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Reflecting on Technology Through Museum Exhibitions

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Sophia Calderón Monárrez

Yale University ‘28 | B.S. Computer Science & Humanities

Technology has become integrated in our day-to-day lives, evolving into an undercurrent of our daily routines — something we blindly reach for, rarely question, and instinctively trust. Technology serves as the background of our lives, supporting our communication with others, giving us directions during our drives, and providing us with information about the world around us, from the weather to the news. At the same time, we often don’t understand the processes behind the technology we rely on. We conceptualize technological processes through abstract simplifications — a series of metaphors we rely on to engage with our devices. “The cloud” is an intangible, online void instead of a physical data center, our “desktop” computer represents a collection of items on a desk, composed of files, folders, and a trash can, and Spotify is a “library” of music.12 We use familiar concepts to make sense of the 0s and 1s driving the technology we use every day, and in doing so, lose the drive to understand or question how essential processes really work.

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Museums and the World of Social Media

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Beatrice Beale Tate

Yale University ‘28

In a time when being on social media has become the norm—roughly half of U.S. adults report using Instagram and sixty-eight percent report using Facebook—cultural institutions are no different.1 Museums have taken to social media, sharing information about their exhibits, missions, and programming in hopes of reaching as many of the billions of people who use social media worldwide as possible.2 As institutions, museums aim to research, collect, conserve, interpret, and exhibit heritage.3 They promote inclusivity and accessibility by presenting heritage to the public as widely as possible through education and entertainment. The entrance of museums into the world of social media, however, begs the question of how a digital presence affects the efficacy of a museum’s mission execution, and what responsibilities museums have regarding their online presences.

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“T.E. Lawrence: Lives and Afterlives” — A Digital Exhibit

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Aruna Balasubramanian

Yale University ’26 | History, Anthropology

In the Yale course “HIST 324J: World War I and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” Professor Jonathan Wyrtzen asked students to create a digital public history resource for their final projects. For this class, I developed an online exhibit about the life and legend of T.E. Lawrence, often known as “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Click the button below to access the exhibit.

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Archival Memory in the Digital Landscape

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Angel Hu

Yale University ’28 | B.A. English

Our knowledge of history is derived from material records – artifacts, manuscripts, artwork, and ephemera. Through these bodies of work, we develop bodies of memory that shape our understanding of the past, especially how power dynamics, sites of conflict, and cultural signifiers play out in our collective consciousness. Museums are especially responsible for informing public memory and shaping perceptions of cultures and historical events. By curating an exhibit, museums deliberately select which objects to make visible to show the narratives that emerge when certain artifacts are placed together. Due to the delicate nature of preserving and depicting nuanced histories, tensions arise regarding issues of representation, provenance, and agency. Who gets to determine which parts are shown and hidden? Whose voices get to be a part of the narrative?

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How AI Can Amplify Marginalized Histories

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Miray Özmutlu

Minerva University ‘27 | B.A History

In today’s rapidly advancing world, where everyone is fixated on future technologies, it is easy to overlook our past, the materials that show us who we are, and how we got here. I believe that we do not pay enough attention to how the number one technology of the century, the generative artificial intelligence model, can enhance humanities research, archiving, museum, and curatorial work.

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