This post was originally published on the official blog of the International Congress of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, held in Manchester 22-28 July, as an appetiser for the paper “Understanding social media in STEM museums: the lessons from establishing a bio-hacking laboratory” that I co-authored with Karin Tybjerg and which Karin presented in the session Using the Web and social media to extend the traditional aims of museums.

There are still lots of skeptical attitudes towards social media among historians and curators of science, technology and medicine. They mainly contain superficial personal conversations and gossip. They may perhaps be useful for public dissemination and institutional branding, but not for serious intellectual exchange. And most importantly, being on social media takes time away from what really matters: research, curatorship, publication, and exhibition making.

These are some of the most common prejudices. However, if you have been immersed in social media for some years, as I have, such opinions are not quite representing what these media can do. In my opinion, it is increasingly difficult to imagine how historians and curators of science, technology and medicine can manage without them.

I started blogging in late 2004 and have produced some 1500 blog posts over the last nine years, on a wide array of themes relating to the representation of contemporary biomedicine in museums (Biomedicine on Display blog and Medical Museion blog).

Since 2010 I have also used Twitter and posted some 4600 tweets under the handle @Museionist, primarily about the historical, philosophical, social (and biographical) aspects of medical science and technology, and about STEM museum exhibitions, collections, and acquisitioning.

Many of these blog posts and tweets have been written in response to postings from other historians/curators and professionals from other relevant fields, and over the years, I have made the same experience as a growing number of people in our field, namely that it is a mistake to think of social media as superficial branding, dissemination or public engagement channels only.

They can of course be used for these purposes. But a sustained presence on social media is, in my experience, first and foremost a very rewarding way of intensifying and widening one’s creative social space, opening up for discussions with a wide range of interlocutors, both inside and outside of one’s narrow professional field.

To illustrate how social media can used for enhancing creative interaction in our field, I will relay my last Twitter exchange with a group of historians of science/medicine and museum curators, on last Saturday.

When I browsed my Twitter stream in the late afternoon (I usually take a quick look three times a day: morning, late afternoon and late evening), I stumbled on this short one by British political cartoonist Adrian Teal (@adeteal), a industrious twitterer with more than 43,000 tweets behind him:

I didn’t know about, even less follow, Adrian Teal, but historian of medicine Jaipreet Virdi — a PhD candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in Toronto whom I follow (@jaivirdi) — apparently did, because it was she who retweeted it.

Yet, her retweet would probably have passed under my radar if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’m currently quite interested in synaesthetics of museum objects and exhibition museum environments. (PhD student Anette Stenslund, @stenslund, here at Medical Museion works on the phenomenology of smell, particularly how hospital smellscapes can be transferred to / reproduced in museum spaces, and we are also discussing the possibility of an art-science installation on hospital smell.) So Jaipreet’s retweet of Teal’s musing triggered my critical acumen:

Jaipreet retweeted this to her 824 followers (thanks!) and then replied:

The physiology of smell is something I’ve read up in order to be able to supervise Anette, so I rapidly sent off a tweet about the use of gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy (not mass spectrography, as I wrote in haste) for recording smell:

which Jaipreet immediately retweeted (thanks again!), thus further enhancing my reputation as a sometime chemist — which encouraged me to send off yet another tweet about an alleged new Japanese method for smell recording (which I found in the meantime by googling ‘smell recording’):

followed by third tweet, in which I took issue with the vision-centric assumptions behind Adrian Teal’s original, i.e., why does he assume we would use photography instead of odorography?:

A few minutes later another twitterer and historian of science/medicine chimed in. Nathaniel Comfort of the Johns Hopkins’ Institute for the History of Medicine (@nccomfort) told us he had recently visited a new exhibit at the trendy Parisian experimental art and design center Le Laboratoire:

Being a long-time fan (see here) of  Le Laboratoire’s founder and director David Edwards, a Harvard professor in biomedical engineering with an interest in aerosols, molecular gastronomy, and other smell-generating stuff (we’re working together in the Studiolabscience-art consortium), I quickly replied (still with Jaipreet and Adrian in the loop, of course):

As a good historian of science/medicine, Nathanael was a bit skeptical, however:

After a quick glance at the Ophone website, I had to admit Nathaniel’s skepticism was sound: David Edwards tells us the OPHONET “allows you to send olfactory messages instantaneously around the world.” (I would probably call that a teleodoron rather than ophone, but that’s a linguistic detail). If it works, if only with coffee flavours, it would indeed be revolutionary.

