Well, it’s obviously not the end of the Information Age, if such a thing truly exists. Although I am marking the end of my personal journey into building the Science Museum’s brand new Information Age gallery, and heading off to pastures new.
When I started at the Science Museum back in 2010 as an assistant curator, the museum had just been told that they had been awarded a pot of money to develop a potential new gallery, then known under the working title Making Modern Communications. It looked likely that I would get to help. What I didn’t anticipate then was a trip to Cameroon to acquire mobile phone related objects, some of my writing appearing alongside pieces by David Attenborough, Stephen Baxter and Martha Lane Fox in our accompanying book, or witnessing the Queen sending her first (and perhaps last) tweet. The last four and a bit years have been long, but extremely rewarding.
So for everybody outside the museum the gallery has just started its life as a public space, meanwhile for the large team who put it together we look to what comes next. I’m about to embark on another long journey. I’m beginning a collaborative PhD with the University of Cambridge and the Science Museum, looking at the development of Ohm’s law and the wider history of electricity in the nineteenth century. I’ll be using museum collections as the starting point for recreated experiments, following in the footsteps of my supervisor, Hasok Chang. I also have every intention of being a more regular blogger, so watch this space!