Among the challenges museums face when displaying digital objects are widely held assumptions about the nature of these objects and the material, social, and political foundations of digital art practices.

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age urges readers to question their assumptions through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object—a box, a pen, an effigy, and a cloak. The book begins with an introduction exploring the legacies of older forms of media and earlier museum practices of collection and then offers a critical analysis of contending theories of knowledge production in museums as it relates to digital projects. From there, Haidy Geismar guides readers in lively, accessible prose through a range of objects, from ethnographic and decorative arts collections, bespoke digital experiments, and even the Google Art Project, revealing what these objects can tell us about both the past and the future of digital collection and display.
 

Haidy Geismar is a reader in anthropology at UCL, where she directs the Digital Anthropology Masters Programme and the Centre for Digital Anthropology. She is also the curator of the UCL Ethnography Collections.