In the meantime, our conversation had been put on track by a real museum curator, David Pantalony (@SciTechCurator), who didn’t let himself be carried away by any futuristic scenarios:
A curator of physical sciences and medicine at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, David has 701 followers on Twitter and has produced more than 2400 tweets over the last years covering a wide range of topics relating to collection and exhibition curating. (A retweet by David means you reach some 500 curators in the sci and tech museum world!)

David apparently also thought an odorograph of smell would be more interesting than a photographic image, but qualified the discussion by making an analogy between audography and photography:

And Jaipreet seemed to agree that I had been too harsh on Adrian:

Anyway — there’s where we ended a few minutes after eight in the evening.  And Jaipreet summed up:
And I got the idea to use this Saturday evening chat as an example of how Twitter can be used to enhance the interactions between researchers and curators.

I’m not suggesting that this short exchange of tweets is particularly unique or mindbreaking. We didn’t go deep into the subject and we stopped after short number of turns. But it is typical of how social media can be used for professional purposes. In fact, over the last couple of years, I have had several conversations of this kind each month with a wide range of Twitter users, both researchers and curators and other kinds of professionals — some shorter, some longer. Discussions with Rebekah Higgitt(@beckyfh) sometimes extend over 15-25 turns with up to a handfull of interlocutors.

But even if the chat relayed above is pretty mundane, it illustrates some of the experiences a growing number of users of social media for academic and curatorial purposes have made:

• Social media allow for instant discussion: Within a few minutes Jaipreet, Nathaniel, David and I were engaged in a conversation about a neglected topic (the representation of smell) in the history of STM and STM museums.

• Social media increase the chances of contacts between researchers and curators considerably: The four of us have never met before, and chances are low we would have had this discussion in a coffee break between conference sessions.

• You don’t need to travel to meet: You can discuss at length with many people without any travel costs and minimal carbon footprint.

• It’s informal: You can have a beer or take a bath while discussing serious matters.

• Twitter breaks down hierarchies: It doesn’t matter who’s a senior professor and who’s a PhD candidate –the best argument creates responses, generates discussion, and increases the number of followers. It also makes turn-taking easier, and breaks down the all too common male domination in seminar discussions.

• Social media nivellate cultural and linguistic barriers: It doesn’t matter if you speak with a strong accent or master the intricacies of English grammar.

• Twitter isn’t built for bullshit: The 140 character limit forces you to sharpen and focus your argument.

I don’t suggest Twitter and other social media are substitutes for conference presentations or academic publishing. But they are a most useful complement to these traditional channels for intellectual exchange. That’s the reason why I think Twitter combined with other social media is the best tool we have these days for extending the traditional aims of  science, technology and medical museums.

I’m participating with a paper titled “The material life-course of a scientist” at workshop ‘The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies’ to be held at Science Museum, London, on 18 July.

There are many things I would like to take issue with in this call for papers: Isn’t the notion of ‘return’ of biography long overdue? Does the notion of ‘biographies’ of things and places make sense? Are biography and historiography necessarily narrative (story-telling) genres? Is it really true that the role of the individual in historical writing hasn’t diminished?

But given the restriction of a 20 minutes talk and my need to say something new, I would rather like to engage with the explicit point of departure for this meeting (Science Museum’s Turing-exhibition), and ask: Are biographical museum exhibitions really possible?

I haven’t seen Codebreaker yet (will certainly do so before the workshop), but I have long been thinking about making a biographical exhibition at Medical Museion, because I would like to be able to combine the two major strands of my scholarly life: Writing (about) biography and curating (and reflecting on) the use of material artefacts in science museum exhibitions.

So far, however, I haven’t been able to make one. There are two reasons for this. One is more conceptual, having to do with the uncertain role of material things in the life-courses of scientists as opposed to the role of ideas, concepts, writing, etc. The other reason is more practical: scientists often save their documents and images for archives but rarely donate their material things to museum collections, which makes it difficult to display the material life of an individual scientist.

