Week 2 Readings

For our second week of readings, we focused on three articles:

-De-Schooling the Museum: A Proposal to Increase Public Access to Museums and Their Resources
-the Museum of Anthropology at Wake Forest University Collections Policy (rev. 12/2008)
-the MOA Collection Plan

The first article discusses how to reduce biases in interpretation. One of the most interesting solutions the author offers is the idea of visible storage, a concept I had never considered before. Visible storage involves presenting the museum's entire collections behind a glass wall for visitors to walk through. The idea is that the objects are not stylishly arranged or given text boxes, so the audience is able to make their own interpretations.

This solution has its benefits and its drawbacks. It allows visitors to see the entirety of a collection, so it does reduce bias by eliminating the choice of which objects to display. The main problem, though, for me at least, is that the average person in a community may not have the level of education or experience with that subject necessary to be able to interpret the artifacts. If I were to visit a museum displaying artifacts from a First Nations culture in Canada, a subject I have little experience in, and no interpretations were offered, I would feel overwhelmed and probably leave after only a short time. That being said, for an academic audience with an interest in the museum's subject area, this style of storage could be nice to have for research projects or class assignments.

Another consideration, aside from the immense cost, is for the staff. If I were working in the curation department of a museum, I would not be comfortable sitting behind a glass wall while people wandered through, watching what I was doing. Overall, while I do think it is an interesting idea that could work in certain settings, it does not seem to be a practical solution to try to implement widely.

Through all the solutions offered, it seems that the interpretation given by a museum in a structured exhibit is a necessary learning tool despite the potential for biases or misinformation. The best way to address this problem is to be aware of your possible preconceptions and how they are effecting the exhibit being built.

The second two articles showed me how the MOA handles acquisitions and manages their collections. I enjoyed getting to see the details of the process, especially after I had read in Beverlye Hancock's article on the history of the Museum, how the current policy evolved.

Sept 25- Sept 27

This week, I selected artifacts to possibly display with the photographs and text boxes for the timeline exhibit. 

To find objects, I went to the Museum's webpage: http://moa.wfu.edu/ and then to Research and Collections. I selected Artifact Database, chose the Browse option and clicked Show Browse Records. 

The collection pieces in the database are listed by year. I tried to select one or two artifacts for each five year block. The earliest objects cataloged are from 1974. 

I tried to pick artifacts that would both be visually interesting and relate to the exhibits we listed on our timeline.  The latter of these two efforts was more difficult than I had originally thought it would be. The artifacts are dated, but the dates are of when they were acquired, and so do not necessarily correlate with when (and if) they would have been displayed. 

Fortunately, when Kyle Bryner was brought on in 2005, she created a database where she has been logging what objects were displayed in conjunction with which exhibits. 

By the end of Tuesday, both Demone and I had finished choosing artifacts from the MOA website, so Thursday we worked on combining our list. After we had created a joint object list using GoogleDocs, we went through the combined timeline we had created last week. We chose four main exhibits from more recent years and emailed our choices to Ms. Bryner so that she could search her database and send us a list of objects that were displayed for each of those exhibits.

Next week, we will continue narrowing down our choices of events, photographs and artifacts to start visualizing how we want the exhibit to look.

September 20th, 2012

Today, Demone and I worked together to combine our timelines. We laid our individual copies out side by side and went through them year by year. We marked which events we wanted to keep and which we thought we should delete. 

We then each went back to our own timelines on our laptops and edited them. I emailed the updated version of mine to Demone and he emailed his to me. 

To split the work evenly, we divided up the years. Demone was in charge of meshing my data with his for the years 1957-1997. I was in charge of meshing our data for the years 1997-2012 (since later years had more data, we divided up the work by the number of pages of information rather than by the number of years). 

I created a new Word Document and copy-and-pasted my timeline (from 1997-2012) into it. I then copy-and-pasted each individual event from his timeline into mine under the appropriate dates. Once our timelines had been combined, I copied the new version to a GoogleDoc. I shared it with Demone and Ms. Bryner. Demone then went into the GoogleDoc and pasted in his combined version of the timeline from 1957-1997. 

Over the next week, Ms. Bryner and Ms. Cromwell will review and edit the timeline we have created.

Week 1 Readings

The readings over the past three weeks have been a combination of articles specific to the Museum of Anthropology and more general articles on the responsibilities of museums.

For our first week of readings, we had:

-"Notes on the History of the Museum of Man" by E.P. Banks

-"Anthropology at Wake Forest University: 1954-1982" by E. Pendleton Banks

-"Part II A Safer Place: Museums in a Civil Society; Ch. 7: The Museum as a Socially Responsible Institution, 1988" in Civilizing the Museum: Collected Writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian by Elaine Heumann Gurian

-"An Anthropological Definition of the Museum and its Purpose" by Richard Handler 

E.P Banks' works dealt with the history of the Museum of Anthropology and the Department of Anthropology. These articles were good brief introductions to the denser, more detailed article on the MOA's history by Beverlye Hancock.

The latter two articles addressed problems facing museums in general, particularly that of bias. Handler highlights the importance of thought and care in organizing an exhibit since interpretations and bias will always be present in the display. Gurian offers an excellent list of questions to ask yourself when building a display to address the problems of interpretation. These questions focus on issues including ones like reflecting diversity and considering the interests of the target audience. 

