Category: Field Report

Event Attendance: Tour of the Green-Wood Cemetery, 11/2

Introduction

The Green-Wood Cemetery is a historic landmark located in Green-Wood Heights in Brooklyn, New York. Founded in 1838 as a non-sectarian Christian burial site, the cemetery stretches a monumental 478 acres and houses over 560,000 permanent residents. Famous New Yorkers buried there include Leonard Bernstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and William ‘Boss’ Tweed. It is also home to approximately 3300 Civil War veterans. I paid the cemetery a visit on the morning of November 2. Later that afternoon, I and a few other students from Pratt’s SAA chapter were privileged to a tour of the cemetery grounds by Green-Wood’s historian Jeff Richman and its records and archival collection by archivist Anthony Cucciara.

The cemetery as a site of information

There is no shortage of information one can find at the at Green-Wood. It prides itself in being not just a cemetery but also a park, an arboretum, a sculpture garden, and a cultural institution where visitors can learn about New York’s history. The cemetery hosts variously themed historical tours, as well as exhibits, lectures, and symposiums on topics revolving around death and the macabre.

The cemetery is exceptionally beautiful during the fall

No institution can survive in the present age without embracing digital technology. Green-Wood goes above and beyond in taking advantage of technology to provide information. An example of this is their meticulous documentation of the various wildlife found on its grounds. Over 8000 trees and shrubs decorate the cemetery, with new species being acquired and planted (under the supervision of Director of Horticulture Joseph Charap) to this day. In addition to having placards attached to each tree identifying their respective species, an app was launched in 2011 that includes a digital inventory and map of every tree planted in the cemetery.

Another example of the cemetery’s use of digital technology is its grave search system. If one wishes to locate a specific person buried at the cemetery, one can simply look them up on Green-Wood’s website and be provided with their burial date as well as lot, section, and grave numbers. One can then locate the lot number to its address using Green-Wood’s comprehensive map. Interactive kiosks can also be used at the visitor center as well as the mausoleums on site to locate a person’s burial place.

On the tour, resident historian Jeff Richman regaled us with stories concerning the cemetery’s illustrious residents, including Rose Guarino—who was rumored to be assassinated by a mafia family but was in reality shot to death along with a servant girl (Annie Tarello) by a male caretaker (Pietro Silverio).

The elegiac Merello Volta is a monument to the deaths of Rose Guarino and Annie Tarello

The cemetery as an archive

After a tour of the cemetery grounds, archivist Anthony Cucciara took us to the administrative offices to give us a look at the cemetery’s archives. Green-Wood’s collection of artifacts consists of artwork made by its residents, photographs, personal belongings and correspondences, as well as published books. The collection is in the process of being digitized and can be browsed online here.

Green-Wood’s records include genealogical charts, family trees, last wills and testaments, death certificates, burial orders, lot records, family correspondence, and affidavit records, as well as architectural blueprints and records of the various day-to-day operations of the cemetery. Volunteers and interns can be found at work preserving and re-housing those documents. A database for these records with finding aids can be found here.

The administration offices are lined wall to wall with paintings made by residents of the cemetery

Reflections

The Green-Wood Cemetery proves itself to be a valuable institution not just because of its basic utility as a burial place but also as a historical and cultural site with educative capabilities. Its archive paints a beautiful and rich picture of the unique history of New York. But as Rilke reminds us in his Duino Elegies, underneath beauty is always terror. Green-Wood exemplifies this not just in the obvious way (it’s a cemetery) but also in the way it belies a sharp class dynamic that was present at the time of its founding (and, we should add, no less present now). In Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory, Schwartz and Cook write, “…archives are established by the powerful to protect or enhance their position in society. Through archives, the past is controlled. Certain stories are privileged and others marginalized.” The largest and most ornate monuments in the cemetery tend to be the subjects of tours, but they also tend to belong exclusively to wealthy families. Thus, the stories of the poor and working class, who often cannot afford a proper burial let alone a monument, are not often told to the public.