Thus, the ‘material turn’ in the humanities doesn’t easily translate into an artifact-based museum exhibition about the course of a life in science.

And here’s the programme as a whole:

The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies, 18 July 2013, Science Museum, London (see more here)

10.15 Introductory remarks
10.30 Panel Discussion: The Pleasures and Perils of Biography
– Georgina Ferry, author of Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (1998) and Max Perutz and the Secret of Life (2007)
– Andrew Nahum, author of Frank Whittle: Invention of the Jet (2005) and Senior Keeper at the
Science Museum
– Henry Hemming, author of In Search of the English Eccentric (2008), and a forthcoming biography of the inventor, educationalist and writer Geoffrey Pyke

(12.00 Lunch)

13.00 Biography Case Studies
– Salim Al-Gailani (University of Cambridge), ‘Domestic Science: Life Writing, Religion and Medical Identity in Edinburgh around 1900’
– Kelly O’Donnell (Yale University), ‘The Muckraker: Science Writing as Radical Critique, 1967–1977’
– Oliver Marsh (University of Cambridge), ‘The Life Cycle of a Star: Media Myths of Feynman and Sagan’
– Peter Collins (Royal Society), ‘Sources for the Biography of an Institution’

14.30 Keynote: Janet Vertesi (Princeton University), ‘Robotic Biographies: Living with/through NASA Spacecraft’

(15.30 Break: tea and refreshments)

16.00 The Biographical Mode
– Geoffrey Cantor (University of Leeds), ‘Do Scientists Have Minds?’
– Sally Horrocks (University of Leicester/National Life Stories), ‘Do Scientists Have Lives? Oral History as a Methodological Tool for Finding Out’
– Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, Copenhagen), ‘The Material Life-Course of a Scientist’
– Commentary by Ludmilla Jordanova (University of Durham)

(17.30 End of workshop: tea and refreshments)

Dinner Event
18.15 Tour of Codebreaker: Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy led by exhibition curator David Rooney
19.15 Drinks reception followed by Dinner in the landmark Who Am I? gallery
22.30 Close

A couple of months ago we closed our psychiatry gallery on the 2nd floor in the museum’s Academy Building. Instead we have created a smaller room — a hybrid between exhibition, open collection, and study room/inspiration venue on the ground floor — which we call The Psychiatry Room

The planning for The Psychiatry Room began half a year ago when we realised we had to move the library, and that the best place to put the books was — right, the psychiatry gallery. Good for the books but bad for the psychiatry exhibit, which was only six years old.

We didn’t want to remove psychiatry from the museum altogether, however. Mental illness is a hot topic and our visitors love the history of psychiatry. We also had the ambition do some museological experiments. For example, we have been talking about open storage — to make much larger parts of our collections accessible for visitors — for almost a decade now. And I, for one, have long been toying with the idea of creating an acquisition room as a way of showing how medical heritage is created and inspire visitors to bring in stuff.

As a result of these considerations we came up with the idea of a hybrid museum room — a public space in the museum that combines several functions in one:

First, it is an open storage room, where you can see all the objects and images in our collections relating to psychiatry, including some archival records from the Danish psychiatry.

Second, it is an acquisition room, where we will exhibit all newly collected artefacts from today’s psychiatry.

We are starting out with a single storage rack, because we don’t expect a flood of artefacts to begin with — but as we acquire more things, we may have to add another rack (and hopefully a whole new room …).

Third, we see it as an inspiration room, where researchers, students , museum curator and members of the public are invited to come and look at objects and images and get inspiration to ideas for research, teaching assignments, exhibitions, art works, etc.

It can also be used as a seminar room, where students, psychiatric staff, officers and members of patient associations, etc. can meet over lunch or a cup of coffee and discuss the past, present and future state of psychiatry — with the stored artefacts and images as a backdrop.

The meeting table in the room is placed close to a wall that is dedicated to possible future directions of psychiatry. In the next of couple of months we will use the white boards to ask questions about the newly discovered association of mental disorders with the gut microbiome. Can this exciting basic research findings be turned into new future psychiatric treatment methods?

