Digital reviews

A new project from the London Transport Museum

Contemporary collecting is fraught with difficulty: how do we select from the present what will be useful to the future? How do we collect without bias, but also reflect what’s important and meaningful to us right now? And how do museums, accustomed to the quirks of material objects, collect from an increasingly digital and ephemeral culture?

#MyJourneyToPride is a collecting project by the London Transport Museum. It asks people who attended 2019’s Pride in London and UK Black Pride events to document their journeys to this year’s celebrations

“We want to record the social side of the story that objects don’t convey by themselves,” says Ellie Miles, the documentary curator at the museum.
Collecting tweets as a public participation project isn’t brand new. Back in 2012, the Museum of London collected Londoners’ experiences of two hectic weeks around the Olympics with the #CitizenCurators hashtag. #MyJourneyToPride adds an intriguingly specific angle to the relationship between public transport and visible diversity.

It addresses under-representation of LGBTQ+ passenger experiences in the London Transport Museum’s archives, while encouraging people to reflect on how public transport spaces are temporarily transformed by the visibility of those attending Pride.

The museum will contact people using the hashtag to discuss acquiring and preserving their tweets, but the real beauty of #MyJourneyToPride is watching it happen in real time. Writing this review on the evening after Pride, as weary marchers and revellers make their way home, I can scroll through the hashtag and see a mixture of so many different faces: LGBTQ+ people and their allies. This is collecting the internet as it should be.


The Public Domain Review is an online journal that was founded in 2011. It is the kind of digital project that gets finer with age, as it slowly grows into a rich and deep resource.

The journal’s aim is to curate and give context to the oddities found in the vast digitised cultural heritage of the 20th century and before, released by museums and archives into the public domain.

Illustrated essays are the backbone of the site and you’ll find everything here from HG Wells’ futurology to Pre-Raphaelite wombats. The collections section brings together images, words and sounds selected by curious associations: floral alphabets and early Antarctic photography.


Remember “culture hacks”, when museums would bring techies in to play with collections and produce spiffy little web apps? Well, they’re still alive in Germany, where “Coding da Vinci” is an annual hackathon for coders playing with digital museum assets.

Cover.boutique lets you choose an image from an international museum’s collections, match it to a template for the back of your mobile phone, and print off a brand new cover.

It’s more proof of concept than polished app as you get a PDF that you’ll need to cut out and stick on your phone case. But it’s a small reminder of the joy that a cheeky bit of creativity can bring to digitised museum collections.