This article introduces a special issue of Museum Anthropology devoted to innovative strategies for teaching with objects. Although a century ago anthropology, museums, and objects were intimately entwined, trends in many museology and anthropology courses have drifted toward focusing on ideas and people rather than objects. The contributors to this special issue have cultivated new pedagogical...

Studies of educational technology projects often describe in detail a software interface and theoretical rationale for the design, and then report on the results of studies conducted using the software. What this presentation explores, however, is another very important aspect of the software development process, namely, the negotiation that takes place when diverse groups come together to coll...

The designers of mobile guides for museums and galleries are increasingly looking to deliver rich interpretation that can be personalized to meet the diverse needs of individual visitors. However, increased personalization can mean that the sociality of museum visits can be overlooked in the design of the user experience. Our work has sought to resolve the tension between the personal and socia...

Vertebrate fossils have been collected for hundreds of years and are stored in museum collections around the world. These remains provide a readily available resource to search for preserved proteins; however, the vast majority of palaeoproteomic studies have focused on relatively recently collected bones with a well-known handling history. Here, we characterize proteins from the nasal turbinat...

There has been a significant adoption of new communication technologies by museums in recent years. Social media for self-publication, image sharing or online video may provide solutions for museums wishing to interact with communities and audiences in more creative and lasting ways. When social media are incorporated within communication strategies, they enable audiences and communities of int...

An increasing number of museums and galleries have been recently conducting experiments with mobile, multimedia capable, handheld devices used as communication and interpretation devices. Mobile museum guides present certain advantages as they can be personalized according to different visitor profiles, deliver rich multimedia content using wireless networks and reveal visitors' attitudes towar...

the present study tries to analyze some conceptual metaphors in the bustan, using insights from cultural linguistics. the data analyzed shows that through a cultural model, the word del, productively, embodies the mind of persian speakers via conceptualizing emotions (love, happiness, and grief), mental faculties (understanding, thinking), cultural values (munificence, truth), character traits ...

This paper examines the development of an information infrastructure involving collaborative technologies at the Spurlock Museum, a museum of world history and culture at the University of Illinois. It details a socio-technological system that was designed to pack and re-locate 45,000 artifacts across campus to a new museum facility. It addresses the question of how the information infrastructu...