The people behind the room are senior curator Niels Christian Vilstrup-Møller (curator) together with student assistants Mads Stender and Anders Stein Knudsen; conservator Nanna Gerdes (conservation work, Twitter documentation); web curator Daniel Noesgaard (metabolism wall); assistant professor Adam Bencard (metabolism wall); cand.mag. Peter Meedom (research); cand.mag.stud. Astrid Mo (web); and myself (idea and conceptual development).

Here are a few images from the opening today (taken from Nanna Gerdes’s twitterstream, @NaGerdes):

 

 

Jeg troede den danske forskningsverden efterhånden var blevet godt og grundigt vaccineret mod at tale om forskning og uddannelse i “verdensklasse”?

Ok, man kan have en dårlig dag indimellem. Være lidt uopmærksom, så ordet “verdensklasse” alligevel sniger sig ind i forskningsansøgningen eller strategitalen. Bagefter får man så lidt dårlig smag i munden. Før alle ved jo, at at det er hype. Og så skammer man sig lidt, og så går livet videre.

Men idag faldt jeg over et tilfælde af ren og skær manglende vaccination. Region Hovedstadens lille pjece DIR Danmarks Internationale Region, som er blevet uddelt vidt og bredt i forbindelse med dir-dagene den 23.-25. maj, indholder noget af den værste “verdensklasse”-retorik jeg har set til dags dato.

Allerede på de første to sider kan vi læse om at “Region Hovedstaden er … en internationalt førende metropol” (fangede I den, London-boere?), hvor der “drives forskning og hospitaler i verdensklassse”. Formålet med dir-dagenes sundhedstema, er at give et konkret indblik i, hvordan der “hver dag arbejdes med forskning og uddannelse på internationalt niveau i hovedstadsregionen”.

På næste side bliver vi så præsenteret for “hospitalsvæsen og folkesundhed i international verdensklasse”. Og på næste side igen får vi at vide at Rigshospitalet er i “international særklasse” — medens Bispebjerg må nøjes med at være i “verdensklasse, når det kommer til idrætsforskning”.

Til gengæld er hele hovedstadsregionen i “verdensklasse, når det gælder talenter og videnskab”, og for sikkerheds skyld bliver læseren fem linjer længere ned mindet om “den verdensklasseforskning, som foregår hver dag på regionens universiteter”.

Og dette bare på de første seks sider i en 16-siders piece i 2/3 A4-format med mange billeder og store overskrifter. På hjemmesiden drukner “verdensklassen” lidt i billederne, så det er mindre slemt der. Men i pjecen er det slemt, rigtigt slemt.

Jeg tror ikke det er tale om en dårlig dag og lidt uopmærksomhed. Jeg tror det handler om at ordet “verdensklasse” efterhånden er blevet så systematisk misbrugt, at pjecens forfattere er blevet tonedøve.

(tak til http://www.verdensklasse.no/om/ for brug af billedet)

Have you heard about Yammer? If not, you are not alone. Many people, who are otherwise familiar with social media like Facebook and Twitter, haven’t.

The reason for the relative obscurity of this social network service, which was launched in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft in 2012, is probably that it is designed for communication within organisations. Users can join a Yammer network only if they have an email address from the organisation’s domain. In that respect, Yammer differs from almost all other social media. Yammer works inside organisations, not in the public domain.

Its relative obscurity shouldn’t be taken as a sign of weakness, however. Described as a “Facebook for business”, Yammer has become a success in the corporate world; it is said to penetrate 85% of the Fortune 500 business, and sales are increasing rapidly. For good reasons — it is actually a pretty well-designed tool and probably well worth the price-tag of $1.2 billion for Microsoft that can now integrate it into its other products and help business customers strengthen their internal communication and culture.

Yammer is also spreading to universities around the world (see examples here). For example, here at the University of Copenhagen, Yammer has recently been introduced as a networking tool for the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences — and other faculties may follow suit.

But while Yammer may be good for business development it is not necessarily good for universities. This has everything to do with what kind of an organisation a university is supposed to be, and what role its staff and faculty members are thought to have in relation to the university versus to the outside world.

