UPDATED:
![[The University of Leicester]](../images/unilogo.gif)
+44 (0) 116 252 3964
rdp5@le.ac.uk
I have been Lecturer in Museums and New Media at the University of Leicester since 1998, and in 2006 was made an HIRF Innovations Fellow. I am Programme Director for the campus-based Masters course, chair of the Digital Heritage Research Group (DHRG), and supervisor to four PhD students.
Since 2001 I have convened the 'Spring School in New Media', an annual three-day event for museum practitioners and researchers to reflect upon the impact of digital technology on their work. I am also leading the development of an innovative new postgraduate degree programme in 'Digital Heritage', due to be launched in the autumn of 2008.
I continue to sit on the committee of the Museums Computer Group, have for the past three years co-convened the annual UK Museums on the Web Conference, and since 2003 have been on the judging panel of the Jodi Awards (the national award recognising museum, gallery, library, archive or heritage websites that demonstrate commitment to meeting web accessibility standards).
Other roles have included: Research Degrees External Examiner (University of South Australia; University of Melbourne, St. Andrews University); External Examiner for the Institute of Education, UCL (MA in Museums and Galleries Education), since 2006; External Advisor, New Course Validation Panel, University of Westminster / University of Aegean (MSc in Museum and Library Multimedia Systems), 2006; International Program Committee (peer review) for Museums and the Web 2007 (San Francisco, US), 2006-07; Peer Reviewer for International Journal of Heritage Studies, since 2005; Reviewer for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), 2005; Peer Reviewer for Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, since October 2004; Reviewer for the European Science Foundation (Humanities), since October 2003; Museums Computer Group since 1999, and elected committee member since 2002.
My research considers the relationship between new technology (including pre-digital technology) and the ways memory institutions such as museums manage information and display knowledge.
Recent research grants have included:
2007 - British Academy award - Overseas Conference Grant
2006 - AHRC award - part of the Research Workshops (Museums and Galleries) Scheme for a nine-month project investigating ‘UK Museums and the Semantic Web’, with project partners MDA and the 24 Hour Museum. [more]
2005 - HEROBC Innovation and Regional Fellowship award - for a six-month ‘Innovations Fellowship’, to develop an in-gallery digital labelling system (‘LIVE!Labels’), with partners including New Walk Museum and Art Gallery and the National Space Centre. [more]
2005 - AHRC award - part of the Collaborative Doctoral Awards Scheme to fund a three-year project entitled ‘Sustaining public-facing digital assets in museums’, with Simulacra Ltd and the Museum of London.
2001 - DTI’s Knowledge Transfer Partnership award - to work on a two-year project with a new media company (MacKenzie Ward Research Ltd.) to develop e-learning software for the cultural heritage and tertiary education sectors.
With a background in Renaissance studies, and having worked for a firm of architects and the BBC World Service, I was part of the University of Southampton's Digital Libraries Research Centre - now the CDLR, part of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group (IAM). This work used three-dimensional computer modelling techniques to build an interior representation of the Whitehall Banqueting House (c.1608-19), as part of wider exploration into the politics of space at the court of James I. During this time I taught within the Department of History and School for Research and Graduate Studies respectively - exploring the connections (in my teaching as in my research) between new media technologies and the humanities. I joined the School of Museum Studies at Leicester, as lecturer in museums and new media, in 1998.
