecting

digitized archives to locations

• Digital repatriation

Connecting collections to communities• The WALL,

Museum of Copenhagen

• Singapore Memory project

connecting with place values creates engaged communities

in the digital space

for collection

s

for museums