At the same time, the cemetery also has the power to recover the previously lost stories of the disenfranchised. An example of this is the mass grave and memorial for 103 people who died in the Brooklyn Theater Fire of 1878. The bodies buried there belonged to those who could not be identified or whose families could not afford a proper grave. But in a blog post entitled Putting a Face on a Tragedy , Jeff Richman was able to put a name and face to one of the buried through historical investigation—Donny Rose.

Preservers of memory are not predestined to always mimic power. They can serve as resistance to power precisely by making its presence known and relating the stories of its victims.

Posted on by Raymond Lei 0

Chinese Language in the Era of Information

 

Image courtesy of mocanyc.org

“Chinese characters are innocent,” said MIT-educated Chinese scholar Zhou Houkun in 1915 and quoted by the curators at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) as a radical introduction to an exhibition titled Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age. Set in the special exhibitions gallery, the exhibition is curated by Dr. Tom Mullaney from Stanford University. Exhibition materials range from archival documents, books, video clips, photographs, and the most eye-catching, rarely-seen vintage Chinese typewriters. Most of the items belong to Mullaney’s personal collection, which is “the largest Chinese and Pan-Asian typewriter and information and technology collection in the world” (mocanyc.org). This collection was formed along with the development of Mullaney’s years of scholarship at the intersection of East Asian history, history of science and technology, and transnational/international affairs.

Shu Zhendong Chinese typewriter, c.1926

The radicalness, nurtured within the complex machines themselves, also sits in the nature of the Chinese language, together with many other languages from the East, being non alphabetical and thus having faced and still facing constraints in having a smooth merge with modern information technologies particularly on the end of inputting. This curatorial project as well as Mullaney’s research thus aim to be a unique introduction to this less known piece of history and a provocation to the Western dominance structured around information technologies.

Installation view, Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age

The exhibition was divided into multiple sections, drawing curious visitors first into an brief overview of the Chinese language, characters and phonetics, and the early history of printing press — Movable Type. Departing from there, since the base of written Chinese involves largely pictograph, morphing the characters into something more systematic emerged as one approach to “alphabetize” Chinese (see photo). On the other hand, the section titled Chinese Telegraphy introduces a second approach of assigning a combination of Latin letters to each of the commonly used characters. Traced back to 1870s, this method seems to be the starting point when the Chinese language was equated to English in order to adhere to the development of information technology and people’s communication needs.

Stroke-coded Characters
Telecoded Characters

Evolution of technology and shifting mode of communication have been increasingly intertwined. To answer the question of how communication defines social existence and shapes human development, exploring the history of communication technologies, from speech and language, writing, to printing press, gives us a developmental model to discuss Internet, as the agreed fourth one (McChesney, 69). The exhibition pretty much follows this itinerary when it takes visitors to explore the following two sections: Beyond QWERTY, The Typist in China.

Close up of keyboard on Stone Chinese Computer, c. 1990s

Beyond QWERTY exhibits several systems developed in history for inputting Chinese language, from the common word usage system, to later developed Wubi system, namely entering stroke-by-stroke. The section illustrates how information technology involves a large degree of customization due to the varying linguistic composition of languages. Therefore, learning how to type on a QWERTY keyboard becomes a less intuitive task for Chinese speakers. The Typist in China introduces the cultural history of learning to type using different methods, stroke-by-stroke Wubi or the phonetic method Pinyin. Echoing pieces of Western history, learning how to type, from textbooks and illustrations, became an appreciated skill for various professions. This is also very reminiscent for me as growing up in China, we also spent a good amount of time learning how to type and recently there’s also a discussion around that since Pinyin is easier to learn and few people can now use the Wubi method to type.

Chinese textbooks teaching typing, 1960s to 90s

Personally a highlight of this exhibition turned out to be a section in the back of the gallery, named Western Perceptions. Absolutely less discussed, this section, including historical Western views of Chinese information technology presented in the realm of media and entertainment, attends to the issue from a cultural perspective. One will find video clips of Lisa Simpson and James Bond perplexed by a Chinese keyboard, Nancy in the cartoon puzzled by a Chinese typewriter found in the city dump. These manifestations carry a strong racist overtone, mocking the Chinese language being non-systematic, irrational, and thus not modern enough to keep up with modern technology.

