Digital Lab Blog

This blog aims to highlight artefacts, stories, histories, and relationships from the collections at MAA. Each post begins with an object or a collection at MAA and explores wider themes including substances of wellbeing and intoxication, process of making, mending, and conservation, digitisation and more!

Explore the most recent blog posts below or use the dropdown menu to filter posts by category. For more stories on collections from across the MAA and the wider University Cambridge Museums consortium, head to the University of Cambridge Museums blog.

Remembering How to Wonder with the Poignant Collection

What do you see in photographs from a different era? Leah Mclaine explores the sense of wonder that she encountered while digitising the Poignant Collection, during her summer internship at MAA.

Leah Mclaine

24 October 2023

Classifying Combs – And the People Who Wore Them

Museums have always described and categorised objects and people in problematic ways. But can this be done more humanely? Eona Bell shows with the example of some combs from Malaysia.

Eona Bell

17 October 2023

From Russia with Radioactivity: Misidentified Objects and Hazards

A series of surprises leads Katrina to improve the provenance record of a beaded necklace from Russia, and identify a new hazard in the collections at MAA: radioactive uranium glass beads.

Katrina Dring

10 October 2023

On Yer Bike: A Review of MAA’s Current Exhibition, Beneath Our Feet

Les, a volunteer, reviews MAA's current exhibition, characterising it as a compelling show spotlighting objects and narratives that serve as catalysts for profound contemplation.

Les Andrews

5 October 2023

Elliott’s Anthropological Photographs as Mnemonic Devices

A novice ethnographer takes Cambridge anthropologist Allan Elliott's 1950 photographs of Kusu Island in Singapore back to the island to explore narratives of change and belonging.

Rui En Pok (Rae)

3 October 2023

The Story of a Tent and its Gypsy Maker

Cambridge anthropologist Ivor Evans' interest in the heritage of British Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller communities led to the preservation of objects familiar to rural Britain in the 1930s.

Eona Bell

26 September 2023

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