[In progress] Ross Parry, Re-coding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (Routledge, 2007) [more]
[In progress] Ross Parry (ed.), Museums in a Digital Age, Leicester Readers in Museum Studies (Routledge, 2007)
Ross Parry and Nadia Arbach, 'Localised, Personalised and Constructivist: A Space for On-Line Museum Learning', in Theorising Digital Cultural Heritage: a critical discourse, ed. by Kenderline, S. and Cameron, F. (MIT Press, 2007) [more]
Ross Parry, Mayra Ortiz-Williams and Andrew Sawyer, ‘How shall we label our exhibit today? Applying the principles of on-line publishing to on-site exhibition’, Museums and the Web 2007, ed. by Trant, J. and Bearman D. (Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics, 2007) available at: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/parry/parry.html
Ross Parry, 'Digital Heritage and the rise of theory in museum computing', Museum Management and Curatorship vol. 20, no. 4 (December 2005), 333-348. [more]
Ross Parry and Nadia Arbach, 'The Localised Learner: Acknowledging Distance and Situatedness in On-Line Museum Learning', Museums and the Web 2005 (Archives and Museum Informatics, 2005), pp. 67-75, available at:
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2005/papers/parry/parry.html
Ross Parry and Andrew Sawyer, ''Space and the machine: adaptive museums, pervasive technology and the new gallery environment'', in Reshaping museum space: architecture, design, exhibitions, ed. by Suzanne MacLeod, (Routledge: 2005), pp. 39-52 [more]
Ross Parry and John Hopwood, ‘Enabling the soft museum: virtual reality and the community’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16 (2004), pp. 69-78
Frank Colson, Jean Colson, Ross Parry and Andrew Sawyer, 'Cutting off the king's head: images and the (dis)location of power', in History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, ed. by Axel Bolvig and Philip Lindley (Brepol: 2003), pp. 187-207
Ross Parry, 'Virtuality, Liminality and the Space of the Museum', in Clicks and Mortar: Building Cultural Spaces for the 21st Century, mda Information, vol. 5, no. 5 (Cambridge: mda, April 2002), pp. 67-70
Ross Parry, ‘Overcoming the Shock of the New: Changing the Agenda for Digital Learning’, Biology Curator, 20 (August 2001), pp. 20-4
Ross Parry, ' "See the Revolution of the Times": Initiatives Won and Lost in the Age of Digital Collections', in Beyond the Museum, MDA Annual Report (Cambridge: MDA, 2001), pp. 6-7
Ross Parry, 'Including Technology', in Including Museums: Perspectives on Museums, Galleries and Social Inclusion, ed. by Jocelyn Dodd and Richard Sandell (Leicester: RCMG, 2001), pp. 110-114
Alicia Colson and Ross Parry, 'Shifting perspectives: method, media and the complex image', History and Computing, vol. 10, ed. by K. Shürer and M. Wollard (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 100-108
Ross Parry, 'The Careful Watchman: James I, Didacticism and the Perspectival Organisation of Space', in Disziplinierung im Alltag des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz (Vienna, Der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999), pp.275-297
Ross Parry, 'A history of disconnect', presented to Discursive Formations: Place, Narrative and Digitality in the Museum of the Future, University of Cambridge, 21 March 2007.
Ross Parry, ‘The New Technologies as a means of dissemination ’, presented to the XIVth National Congress of Educational and Cultural Action Departments, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 10 November 2006.
Ross Parry, ‘Museums, databases and the industrialized production of knowledge’, presented to EITEC 2006, University of Coimbra, Portugal, 20 October 2006.
Ross Parry, ‘Museums and IT: overcoming a history of incompatibility’, presented to AMOT Annual Conference, Royal United Services Institute Whitehall, London, 3 October 2006.
Ross Parry, ‘Museums as narrative’, keynote presented to the NLab (Narrative Laboratory) workshop, Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, 29 June 2006.
Ross Parry, ‘'Museum/Computer: a history of incompatibility?', guest lecture presented at the Departamento de Ciências e Técnicas do Património, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Portugal, 5 March 2006.
Ross Parry, ‘Where are you learning today? How museums and galleries are localising their online learners’, presented to Pushing the boundaries: setting the e-learning research agenda, Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester, 10 January 2006.
Ross Parry, ‘The problem of the “virtual museum”’, presented to Museums and Galleries in the 21st Century lecture series, Fitzwilliam Museum and McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, 24 November 2005.
Ross Parry and Mike Gogan, ''Visualising early modern space: a role for spatial theory and digital media', to be presented to 'Thinking space in early modern England', University of Warwick, 5 March 2005.