Lisa Simpson confronted with Chinese keyboard
The Chinese Typewriter, film, 1979

Obviously there’s issues around class and accessibility, but most often we perceive technology to be culturally neutral, or that technology even being a way to culturally collectivize human beings. Yet, Radical Machines tells us that technologies could also be racialized and the prejudice reflects what has been projected onto its users. Though framed under the umbrella ideas of language, information, and technology, the curators also sought to integrate “difficult heritage” — “pasts that are meaningful in the present but that are also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive self-affirming contemporary identity” (MacDonald, 6) — into this exhibition. MacDonald in her research discusses that the task of tackling difficult heritage is indeed hard for museum and heritage institutions, in that on the one hand, museums, as public educational institutions with a sound voice, must take on the responsibility in addressing difficulty heritage, and gladly according to research observation, an increasing number of institutions are willing to do so (MacDonald, 16). On the other hand, how to address difficult heritage in a provoking yet equally inviting way always needs extensive discussion. MOCA has been an active participant in exhibiting difficult heritage: narratives in this particular section of Radical Machines resonate with those in the permanent exhibition next door, “Within a Single Step: Stories in the Making of America.”

Continuing with the socio-cultural perspective, the curator took this aspect to mark an end of this exhibition — “China is the world’s largest IT market? Isn’t it the time we knew it’s history?” Linking the past to present, Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age successfully raises the dialogue on information, language, and technology with a unique lens. To learn more on this topic, Dr. Tom Mullaney’s blog, though not updated in a while, has a handful of interesting articles.

 

Bibliography

MacDonald S. (2015). Is “difficult heritage” still difficult?. Museum International, 67, 6-22.

McChesney, R. W. (2013). How can the political economy of communication help us understand the Internet? In Digital disconnect: How capitalism is turning the Internet against democracy. New York: The New Press.

Museum of Chinese in America. (2018). Radical machines: Chinese in the information age. Retrieved from http://www.mocanyc.org/exhibitions/radical_machines

Posted on by Evian Yiyun Pan 0

A Multi-Sensory Visit to the American Museum of Natural History

At the beginning of October, I used my New York Public Library card to pay a visit to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The enormous complex was packed on that sunny Saturday afternoon, but I was still able to deeply engage with the exhibits.

AMNH was the 12th most-visited museum in the world in 2017, having almost 5,000,000 people come through its doors throughout the year (TEA/AECOM, p. 19). The institution holds 34,120,652 specimens and artifacts in its collections, and recently added over 44,000 more (American Museum of Natural History Annual Report, p. 4).

The public spaces of the buildings that make up the institution are segmented into 4 floors and a lower level. Upon entering, visitors are given a physical map outlining the best paths to take depending on the order in which they’d like to see the exhibits. AMNH also offers a mobile app that gives “turn-by-turn directions”, provides descriptions of exhibits, and allows for the use of augmented reality and other digital experiences that can open up more levels of engagement throughout (Figure 1).

Figure 1: A sign notifying visitors of the museum’s navigational app.

A very notable way in which AMNH creates a logical navigation of the space is through a mixture of information visualization and mapping. Figure 2 and Figure 3 show some charts for The Hall of Vertebrate Origins, in which a cladogram is used to physically arrange exhibits throughout the Hall in order of evolutionary relationship.

Figure 2: A navigational chart in the Hall of Vertebrate Origins.
Figure 3: A navigational chart in the Hall of Vertebrate Origins.

This technique melds the information on display with the physical space in order to help visitors navigate. Other visual techniques are also used, like the display in Figure 4 that makes up for missing parts of a fossil in order to show what the complete specimen might look like.

Figure 4: using a metal outline to show what this fossil may have looked like as a prehistoric animal.

As mentioned, the museum also has the ability to use augmented reality, permitting interaction with the exhibit itself and enabling the experience to not just rely on a visitor’s ability to read as they browse collections (Robinson, 2015, p. 4). Signifiers are placed on the floor throughout to signal when this function is available (Figure 5).

Figure 5: a sticker on the floor notifying visitors that an augmented reality experience is available through the app.

