The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication

Museums today find themselves within a mediatized society, where everyday life is conducted in a data-full and technology rich context. In fact, museums are themselves mediatized: they present a uniquely media-centered environment, in which communicative media is a constitutive property of their organization and of the visitor experience. The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication explores what it means to take mediated communication as a key concept for museum studies and as a sensitizing lens for media-related museum practice on the ground.

Including contributions from experts around the world, this original and innovative Handbook shares a nuanced and precise understanding of media, media concepts and media terminology, rehearsing new locations for writing on museum media and giving voice to new subject alignments. As a whole, the volume breaks new ground by reframing mediated museum communication as a resource for an inclusive understanding of current museum developments.

The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication will appeal to both students and scholars, as well as to practitioners involved in the visioning, design and delivery of mediated communication in the museum. It teaches us not just how to study museums, but how to go about being a museum in today’s world.

KIRSTEN DROTNER is Professor and Chair in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark and founding director of Our Museum and of DREAM: Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials. Author or editor of 30 books, her research interests include media history, media and information literacies, digital creativities and museum communication. Her most recent book is Museum Communication and Social Media: The Connected Museum (edited, with Kim C. Schroder, Routledge, 2013).

VINCE DZIEKAN is an academic and practitioner-researcher whose work engages with the transformation of contemporary curatorial practices at the intersection of design, creative technology and museum culture. The scope of this interdisciplinary investigation has been outlined previously in his book, Virtuality and the Art of Exhibition: Curatorial Design for the Multimedial Museum (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has published widely in traditional, scholarly as well as non-traditional modes through his independent curatorial practice. He is associate editor of Curator: The Museum Journal (Wiley) and curator of MWX, the exhibition initiative of Museums and the Web (USA). He is Director of Programme, Graduate Research in Design, at Monash Art Design & Architecture (MADA), Monash University, Australia.

ROSS PARRY is Associate Professor (Museum Studies) and Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Digital) at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. A former Tate Research Fellow, and former Chair of the United Kingdom’s national Museums Computer Group, he is also one of the founding Trustees of the Jodi Mattes Trust—for accessible digital culture. A widely read author, his books include Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (Routledge, 2007), Museums in a Digital Age (editor, Routledge, 2009), and most recently Museum Thresholds: The Design and Media of Arrival (edited, with Ruth Page, Routledge, 2018). Currently, he is leading a major national project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom, to develop a digital literacy framework for the UK museum sector.

KIM CHRISTIAN SCHRODER is Professor of Communication at the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark. His co-authored and co-edited books in English include Audience Transformations: Shifting Audience Positions in Late Modernity (edited, with Nico Carpentier and Lawrie Hallett, Routledge, 2014), Museum Communication and Social Media: The Connected Museum (edited, with Kirsten Drotner, Routledge, 2013), and Researching Audiences (co-autored, with Kirsten Drotner, Steve Kline and Catherine Murray, Arnold 2003). His research interests comprise the theoretical, methodological and analytical aspects of audience uses and experiences of media, with particular reference to the challenges of methodological pluralism. His recent work explores different methods for mapping news consumption.