Paper short abstract:

This paper sheds light on how users of online museum archives pervade digital and physical spaces through recreating historic artefacts and garments.Curation of digital images and the enactment of tacit knowledge through craftsmanship become entangled in the creation of new kinds of memory practice.

Paper long abstract:

For several years, museums and heritage institutions all over the world have been, and still are, heavily invested in digitizing their collections and making them accessible online. These archives offer online visitors the opportunity to browse museums' collections at any time and use them for different purposes. My research within the DFG-funded research project "Curating Digital Images: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Affordances of Digital Images in Heritage and Museum Contexts" is concerned with how and for what reasons visitors interact with these archives. I apply ethnographic methods to understand how digital images transform the museum experience of online visitors. Through careful observation, participation and interviews, I shed light on how the curation of digital images in everyday life creates personal, emotional, practical, and tacit knowledge.

In this paper, I will take a closer look at how such curatorial practices pervade digital and physical spaces, especially through embodied memory practices enacted through craftsmanship. When digital images serve to (re)-create and wear or use historic artefacts and garments, digital media and physical spaces blend into one another: Historic physical objects get digitized, are shared and discussed online with other agents, and then find their way back into physical spaces, bodily practices and material objects. In this way, new memory modalities emerge in-between physical and digital spaces by way of understanding and feeling historic material properties and thus making sense of historic living conditions and cultures.