AMNH also uses tactile methods for visitors to engage on a more active level by embedding multi-sensory interactions into the exhibits themselves. Figure 6 shows a touchscreen that teaches more about “Evolutionary Changes in Placoderms” by providing the option to interact with a device rather than just merely showing a description on a sign.

Figure 6: a touchscreen next to a fossil exhibit.

In Figure 7, a sign says “Please touch this”, a very obvious signifier telling visitors that they can literally touch the bony scales of a Vinctifer, a fish that swam in the ocean 110 million years ago.

Figure 7: a fossil that visitors are allowed to touch.

The world’s largest meteorite on display, The Cape York Meteorite (Figure 8), lets visitors experience “touching an object that is nearly as old as the Sun” (American Museum of Natural History– Ahnighito).

Figure 8: the largest meteorite on display in the world, which visitors are allowed to touch.

Using the sense of touch fits into Robinson’s idea of using multi-sensory options when interacting with a display in order to make exhibits more participatory (Robinson, 2015, p. 5).

Established in 1869, the American Museum of Natural History is a scientific juggernaut, a leader in exploration and research, and is constantly adapting to the new ways in which people can experience and enjoy museums.

References

  1. TEA/AECOM 2017 Theme Index and Museum Index: The Global Attractions Attendance Report. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.aecom.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2017-Theme-Museum-Index.pdf
  2. American Museum of Natural History Annual Report 2017. (2017). Retrieved from https://www.scribd.com/document/382887896/AMNH-Annual-Report-2017#fullscreen&from_embed
  3. Robinson, L. (2014). Multi-sensory, Pervasive, Immersive: towards a new generation of documents. Retrieved from Centre for Information Science – City University London: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/6864/1/LR%20-%20Immersive%201.pdf
  4. American Museum of Natural History – Ahnighito. Retrieved from https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/earth-and-planetary-sciences-halls/arthur-ross-hall-of-meteorites/meteorites/ahnighito
Posted on by Drew Stanley Gallery 0

Queer Zine Fair Observation For Dr. Rabina’s Class

Queer Zine Fair Observation 

By Taylor Norton

For my 3-hour observation, I decided to go to the NYC LGBT Center for its New York Queer Zine Fair. While this easily could have been applied to my event attendance, I decided to take this a bit further and not only attend the fair, but observe and assess the information and information users that were being shared in this temporal setting.

Upon entering the fair, I could see that the way the 50+ artists were set up allowed for a very specific traffic pattern for attendees.  With booths lining the outer four walls and two rows of booths in the middle, people could walk in a circle in one direction while looking at the outside booths and then in another direction for the booths set up in the middle. While there was one large room with all the booths set up, there was also another room for programs and shows. The event happening while I was there was a queer collage party that allowed attendees to make their own collage that would later be scanned and made in to a zine with others’ work.

With each new booth visited, I could see a variety of identities, sexualities, and genders represented and the ways that each person decided to present themselves and their zines were distinctly different. There were tables that shared information on that person’s experience, such as a queer femme who made zines based off of the poet, Sappho, or a gay man’s zine informing people about the different meanings of colored bandanas in the pants pocket of one’s jeans. Besides zines, I also saw t-shirts, buttons, pins, and patches that were obvious to some and not so obvious to others of the wearer’s identity. Semiology, rhetoric, and double meanings could be inferred everywhere, from cat pins to patches of fingers touching flowers to crowns and collars. There were hand-drawn zines, screen-printed t-shirts, and photography zines, among other forms of ephemera. It was fascinating for me to see all of the different expressions and to learn more about a community that I am actively involved in. Two of our class readings stuck out greatly in my mind while going through this fair.

Emily Drabinksi’s 2013 article, “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” was strong in my mind as I watched people walk by booths and engage with others because not only was this an information setting that allowed people to learn more about the community that they identified with, but they were also able to buy (or sometimes trade) items that expressed their identity; an opportunity that is not always presented to them in mainstream information settings. I saw this an opportunity for people to not only queer the hypothetical catalog by learning more vocabulary and ways of expression, but also by engaging with items and eventual artifacts that have the potential to go beyond this fair and make their way in to more mainstream cultural institutions. The more people create and share, the further their messages can go beyond such information settings.

