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Journal article
Projecting the Museum: moving images in, and of, Scotland's national museum
The century-long engagement of museums with the moving image is examined through a case study of its deployment by National Museums Scotland (inclusive of its predecessor organisations the Royal Scottish Museum and the Royal Museum of Scotland). The study engages the academic genres of film studies and museum studies to...Swinney, Geoffrey N
Cinema, television, video, film, Royal Scottish Museum, National Museums Scotland, and historical geography
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Journal article
Appropriate and appropriated sites for elephants: a case study of the making of museum objects
Through a case study of the museum career of a mounted specimen of African elephant, the nature of “museum objects” and sites in which they engage in the construction of meaning are examined. The paper tracks a series of representations through a museum and explores how this representative of the...Swinney, Geoffrey N
material culture, natural museology, remediation, translation, meta-representation, and afterlife
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Book chapter
The art and science of replication. Copies and copying in the multi-disciplinary museum
Few institutions are warier of copies than museums. Few fields of knowledge are more prone to denounce copies as fake than the heritage field. Few discourses are as concerned with authenticity, aura, originals and provenance as those concerning exhibiting and collecting. So why is it that these are institutions, fields...Alberti, S J M M ; Blackwell, Alice ; Davidson, Peter ; Goldberg, D Martin ; Swinney, Geoffrey N
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2013
Doctoral thesis
Towards an Historical Geography of a ‘National’ Museum: The Industrial Museum of Scotland, the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art and the Royal Scottish Museum, 1854-1939.
This thesis adopts a primarily process-based methodology to put a museum in its place as a site of knowledge-making. It examines the practices of space which were productive of a government-funded (‘national’) museum in Edinburgh. Taking a spatial perspective, and recognising that place is both material and metaphorical, the thesis...Swinney, Geoffrey N
history of science, exhibition, museum education, institutional history, geographies of science, and visitor experience
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2008
Journal article
Enchanted invertebrates: Blaschka models and other simulacra in National Museums Scotland
This paper examines the role of natural history models in museum displays in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth century. In particular it considers the 257 Blaschka models of invertebrate animals and some of the other natural history models acquired by...Swinney, Geoffrey N
invertebrates, glass models , museum display, and educational models
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2010
Conference paper (unpublished)
The circulation of museum objects
The paper discusses the spaces of production and use of a photographic image, depicting two African elephants and their human attendant, produced in the Royal Scottish Museum in 1907. The translation of the image and its appropriation into different material forms – as photographic print, half-tone newsprint illustration, and embellished...Swinney, Geoffrey N
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2018
Journal article
The Janitor and his museum: John Wilson (1775–1832) and the teaching of ‘practical zoology’ in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh
A description by William Jardine of Applegirth of the state of taxidermy in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh draws attention to the agency of the University of Edinburgh’s Janitor, John Wilson, in contributing to the University’s Natural History Museum, in the building of his own private museum collection, and in the teaching...Swinney, Geoffrey N ; McGowan, R Y
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2017
Journal article
Recycled objects: curatorial practice and the engagement of contemporary art in the interpretation of historical African figurative sculpture
Through a case study approach those acts of assembling, juxtaposing and exhibiting collections of objects, which constitute the western museum, are analysed as artistic processes which produce the museum as a form of ‘public art’. The paper takes as its fulcrum L’Ange, a contemporary artwork formed from recycled materials by...Swinney, Geoffrey N
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2016
Journal article
George Wilson's Map of Technology: giving shape to the ‘industrial arts’ in mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh
An intriguing symbol adorns the grave, in Edinburgh's Old Calton Burial Ground, of George Wilson (1818–1859), Britain's first Professor of Technology. Wilson himself had devised the symbol as an emblem for the Industrial Museum of Scotland of which he was Director. In his professorial role he defined and delineated the...Swinney, Geoffrey N
technological education, Industrial Museum of Scotland, National Museums Scotland, geographies of science, collections, and teaching