Is there a point in making a medical museum like ours part of an ‘internet of things’ — i.e., a global network of miniaturised sensors and radio transmitters attached to physical things, thus connecting the material world to the digital internet?

The rapid technological development invites to leaps of museological imagination. RFID-tags and barcodes open up for a seamless connection between museum showcases/storerooms and internet sites. Just a decade ago, the ‘internet of things’ was nothing but techno-fiction. As usual when it comes to IT nothing seems to be impossible, however. There are indeed tons of technical, economic, legal, political etc. problems to be solved first, but both academia and industry have been moving along towards a realisation of the vision for some years now (see, e.g., The Internet of Things 2008 conference in Zürich in March).

I didn’t expect anything about museum applications on the Zürich programme, but I thought there would have been a workshop or session about the ‘internet of things’ on the program of the Museums and the Web 2008 conference in Montreal in early April. This doesn’t seem to be the case, which is a bit disappointing (even though there may be a few barcodes hiding behind more innocent session titles).

Because the topic has been thought of for a while. For example, archaeologist Shawn Graham (Electric Achaeologist) envisions internet-of-things-based exhibitions where visitors spot artefacts on the shelves and when pointing to the object barcodes they instantly get access to excavation reports, secondary literature etc. through the web. Internet pundit Clay Shirky imagines how even “the smallest relic in a collection” can get a RFID tag which makes it “traceable, updateable, auditable, Google-able and even be its own Web page, living on-line as well as in a glass case” (cited from Archimuse here).

There are skeptics, of course, including Shirky himself:

If we can search nationally for certain objects, would our funders then be able to ‘rationalize’ the duplicated collection items? It could be like the way national supermarket chains use EPOS (electronic point of sale) technology to track inventories and control stock levels on a hourly basis: good from one point of view – keeping tabs on collection items would be easy, but bad in that it could diminish local, regional or personal responsibility for curation and collection policy.

To such political warnings one could add aestetic and existential questions. What about the relation between unmediated material presence, on the one hand, and mediated digital information and visualisations on the other? Will the constant interpretative power of the on-line connection kill the immediacy and aesthetic apprehension of the artefact ‘itself’?

And what about the joy of being off-net? Today, museums are internet-free zones outside the ubiquitous Google empire. Can they remain cultural reservations. Will the possible invasion of RFID tags and barcodes destroy this quality? And is it a quality?

The European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) is holding its 14th congress at The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 17–21 September 2008. The congress theme is ‘The Body: Simulacra and Simulation: models, interventions, and prosthetics’. Here’s the synopsis:

Models in wax or plastic, wood or metal, plaster or papier-mâché are held in almost every medical museum in the world; while the development of surgical interventions and prosthetics has also led to a range of materials being used to replicate and imitate external and internal parts and movements of the body. Congress 2008 will explore aspects of the use, culture, history, art and manufacture of models, surgical interventions and prosthetics. It is hoped that the conference will be the catalyst for the development of a European-wide electronic catalogue of models and prosthetics held in medical collections.

Keynote speakers for the Congress include Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen) and Ken Arnold (Head of Public Programmes, Wellcome Trust).

There will be more info on the EAMHMS’s website later.

Unfortunately the Edinburg meeting partly overlaps with the congress on university museums in Manchester 16-20 September (see earlier post here). Hopefully there will be a possibility to attend both without sacrificing too much.

The Bio-Rad corporation has released a music video called “Scientists for better PCR” to promote their new 1000-series of thermal cyclers (PCR machines).

It’s well done indeed. But I think MedGadget get it wrong when they write that “it does successfully fill the time between test tube changes”.

The model for the Bio-Rad video is apparently the 1985 bestselling “We are the world” song by Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones, which was produced for charity reasons, to raise funds to help famine-relief efforts in Africa. The 45 singers gathered as artists for a better world, like Bob Geldof‘s Band Aid and Live Aid concerts.

Bio-Rad is probably not interested in raising funds for anyone else but their own shareholders. So the biotech company is just exploiting the good vibrations of popular culture for commercial reasons. Bad taste! What would Naomi Klein (No Logo) think of this?