One of Drabinksi’s quotes stuck out in my mind, “The materials themselves are linguistically controlled, corralled in classification structures that fix items in place, and they are described using controlled vocabularies that reduce and universalize language, remarkably resistant to change” (Drabinksi 2013). It was obvious at this fair that there was a vast array of different identities represented here and that both written and visual linguistics were in heavy use. However, opposed to the static ways of traditional cataloging, this fair allowed information users to go from one category to the next with each new booth visited. There was absolutely controlled language in this setting; however, the feeling of learning and being open to others’ experiences allowed users to engage with others more freely in order to further their knowledge.

Another quote by Drabinksi, “Where lesbian and gay studies takes gender and sexual identities as its object of study, queer theory is interested in how those identities come discursively and socially into being and the kind of work they do in the world” (Drabinksi 2013), resonated with me during this observation. Everywhere I looked, I could see people engaging within their own identity circles while taking the time to look at information that taught them about other identity circles. It was both a social and information setting in which discourse through artifacts was encouraged to transcend the settings of the fair.

Not only was I reminded of Drabinksi’s article, but also of Marcia J. Bates’ “Fundamental Forms of Information” article written in 2006. In this article, Bates defines the general idea of what is information and the different types of information. After seeing how intentional people were with the zines they made and the booths they set up to display them, I thought of how Bates writes that, “Other than in a few cases, such as a spontaneous cry of pain or fear, all expressed information is intentionally communicative to others in the environment” (Bates 2006).

While observing how people learned about different identities through the zines and other artifacts, I recognized three main types of information at play here: embedded, expressed, and recorded information. It is very clear that there are several different identities within the queer communities, from pansexuals to bears to doms and subs to femmes, and while observing I thought of Bates’ quote: “Because animals act, they leave evidence of their presence” (Bates 2006). Here people were acting on their gender and sexual identities and actively reaching out for shareable informational objects that represented and showcased their identities.

One example of information being produced from humans’ presence is embedded information. Bates writes, “In short, the embedded information is generally not left by its creators to be informative, but rather is informative as an incidental consequence of the activities and skills of the people leaving the artifacts” (Bates 2006). Many of the creators had started with the idea of processing embedded information from their lives and made them into recorded information. Described as “communicatory or memorial information preserved in a durable medium” (Bates 2006), these zines and ephemera were direct representations of expressed information.

While watching people interact with artists and buy zines, pins, patches, and t-shirts, I couldn’t help but consider the impact of this information setting in a wider capacity. People and their experiences were able to feel validated through the readily available and expressed information and could take this validation—in metaphorical and haptic representations—beyond the fair. As Bates writes, “Recorded information is distinguished here from expressed information because the invention of writing and the development of the technologies to produce durable recorded information appear to have had an immeasurable impact on human cultures and on the speed of development of those cultures. No longer do humans have to try to memorize all that their culture knows; now a lot of that information can be kept in durable form outside the body. The durability and storage efficiency of such information have enabled a great leap in human information processing” (Bates 2006). While seeing people use recorded representations of their identity, I could see a world of information being reborn and growing through the exchange of such information.

Posted on by Taylor Norton 0

Help! ––I’m at a symposium and I’m trying to learn!

By Meghan Lyon

Last Friday, October 19th, I had the pleasure of observing two symposiums. I attended the first half of The Uncomfortable Archive: New York 2018 Archives Week Symposium, and the the second half of the first day of theWhitney Independent Study Program 1968-2018 50th Anniversary Symposium. These events marked my first encounter with the conference-style symposium. I have attended numerous lectures, but a presentation in the symposium format has a quality that diverges from a unique lecture; each speaker addresses their own content or area of expertise  as well as the overarching concept of the day.

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of symposium includes: “a social gathering at which there is a free interchange of ideas”; “a formal meeting at which several specialists deliver short addresses on a topic”; “a collection of opinions on a subject”; and “discussion.” Additionally, it defines a panel as “a group of persons who discuss before an audience a topic of public interest.” The panel would be the object of attention, the body expected to enlighten the audience; it could also be the platform from which information is distributed. From my observation of the symposium as an information environment, I would define it as a learning-based information environment, where the audience is an information-seeking group whose attendance is predicated on the expectation of a conference of knowledge from the panelists. 

