Conference organisers: Helen Mears and Harriet Hughes (Brighton Museum & Art Gallery) and Claire Wintle (University of Brighton).

Museum ethnography has always been shaped by technology. Before the digital age, new mediums such as photography, film and sound recordings transformed the sciences of anthropology and ethnography and brought new meaning to ethnographic museum collections. How were these technologies exploited by museums and other agencies working on their behalf? What have these technologies brought to our field? What are their legacies?

Museums now exist in a digital era where communication is instant and global. How are new technologies being harnessed to develop and disseminate knowledge about ethnographic museum collections? To what extent does technology facilitate ‘global’ dialogues? To what extent does it limit them? Is the growth of new technologies enabling wider ownership of knowledge or creating new knowledge elites? What impact is social media having upon how collections knowledge can be generated and shared? Is technology creating new cultural objects and, if so, how can these be collected or recorded?

Speakers included representatives from the British Museum, the Horniman Museum, the Tropenmuseum, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge and the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

See conference programme.