Yammer is probably good for universities to the extent that they define themselves as corporate organisations. Which they increasingly do. As former Harvard University President Derek Bok pointed out a decade ago in Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton University Press, 2004), the notion of universities as private enterprises has spread throughout the entire university world.

That universities are in the marketplace means not only that they focus on the interaction with the corporate world (commercialisation). It also means that they begin to behave as if they too were companies competing with each other and other knowledge institutions on the global market (corporatisation).

The consequences of this increasing corporatisation of universities is all too well known: it means that students are viewed as customers, that professors and others members of faculty are redefined as ’employees’, and that the results of research and teaching activities are measured in quantifiable productivity units.

Corporatisation also has consequences for the way universities think about communication. Twenty years ago, hardly any university in the world thought about branding itself like business corporations. Now most universities use considerable amounts of money on branding and they strengthen their communication and business relations departments to become more competitive.

I think this is the context in which the implementation of Yammer in universities has to be seen. Designed as a tool for enterprise social networking (its official name is actually ‘Yammer: The Enterprise Social Network’), might help build a stronger internal university organisation. But since it is explicitly designed not to involve actors outside the organisation, it will not enhance interaction and flow of information and knowledge between universities, or between universities and the public. On the contrary, the more we use tools like Yammer, the less time we will spend on outer-directed communication.

And this is, in my view, highly problematic for a university. Because by operating behind closed doors (you cannot find Yammer conversations through search machines), and by prioritising intra-corporate communication over peer-to-peer and public communication, closed enterprise networks in universities are working against one of the most celebrated norm sets for good scientific conduct (scientific ethos), formulated by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton.

The Mertonian norm set includes four basic rules for scientific conduct, viz., communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism (the ‘cudos’). Merton’s point was that science and scholarship can only thrive if universities and their researchers and scholars operate in full openness, share their knowledge with all interested colleagues, collaborate on a global scale, and criticize each others work in the public sphere. Science and academic scholarship is about collaborating and sharing, not about keeping information restricted to the own organisation.

So even though Yammer and similar closed corporate social network tools may be useful for communicating experiences about the administrative work in universities, they are not particularly appropriate for academic interaction and the promotion of a scientific culture. Yammer’s focus on closed communication at the expense of universal peer-to-peer and public communication is in direct opposition to the Mertonian norm set — which universities otherwise use to celebrate as a fundamental ethos for responsible conduct of research.

In contrast, most other social media are designed as platforms for communal and universal communication, and not least for organised skepticism. And therefore I think academics are better advised to embrace such platforms to create peer-to-peer bonds across universities and research institutions and engage with the public concerns about science and its technological implications.

Yammer is a nicely designed and easy-to-use web tool, but there are good reasons to question its implementation university settings. I suggest researchers and scholars take an organised skeptical attitude to Yammer — unless we want to accelerate the development of the corporate university further.

(image credit: http://plmtwine.com/2012/06/26/will-microsoft-yammer-kill-social-plm-not-yet/)

PS: Another argument against corporate networking tools in academic settings, which my colleague Louise Whiteley has pointed out to me in a conversation, is that many PhDs and postdocs (actually the majority of the research staff in universities these days) are employed temporarily and expect they should be able to take professional communication with them when they move to another institution. So unlike a business, where your project-related communication belong to the company, in universities communication is part of work that you have ownership over, and so you are unlikely to want to situate intellectual discussions on such a platform.

It’s less than four weeks left to yet another event here at Medical Museion — ‘The Data Body on the Dissection Table’ — organised by Annick Bureaud from Leonardo/Olats together with our own Louise Whiteley.

The event takes place in Medical Museion’s unique late 18th century anatomical lecture theatre in the old Royal Academy of Surgeons in Copenhagen in Tuesday 4 June, 6.30 — 9 pm.

Dissection reveals what lies beneath the skin, but for a brief moment in time, and for a privileged few. Depictions, models, and preservations have long been used to share what dissection uncovers; from ancient anatomical drawings to today’s virtual 3D anatomies.

 

In the 18th Century skinned “écorché” figures and anatomical waxes were constructed to reveal systems of interlocking bones, balanced pairs of muscles, and delicately entangled traceries of nerves and blood vessels. The Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt, and the écorché The Horse Rider by Honoré Fragonard are famous examples at the border between medicine, science and art.