The Uncomfortable Archive Symposium, which I observed from 9:30 am through the lunch break at 1:15 pm, was devised to motivate the audience by revealing uncomfortable histories and truths about archives or loosely-defined archival materials. This goal manifested in multiple presentations about obstacles to record keeping and maintenance from autocrats, fascists, and capitalists. The Keynote Address was given by Anthony Clark, who played up the “uncomfortable” concept. Clark is an expert on presidential libraries and archives and discussed the more insidious aspects of presidential libraries—not just as propaganda machines but as active forces in politics, conservatively oriented towards maintaining the status quo of private interest groups. His address examined the unfortunate history and present mismanagement of the National Archives and Records Administration by the former director of NYPL, David Ferriero.

Clark addressed a room full of concerned professionals who were mostly cis-female, mostly white. The audience lights and stage lights were both on and remained on throughout the day; the AC was on, there was carpeting and plush chairs, there were no outlets throughout the seating area, and  there was no wifi and no data service in the hall at the Center for Jewish History. There was a podium for speakers and a table for panelists; I found that every panelist was an individual speaker and the “panel” discussion was, unfortunately, just an audience Q&A directed at the group of “panelists.”

The Uncomfortable Archives Symposium was crafted as a learning environment for archivists and professionals within the field of information. Most audience members were taking notes; actively engaged and trying to learn. However, several days after the Uncomfortable Archives, a peer who was also in attendance bemoaned that there was too little discussion of problems or troubleshooting thereof from within archives; in other words, she gained no knowledge that was useful to her as a professional.  Also, most talks were initiated after a precarious disclaimer: “My comments are my own and not my employers,” a common social media and web-based, personal disclaimer which has migrated towards any format that has the potential to wind up on the internet. This attempt by speakers to protect their professional status could relate to Robert Jensen’s paper, The Myth of the Neutral Professional. In order to keep their jobs, librarians and archivists are pressured to appear politically neutral. At the very least, they must attempt to be sure that they cannot be held accountable as a representative of their employer when speaking publicly. I find the disclaimers’ presence to be unsettling, and feel sorry that the speakers need to present defensively on stage.

Midday I walked over to the Whitney Museum of American Art for the ISP 50 Year Anniversary Symposium; This second observation lasted from 2:30pm – 8pm.

The Whitney Independent Study Program 50 year anniversary Symposium was a very different kind of event from the Uncomfortable Archive; It was not technically a professional event. The intended audience was ISP alumni, but the ISP program is so popular that many others were also in the audience. The 2-day event was both open to the public and free, so it drew contemporary art enthusiasts, fans of panelists, social climbers, artists, museum workers, art historians, current university students, and people in some way involved in the art world who are hungry for continued education. Because of the various points of entry, there was also a more diverse demographic. It was so packed in the lecture hall that overflow seating was made available in the Tom and Diane Tuft Trustee Room on the 8th floor, which is where I wound up for the first panel that I witnessed.

Whitney ISP Symposium from the 8th floor Trustee Room

In the trustee room, there was a monitor playing a livestream of the symposium as it occurred downstairs. This room quickly filled up, although it wasn’t totally full and people wandered in and out. There was an odd phenomenon of 8th floor of attendees clapping when speakers concluded, even though the presenters were on tv.

Another unexpected occurrence (unexpected to the Whitney staff, at least) was that people who showed up at the beginning of the symposium did not leave. This created a major occupancy problem, because people who registered beforehand, or who were ISP alum, could not enter. I believe that the organizers thought that people would come for a panel, or a particular speaker, and then leave—grossly underestimating the major interest in this kind of educational experience. After witnessing this symposium, I would conclude that multitudes of people are craving high quality, free, educational experiences. The panelists in this case were key figures in art theory, writing, criticism, contemporary studio practice, and pedagogy, and it is too often an exclusive few who are able to interact with the brilliance associated with the ISP milieu.

Like the Uncomfortable Archives’ attendees, nearly every audience member had a notebook out, although I would say the note-taking at the Whitney was a little more feverish, on both the 8th and 3rd floors. Eventually, a few people from the 8th floor went down in between panels to try and claim a few abandoned seats.