The idea of a target audience was particularly important for me to consider as I built my timeline. When choosing events, I had to be mindful that the timeline exhibit is geared towards a diverse group comprised of students, faculty and general public, who are of all ages. This made it difficult to decide what I should include or not. I tried to focus on events that showed the evolution of the museum to what it is today because I thought would be of interest to the adult audience (high school and up) as they have probably interacted with the Museum on more than one occasion. I thought they might find it interesting to see how traditions like the Day of the Dead exhibit started. For the younger audience, I tried to pick events that had a variety of good photographs that could keep them engaged through all the text. 

Even with a target audience in mind, it was very difficult to select events and I am looking forward to collaborating with Demone on Thursday to see what he chose to record and to further work on narrowing down and editing the timeline.

September 18, 2012

Today, I completed the final draft of my timeline. I reviewed the events I had listed and added a couple more exhibits. I also went through the MOA website's archives and looked through the negatives to add a few more older pictures. I found a some great ones of the Museum when it was housed in Reynolda Village. There were photos of it from the outside, including ones of the sign "Museum of Man" that hung by the front door, and photos of the storage room. 

I had hoped to be able to use the online archives to fill in the gaps in photographs that I had for the 1990s, but as the negatives were not dated, this proved difficult. There were a few negatives I was able to identify by the exhibit titles, but I did not find any for the dates that I needed.

To get to the MOA's photograph archives, I went to http://moa.wfu.edu/ --> Research and Collections --> Archives Database --> Browse --> filled in the box "Browse Starting with" with the word "negative" and then hit the "Show Browse Records" (I had to hit it twice to get the pictures to show up).

Once I had finished looking through the negatives, I sorted through photos I had downloaded off Sara Cromwell's computer. These were of events dating from 2005 to the present. I created folders with select photographs from events like the Peace Corps exhibit in 2011, the SciWorks African exhibit in 2009 and the building of the Art of Sky, Art of Earth: Maya Cosmic Imagery exhibit in 2009.

Tonight, I will do one final read through of the timeline and send it in.

September 11th and 13th, 2012

On Tuesday and Thursday this week, I worked on revising the rough draft of the timeline I had completed last week.

On Tuesday, I went back through and changed the format of the timeline to one that is easier to read. I brought the timeline up to present using hard copies of the MOA's newsletters and then filled in photos from the mid-1990s onward. As I looked through the boxes for pictures, I found that there was a gap in the photographs available (in hard copy, I have not checked online). I could not find any photographs for the events that I listed for 1996, 1997 and 1998. The few photos that were cataloged in hard copy from 1995, 1999, 2000 and 2001 were dark or blurry. I will have to look through the online database to see if I can find better pictures for these years.

On Thursday, I completed reformatting my timeline and adding in photos. The hard-copy photographs did not extend beyond 2008, so I copied down the volume, number, season and year of newsletters that had good photographs in them.

Next week, I will work on narrowing down events and adding a final round of photographs to complete the final draft of the timeline.

September 6th-7th, 2012

Thursday and Friday were my last days working on the rough draft of the timeline, as it was due Friday. On Thursday, I finished up the 1980s and continued on to 2000. This was the time period when the Museum of Man left the Reynolda Village and was established at Wake Forest University as the Museum of Anthropology. 

The pictures from the late 1980s and 1990s were, for me, particularly interesting to look at, because they were taken in the same building that the Museum is housed in today. In some ways, it was very different then, but in others it is still very much like it is today. 

One of my favorite parts of the latter half of the timeline was reading about 1995, when they hung the dugout canoe on the wall. After reading that section, I went upstairs to look at the canoe, still hanging in the education room. I liked being able to go up and see in person what was described in this article. 

On Friday, I reviewed 2000 to 2008. These years were about continued programs of outreach to the community, updating technology and new strategies for education. 

It was during this time that the Museum began to explore opportunities to partner with other departments on campus. In 1999, the Museum opened an exhibit in the Student Health Center on health and wellness across cultures. This tradition continued into 2000, when two more exhibits were installed on campus in the Career Services building and the Campus Ministries office. MOA also partnered with departments such as Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology to create exhibits in the Museum. 

It was also during this period that the Museum put its collections up online and trained teachers on how to use the database in the classroom. 

My favorite part of the 2000-2008 portion of the timeline was reading about how the annual tradition of Los Días de los Muertos exhibit got started since it is still continued on today and is an exhibit I have visited many times over the past few years. 

 

September 4th, 2012

Today was my first official day as an intern. I started building a rough draft of a timeline of the Museum's history for the exhibit we will be designing. My main source for events and dates was: "A Continuing History and Recollection of the Activities of the Wake Forest University Museum of Anthropology: 1980-2008" edited by Beverlye H. Hancock. I partnered the information found in this document with photos from the Museum's archives. 

I started with the year 1957. While the Museum was not actually formed in this year, it was the beginning of efforts to build a museum to further student’s learning. In this year, a student arranged for the donation of a display case to the Department of Sociology (which at the time was combined with the Department of Anthropology). A small exhibit of prehistoric Native American artifacts was then arranged in the case and displayed in Wingate Hall. From there on, faculty and students started working with the University to establish a museum.

I made it up to the mid-late 1980s before having to leave for class. During this time, the Museum was preparing for its move from Reynolda Village to its current location on campus.

My favorite part of this project so far has been reading about the MOA and then going through the boxes and finding pictures of the exhibits, people and events described.