 

Contemporary medical sciences reveal ever more about the complex systems of the human body – but at a barely perceptible level. The (medical) human body today is understood, tested, and treated as a huge system of data, including complex interactions between our genetic material, our environment, and our host of microbial companions.

 

How do we grab hold of this data? How do we make sense of it and communicate it to others? How do contemporary artists and designers give our ‘data body’ material form through images, sound, and touch? What kind of tools are complex networks science proposing, and what kind of body do they reveal?

 

The Data Body on the Dissection Table brings together scientists, artists, philosophers, and designers to explore these questions, through roundtable presentations and audience discussion. The event takes place in Medical Museion’s auditorium – the Danish Royal Academy of Surgeons’ former anatomical theater.

Speakers at the roundtable include

• Albert-László Barabási, Distinguished Professor and Director of Northeastern University Center for Complex Network Research, Boston
• François-Joseph Lapointe, Professor at the Biological Sciences Department, University of Montreal
• Annamaria Carusi, Associate Professor in Philosophy of Medical Science and Technology, University of Copenhagen
• Jamie Allen, Artist and Head of Research, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

The event is co-organised by Leonardo/Olats and Medical Museion under the EU Studiolab framework, and in conjunction with the Leonardo Day “Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks” satellite event for NetSci 2103.

Attendance is free within the seat limits, refreshments provided, but for logistical reasons it would be nice of you would like to register in advance at medm.us/databody 

And again — the event is taking place on Tuesday 4 June at 6:30 – 9 pm

Venue: Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, DK-1260 Copenhagen K

Relevant web sites:

• Leonardo/Olats (for detailed programme)
• Medical Museion
  
• Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks 2013
• Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks e-Book and web companion 
• StudioLab

Just want to mention three upcoming Thursday afternoon lectures here at Medical Museion  (abstracts will be up on our seminar page soonish):

* Thursday 16 May, 3pm: Massimiano Bucchi (Trento) on “Newton’s Chicken. Science in The Kitchen and its Metaphors” (abstract here for circulation).

* Thursday 30 May, 3pm: Morgan Meyer (Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Paris) on labs in museums.

* Thursday 20 June, 3pm: Bruno Strasser (Science Education and History of Science, Geneva).

Please share with colleagues.

Here are some topics that medical museums need to get involved with if we want to engage with contemporary healthcare:

* Ambient Assisted Living for Elderly Care
* Ambient Intelligence and Intelligent Service Systems
* Analysis and Evaluation of Healthcare Systems
* Clinical Data and Knowledge Management
* Cloud Computing for Healthcare
* Collaboration Technologies for Healthcare
* Context-aware Applications for Patient Monitoring and Care
* Data mining Techniques and Data Warehouses in Healthcare
* Data Visualization
* Decision Support Systems in Healthcare
* Drug Information Systems
* Design and Development Methodologies for Healthcare Systems
* Diagnostic and Therapeutic Technologies in Healthcare
* Digital Hospitals
* E-health & m-health
* Electronic Health Records (EHR) & Personal Health Records (PHR)
* Evidence Based Medicine (EBM)
* Healthgrids
* Health Portals
* Information and Knowledge Processing in Healthcare Environments
* Middleware Support for Smart Homes and Intelligent Applications
* Privacy, Confidentiality and Security Issues in Healthcare Systems
* Related Real World Experimentations and Case Studies in Healthcare
* RFID Solutions for Healthcare
* Smart Homes and Home Care Intelligent Environments
* Telemedicine and Health Telematics
* Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing in Healthcare
* Usability & Socio Technical studies
* User Interface Design for Healthcare Applications
* Virtual and Augmented Reality in Healthcare
* Virtual Environments for Healthcare

Daunting, right? Or exciting — depending on the museum’s ambitions.

Why do medical museums need to get involved? The list of topics is copied from the call for papers for the 3rd International Conference on Current and Future Trends of Information and Communication Technologies in Healthcare, a meeting series that brings together “multi-disciplinary researchers, professionals and practitioners from both academia and industry”, who are engaged in different facets of healthcare and information and communication technologies (ICTs).