A panel in the lecture hall at the Whitney ISP Symposium

I made it into the lecture hall for the Pedagogy and Critical Practice panel. The structure of the panels were similar to those of the earlier symposium; each member of the panel gave a short presentation with slides, however, instead of a Q&A afterwards, there was a moderated discussion on the overarching theme of the panel, with a short time for  audience questions. The time-ratio weighed heavily on the lectures, clocking in at almost 2 hours of serial lectures per 20 minutes of panel discussion.

A little earlier in the evening, curator Johanna Burton had referenced  “embodied learning”—which she described as something along the lines of “trying out learning through new experiences.”  I thought this would be a good opportunity to explore  Marcia J. Bates’ paper Fundamental Forms of Information.  I could see note-taking as an interaction with recorded information, “communicatory or memorial information preserved in a durable medium,” (Bates 14)  as well as an enactment of student/teacher paradigm, and an attempt to fill a knowledge-seeking need. The symposium could be examined as a place for the expression of recorded information (lectures) to be

Single-Circle Diagram that says "Information Environment / Learners / I feel grateful to be here ----->"
“Information Environment / Learners / I feel grateful to be here ——–>”

embodied by an audience through listening and interpretation, and then enacted by their future selves as more knowledgable beings.  

Nearing the end of the ISP Symposium, Mary Kelly took the stage. Kelly was the only speaker who did not use a slide-show presentation, and she was so soft spoken yet captivating, you could feel the entire audience leaning in and opening up. I drew a small diagram of the environment and how I felt.

Sources:

Bates, M. (2006). Fundamental Forms of Information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(8) (2006): 1033-1045

Jensen, R. (2006). The Myth of the Neutral Professional. Lewis, A. (Ed.), Questioning Library Neutrality: Essays from Progressive Librarian. (pp. 89-96). Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press.

 

Posted on by Meghan Lyon 0

Effective Engagement @ Cooper-Hewitt

Effective Engagement @ Cooper-Hewitt

by Elizabeth Phyle

To observe an information environment I spent time at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum watching audiences interact with their exhibit. The Cooper-Hewitt is at the forefront of incorporating technology into their visitor experiences. In addition, they have “Senses: Design Beyond Vision” on view until the end of the month. I am very interested in how museums incorporate tactile activities to facilitate visitor engagement with the material. The “Senses” exhibit and their other hands-on exhibits gave me a chance to observe how these features provide deeper engagement as well as how they potentially divert attention from more substantial information.

Perspective taking

I believe that sense are an under-utilized tool in museums. We ask visitors to look, listen, and read a lot while they walk through a quiet gallery. It was shocking the difference in atmosphere between the more traditional exhibits and the “Senses” exhibit. The energy was palpable while people were engaged in touching and smelling as well as looking and listening. Some of the most interesting installments were the ones that took a risk; using the senses to convey something beyond words. For example there were translucent white boxes with phrases on top of them describing a moment or feeling that is specific enough to conjure an image in your mind. Then you press a button, lean in close, and the artist’s interpretation of that scent whiffs over you. Watching people interact with the exhibit was fascinating. People had strong, immediate reactions; often in the form of interjections, not words. The scent named “the feeling for someone once loved, but no longer” elicited pained “oohs.” The one named “being perfectly entangled with another” caused many visitors to smile and “awwhh”. Not everyone thought that every scent was a perfect representation of the emotion described, but it served as a fantastic conversation starter either way. Any good exhibit asks visitors to shift their perspective. By asking them to uses their senses in unfamiliar ways the exhibit forces perspective shift. Context shifting is an important skill in a multi media and medium world. Other museums could incorporate sound, touch and smell into their exhibit in similar ways to help visitors realize their own perspective and take on the perspective of others.

One installment that compelled the visitor to enter the life of another was called “Portal_Soundscapes” Here visitors listened to sounds from cities around the world including voices from refugee camps. I found it very powerful, but unfortunately not many people visited it while I was in that area. This may be partly because it was slightly off the main path, or it may be that visitors did not want to engage in more serious topics while they were playing. Things like this that offer a wide snapshot of human experience could be useful in history museums. Oral histories are powerful, but visitors can also benefit from abstract views of the human experience like asking “what do humans sound like?”

