Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change

Recoding the Museum is a cultural reading of how ?new media? has coded the practices, aspirations and perceptions of the modern museum. Through an historical approach, Ross Parry excavates cultural assumptions and values that provide the basis of museum information management and display, and that are still used to this day. The book analyzes amongst others: digitization techniques database management virtual reality hypermedia. Parry resists models of technological determinism, passive media, and the notions of the museum as a constant institution transmitting knowledge, and instead predicates : that communication technologies are as formed (as they inform) society that new media as a cultural product is an active contributor to any message it transmits that museums themselves are an adaptive medium that tend to be part of dynamic interactions with a diverse and activeaudience. For students and professionals in the field, this is a hugely interesting and enlightening book full of ideas and arguments to make you think.

Ross Parry is a lecturer in the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.