Abstract
The online world and its origins is one of the most obviously relevant areas of computing history to the general public. It is also one of the hardest to effectively interpret and display. This paper discusses the challenges of exhibiting the complex and mostly intangible online world – sometimes called “cyberspace” – in a museum context. These include not just display challenges, but also the difficulties of framing this complex, wide ranging, and largely unknown history in an accessible way. It presents some of the techniques we’ve developed as solutions at the Computer History Museum, with the hope they may contribute to an exchange of ideas. These techniques are still evolving. The three relevant galleries in our permanent exhibition form the first comprehensive exhibit on the history of the online world. A current temporary exhibit and five small permanent ones in development focus on specific areas of cyberspace.
Chapter PDF
References
Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing, Web version. The Computer History Museum (2011), http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution
Going Places: A History of Google Maps with Street View. @CHM blog, the Computer History Museum (2012), http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/going-places-a-history-of-google-maps-with-street-view
Make Software, Change the World! @CHM blog, the Computer History Museum (2012), http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/make-software-change-the-world/
Report: 90% of Waking Hours Spent Staring at Glowing Rectangles. The Onion (June 15, 2009), http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-staring-at-glowing,2747/
Maslow, A.H.: A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review 50(4), 370–396 (1943)
Blum, A.: Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. Ecco (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 IFIP Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Weber, M. (2013). Exhibiting the Online World: A Case Study. In: Tatnall, A., Blyth, T., Johnson, R. (eds) Making the History of Computing Relevant. HC 2013. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 416. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41650-7_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41650-7_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41649-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41650-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)