The nagging questions that I had all the while was, how much are people actually taking away as they flit from one thing to the next? It is a tall order to expect visitors to be able to go from scratching and sniffing a wall to reading the placard text about accessible design. I saw that some visitors would skip any exhibit here that didn’t have some of sensory activity associated with it. Like bee’s between flowers, many people would walk up to the installment, do a quick skim for any feature that they could do something with, but if all there was was something to read or information to listen to they would flutter to the next spot and repeat. This certainly telling about how we prefer to interact with our surroundings, but to what extent should museums cater to these impulses? This reminds me of the discussion of user-centered versus system-centered design that we encountered in Talja and Hartel as well as the class discussion we had surrounding it. They discuss the traps in images about user-centeredness being warm and compassionate opposed to a cold and quantitative system centered design (Talja and Hartel 2007). Compared to traditional museum experiences where the visitor is expected to conform to the museum, we can see with the rise of sensory exhibits and pop-up museums how museums are being pressured to cater to the visitor. However, museums should not lose sight of their mission and institutional strengths. The Cooper-Hewitt overall did a fantastic job of balancing education, collection presentation, and interaction.

Conscious Consuming of Information

At a small out-of-the-way alcove there was a headset with two short hospital soundscapes. One was of a traditional hospital setting with high frequency beepings, rushing of gurneys, panicked footsteps, and doctors yelling out stats. The other one was what a “humane patient experience” could sound like. It explains how information could be communicated between nurses and doctors while preserving a environment that is beneficial to the patient. This reminds me of the way they Sengers ended the article on Practices for a Machine Culture, she argues for “technical artefacts that enrich human experience, rather than reducing it to a quantified, formalized, efficient, and lifeless existence (Sengers 2000).” Hospitals are a great example of a systems-centered environment. Since their work is so technical, fast pace, and high pressure, it is unsurprising that the externalities of their system is not something that has traditionally been at the forefront. This exhibit allows visitors to think critically about these externalities as well as examine the role that sound plays in decoding our environment and on our stress levels.

Cooper-Hewitt is a unique case for consumerism in museums because at its core it is a product design museum. The question then become are they feeding consumer culture or educating on it? There was only one stark example that I found of product promotion in the museum. There was a wall of chocolate bars in different flavors and enticing packaging, which you could conveniently find for sale in the gift shop. I could find no educational value in this installment. The purpose it served was only to generate excitement about a product. Again this brings us back to the user-centered discussion. The designers tell the user what they need and proceed to embed their product into the grooves of our lives. This is not the same as responding to a demand.

On the other hand, working through this exhibit may be an effective way for visitors to learn about the ways we react in accordance with our senses and ways we are likely to be deceived. The disability and sensory design area showed how certain scents can spark appetite and memory for dementia patients, and how color coded design can help our brains understand the functionality of items. Examples like these shows how the exhibit is educating visitors to what product design has the potential to be. In “Saturated: The Allure of Science and Color” there was a old Mac computed on display with this quote from Steve Jobs, “For most consumers, color is more important than megahertz, gigabytes, and other gibberish associated with buying a typical PC.” This placed in an exhibit about color allows visitors to reflect on their own consumer decision and how they are affected by design. This fits in to the discussion about design justice introduced to us by Constanza. The products we buy are all encoded with values, and along with the values are the frameworks of our society and all the power structures that entails (Constanza 2018). Museum experiences that let the visitor “behind the scenes” on how and why things are designed allow them to decode their consumer environment.

 

Talja, S., Hartel, J, (2007). Revisiting the user-centred turn in information science research: an intellectual history perspective. Information Research, 12(14).

Constanza-Chock, S. (2018). Design  Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. Design Research Society. University of Limerick. 25th-28th June 2018.

Sengers, P. (2000). Practices for a Machine Culture: A case study of integrating cultural theory and artificial intelligence. Surfaces. Presses de l’Universite de Montreal.

Posted on by Elizabeth Phyle 0