Better fill the time between test tube changes with some serious reflections about the advertising strategies of the transnational biotech market instead.

Like many museums around the world, Medical Museion is owned by a university (University of Copenhagen); and like other university museums we are not only a player on the international academic arena but we also constitute a link between the university and the surrounding local and regional community. Our research projects are oriented towards an international audience, but our exhibitions are mainly visited by people from the Øresund region (the Copenhagen area, Malmö etc). 

Same with our internet activities. This blog is written in English for visitors from Chile in southwest to South Korea in northeast, while our website is in Danish.

I came to think about this balance between the global and the local when I read the recent call for papers to the 8th International Conference of University Museums and Collections (UMAC) to be held 16-20 September 2008 at the University of Manchester on the theme ‘University Museums and the Community’.

For much of their history, universities were elite learning environments, sheltered from the outside world by their ‘ivory towers’, and taking their model from the monastery. Since at least the 1960s, though, universities have been playing an increasingly important role in their local and regional communities. One of their early roles was to form extra-mural departments which offered courses to members of the public. More recently, universities have begun to recognize their cultural, economic and social role within their communities. Universities are often major employers; some historic universities play a major role in the tourist economy; and some make a significant contribution through spin-off companies formed as a way of bringing commercial applications to university research.

The theme of UMAC’s 8th International Conference therefore focuses on one of the most pressing issues today for university museums across the globe, which is how they can best act as two-way bridges between the world of the university and the many and varied communities, outside the university, within it in the form of students and staff using the museums in their leisure time, and the global ‘virtual’ community of the Internet.

Proposals are invited for the following five themes:

• Public engagement with academic research
• University museums and the internet community
• The role of the university museum in community development (outreach,
  tourism, economic development, attracting diverse audiences etc)
• The role of the university museum in formal and informal learning
  (i.e. schools, families)
• Marketing to the university audience as leisure users (i.e. attracting
  academics and students visiting outside formal teaching and research
  programmes)

People are encouraged to send in proposals for workshop sessions and panels rather than conventional papers. More info here. Deadline for papers is 31 March 2008. 

(See also earlier post about museums between the global and the local here) 

Apropos our perpetual interest in human remains (see earlier posts here and here) — Tiffany Jenkins is a writer and researcher (in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kent, Canterbury) who is exploring the cultural meanings of human remains in museums in her blog TiffanyJenkins — an interesting mix of medical history, archeology, art and museum thinking.

Today’s good news for this humble blog is that we’ve been nominated as one of the top-five in the category “Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog of 2007” — a contest organised by MedGadget: internet journal of emerging medical technologies.

Our four competitors in this category (there are seven parallel categories altogether) are the following awesome blogs: Ves Dimov’s (Cleveland) Clinical Cases and Categories, medical librarian David Rothman’s davidrothman.net, John D. Halamka’s (Harvard Medical School) Life as a Healthcare CIO, and Bertalan Meskó’s (Debrecen, Hungary) ScienceRoll.

These are formidable competitors indeed. The nominating committe says they were selecting from among “literally dozens of candidates in each and every category”, so I think we have to be grateful for being chosen together with these very fine medical blogs.

That said — we’re in it to win! So if you think Biomedicine on Display is the best blog in the “medical technologies/informatics” category, then don’t hesitate to give us your click here!!

(Admitted — “medical technologies/informatics” is probably not the best description of Biomedicine on Display. However, there is no category for medical history, medical science studies, medical communication studies etc., so I guess we were nominated in this category for lack of better choices.)

Our otherwise sensitive antennae seem to be prette insensitive right now — or why else did we miss the deadline for the interdisciplinary conference ‘Transforming Museums: Bridging Theory and Practice’ at the University of Washington, Seattle, 15-16 May?