The list contains some of the most important developments and future trends of ICT in healthcare, medical research, public health and pharma. This is a significant part of the future of technoscience-driven medicine and health care.

And therefore it is a momentous challenge for medical museums. These are among the things museums need to collect, curate, exhibit and engage their public with if they don’t want to be reduced to insignificant repositories of the far past.

The next question is whether museums are intellectually prepared to deal with such future trends of healthcare and medical science. Will our traditional humanistic skills be sufficient? Is it enough to hire ICT specialists as curators? Or do we also need to rethink the way we do humanities research? I’ll get back these questions in a later post.

(featured image from here)

I wrote the other day that taking down museum exhibitions could be as much fun as building new ones.

That was a pretty spontaneous tongue-in-cheek comment triggered by our conservator Nanna Gerdes’ enthusiastic twitter series of images (see @NaGerdes and storified here, here and here) from the process of taking down three old exhibition rooms in our museum’s Tietkens Gaard building.

But the more I think about it, I feel this spontaneous remark has some deeper truth to it. Here’s the way I reason about it:

Most curators will probably think the design and building of an exhibition is more fun than taking it down afterward. Especially if you are interested in ideas and concepts, and in constructing new unseen worlds.

Sure, it can surely be forbiddingly exhausting to design and build: conceptualising and physically constructing a new exhibition in the interfaces between history and the present, between images and material artefacts, immaterial ideas and three-dimensional physical spaces can at times be frustrating and anxiety-provoking.

But all in all it’s a pretty satisfying creative process. And I think it is this combination of hard work and immersion in creative processes that make us think of exhibition making as being ‘fun’.

And in contrast, the taking down an exhibition after closing day sounds, from an exhibition curator’s point of view, like a pretty dull and boring activity. The opposite of having fun. Like cleaning up after the party rather than planning and taking part in it.

However, I think there is another and more fun side to taking down than the immediate connotations of boredom, deconstruction and cleaning up.

Whereas the building and construction process has certain similarities with being on speed (especially in the last couple of weeks and days before the opening), the post-closing process is much more relaxed. If building up is associated with fervour, even hysteria, taking down is more characterised by tranquility, even melancholia.

Now, paradoxically, the creative and conceptual focus in the building phase draws the curator’s attention away from the artefacts themselves. When you build an exhibition you are 110% focused on how to find the right objects and images, and how to make them fit into the overarching theme of the show. You concentrate on the meaning of the artefacts — their history, their social context, their cultural significance, how they play together with other artefacts into a meaningful whole. The concept and the idea are sovereign, the artefacts its subjects.

After closing down, however, the conceptual frame is dead. The curator’s ordering mind has since long continued to other storage room hunting grounds. Now the remaining artefacts are no longer subjected to the powerful mind of the inquisitive and sovereign curator, they are no longer props in the curator’s script. And suddenly we can see them for what they are, as artefacts pure and simple.

So if you really want to see, smell, touch and contemplate artefacts, you’d better not get too involved in the constructive building up of a new exhibition, but rather wait until the last visitor has left the rooms and the catalogue has been removed from the shelves of the museum shop. When the show is over, the curator in the original sense of the word (the one who cares about artefacts) enters the scene and takes a renewed and more intense look at the artefacts.

That intense dealing with the artefacts can be pretty ‘fun’ too. My online dictionary defines ‘fun’ as “a source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure”, and that’s what a less hectic and conceptual dealing with artefacts can be: enjoyable, amusing, pleasurable, playful.

Actually, even if we talk about exhibition making as ‘fun’, there isn’t really much time for pleasure and play in the process. Deadlines must be met, budgets kept, many different wills must be negotiated, and conflicts avoided. That’s hectic fun. But packing the whole thing down afterwards gives us a chance to engage with the things in a more free and relaxed way: that’s playful fun.

And after all, that’s what fun is about, isn’t it?

We’ve had two specialists in colour history visting from the National Museum of Denmark.

They have worked hard grinding down selected areas of the walls and doors in the museum’s Titkens Gaard building to find out what colours the new exhibition room have had since the mid 18th century.

See also Nanna’s tweets here.

For larger images, click the photos below:

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