Digital [Air &] Space: Combining Ethnography and Photogrammetry to Understand Museum Collecting Strategies, Object Transformations, and Digital Method Implementation

Most museums are trending towards using digital space in new ways to engage broader public engagement or for educational purposes. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how beneficial digital tools can be. This research seeks to understand how applying digital technologies in museum collection departments can transform objects and facilitate current practices within management systems. Using methods that are often applied by archaeologists and cultural anthropologists, I explore these questions through the collections at the Hill Aerospace Museum. Through implementation of photogrammetry as a method of object transformation and the use of ethnography as a tool for data collection, I detail how these methods can understand the object habits and expand upon collecting strategies.