Artwork Of The Day Initiative For The Met Museum

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Convergence culture is a concept initially developed by Henry Jenkins, in his 2006 books in which he explores the collision between the new and old media structures, and how they’ve affected several spheres from our everyday life; from entertainment to education, politics or advertising. The concept itself is very wide, covering a convergence of our electronic devices into newer ones that contain functions of several previous devices into a single one, an organic convergence where we use several forms of media at once, and a cultural convergence in which we are exposed to some of the same contents almost worldwide. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this convergence allows media or cultural consumers to speak up about their …show more content…

One example of this would be the “Artwork of the Day” initiative for the Met museum, which depicted which work of art would show up in the first outlay of the museum’s website, based on online votes and comments by some of its online followers, as all their artworks are available in very good quality online. Some museums may undertake initiatives that help the educational role of a museum in specific areas, making use of the technological advantages of digitalizing an archeological process, and sharing it for students and archeologists to learn, follow, mediate and comment the results, can have a great impact on the process …show more content…

By sharing different information types such as the soil, the density and length of the layers and the position of the objects, the process is exposed to mediations by new perspectives and interpretations of followers of the project. Normally mediation can only happen once the analysis and categorization had ended, which could sometimes take years. A research lab designed the website built on categories, which in turn aimed to show how a processual approach versus a post-processual one can changed the analysis of a same object in different ways. This was one specific example of convergence that drew my attention, for it ultimately could make a difference not just in terms of the educational scope, which provided an insight for students to an archaeological process they might have never so directly witnessed before, but also in the ultimate findings and perspectives on excavations that will eventually end up making up some museum’s

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