Here’s the brief for the meeting — organized by The Museology Student Committee for Professional Development at the University of Washington:

Museums are institutions steeped in tradition but surrounded by constant change. “Transforming Museums” seeks to find ways that professionals can meet these changes deliberately and thoughtfully instead of being swept along their currents. Building on the overwhelming success of last year’s “Rethinking Museums” conference, we now turn to the task of “Transforming Museums.”

And then they invite museum professionals, students, and university faculty to submit paper abstracts or workshop proposals on things like:

How do we transform museums?
Who is leading these transformations?
What recent and current work shares this aim?
How do we define transformation?
Why are these transformations taking place?
Are there discernible patterns in this change?

Great program! A must for one or two from Medical Museion who could have presented our ideas for changing the medical museum concept. But we missed the deadline — which was last Friday, January 4.

Anyway, we can always visit their website. And polish the antennae for next year’s advertisement. 

Apropos our former discussion about blogs and exhibitions — here’s another way of integrating the two genres:

In yesterday’s Material World blog, Haidy Geismar, an anthropologist at New York University, relays the experiences of teaching a class in material culture studies together with Robin Nagle, an anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY).

Titled “Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes of Value with the New York Department of Sanitation”, the class worked closely with the DSNY to collect and curate material that could be used for a future museum of sanitation.

The DSNY archive was restricted to “a series of mouldy cardboard boxes” and the artefacts were scattered all around, so the students collected archival material, interviewed managers and workers, and did ethnographic fieldwork into “the contemporary landscape of garbage in the city”. In short, they engaged in a kind of “social activism” – “to not only teach the public more about the job, about waste management and the cultural landscape of trash, but to publicly integrate the DSNY into the fabric of the city in a representational as well as practical way”.

Integral to the process was the class blog (authorized access only, unfortunately) — used to post continuous commentary on their own work, to devise key word lists for the archive, and to share media clips and articles on the subject. It was also used “to discuss issues of copyright and fair use, and to talk about the limitations of the different fields in the archive on how we were framing and presenting our newly created digital objects”.

“In this way”, says Heidy Geismar, “both blog and archive were tools in the imagination of what a museum both is and could be”.

The grand finale of the course was a small one-room exhibition which opened on December 12 in the DSNY’s Derelict Vehicles Office. They used artefacts “to recreate an old-school style locker rooms”, they put their archive on display, and they permeated the place with a soundscape “evoking the gathering of trash in the city”. For press coverage of the exhibition, see here.

Small exhibition, yes. But Heidy Geismar’s enthusiastic report is contagious — and a wonderful example of how teaching, blogging, and collective exhibition work can be integrated.

Speaking about biomedical animation and displays: iMed Studios have also just released this 2 min. holiday greeting promotional video which is useful New Year’s fuel for imagining how biomedical animations could be incorporated in future medical museum settings.

For example, I like the holographic display of the heart model. Maybe this could be done as augmented reality (see earlier post here) as well?

It’s also amazing to see how the collaborative touch screens which Tom Cruise sci-fictionally handled in Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) has become a feature in a pharma advertising company promotional video! (They sort of exist IRL too.)

Otherwise I must admit that I’m a bit sceptical about bringing too much holography and touch screen visions into museum planning. There’s a risk that the high tech stuff will kill the raison d’etre of museums which is, after all, the good old material artefacts. True, these can be augmented by the gadgets — but one has to strike a careful balance here.

What does Charlotte and the digital museum colleagues at Museer og digitalisering think about this?

Forget about subcellular and molecular animation movies being done for research purposes or as didactic tools. The real driving force in the future will be pharma advertising.

Take a look at this demo reel from iMed Studios — a spin-off company from Engineering Animation Inc., now part of the Saatchi & Saatchi family — that “develops scientifically accurate, visually impactful, leading edge multimedia for clients in the medical and pharmaceutical industries”.

The demo has just won the prestigious 2007 RX Club Award (Vanessa at Street Anatomy explains that the RX Club Awards are “the Oscars of pharmaceutical product advertising and promotion”). In other words, the inner-life-of-the-cell kind of movies will probably become an important part of future pharma advertising. That’s where the money is, so that’s where the animation technology goes.