Ross Parry, 'The language of digital heritage: a new critical discourse for museums and technology', presented to 'Museums and Technology: an international conference on the application of new technology in museums', Graduate Institution of Museology, Tainan National College of the Arts, Taiwan, November 2004.
Ross Parry, ‘Digital heritage and the cultural turn in museum computing’, presented to ‘Technology for cultural heritage: management, education, communication’, 2nd International Conference of Museology, University of the Aegean, Greece, 28 June 2004.
Ross Parry, ‘'Working with e-tangibles: new objects and new media', presented to Why digitise? Digitisation in museums, libraries and archives, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford, 26 November 2003
Ross Parry, ‘Enabling the soft museum: virtual reality and the community’, presented to 'Developing audiences, developing collections’, Museum Ethnographers Group Annual Conference, Leicester, 13 May 2003.
Ross Parry, ‘Communities of practice, space and the organisation of knowledge: the use of three-dimensional visualisation within the Mirror project’, American Association of Museums Annual Meeting, Dallas, Texas, USA 15 May 2002.
Ross Parry, 'The real thing: visuality, virtuality, reality', presented to 'Moving Clio into the New Millennium: Interaction, Digitisation and Collaboration', American Association of History and Computing Annual Conference, Indianapolis, USA, 1 February 2001.
Ross Parry, ‘Pictures with light and motion’: Spatialising the narratives of the English court masque', as part of a panel entitled "Primacy to the event? The new technologies and the narrative mode," presented to the American History Association, Boston, USA, 5 January 2001.
Ross Parry, ' "Wisdome was built a House": The Early Stuart Court Entertainments and the Construction of Knowledge', Department of English, Goldsmiths College London, 25 October 2000.
Ross Parry, 'Virtuality, Liminality and the Space of the Museum', Clicks and Mortar: Building Cultural Spaces for the 21st Century, Museum Documentation Association Annual Conference, University of Newcastle, September 2000.
Ross Parry, 'Spatialising the Masque with New Technology', Animated Porcelain: Rethinking the Early Stuart Masque, University of Keele, 3 June 2000.
Ross Parry, ''Laws to all their motions': Movement and Space at the Court of the Early Stuarts', The Early Modern Seminar, University of Cambridge, March 1998.
Ross Parry, ''The King's the Eye!': Reconstructing the Acuity of James I", XI International Association of History and Computing Conference, Data Modelling, Modelling History, Moscow, 1996.
Co-convenor and chair (with Museums Association), ‘Fast forward: building a sustainable new media future for UK museums’, a one-day Museums Association conference, London, 29 September 2006
Co-convenor, User Specified, the UK Museums on the Web conference 2006, University of Leicester, 6 July 2006
Co-convenor, The digital object: visualisation, interpretation and sustainability, the UK Museums and the Web Conference 2005, University of Leicester, 21 April 2005.
Convenor and chair, 'Training in new media', panel session at 'Valuing Practice', mda conference, Durham, 24 September 2004.
Convenor and chair, 'Curating captivity: imprisonment and the museum' panel session at 'Renaissance Imprisonment', New Armouries Building, HM Tower of London, 3 September 2004.
Convenor, Web enabled: museums, online access and ability, the UK Museums and the Web Conference 2004, University of Leicester, 22 April 2004.
Chair, ‘Facilitating learning: concepts and theories’, Common Threads, mda conference, Birmingham, 4 September 2002.
Convenor and Chair, ‘Spring School in New Media’, University of Leicester, 5-7 March 2002; 29 April – 1 May 2003; 20-21 April 2004.
Panelist, ‘Beyond the Museum: Working with Collections in the Digital Age’, with Bamber Gascoigne, Mike Houlihan and Chris Yapp, organised by MDA and Humanities Computing Unit, Oxford University, Oxford Union Debating Chamber, 20 April 2001.
Chair, 'Provision for new media training for the museum and gallery sector', plenary session, Museums Computer Group, New Walk Museum and Art Gallery and University of Leicester, 23 November 2000.