Coordinating the material culture of technology

At SHOT several weeks ago, we had a meeting of the TEMSIG group, the technology museums special interest group.*  A small braintrust of public historians of technology (Allison March, Erik Nystrom, David Unger and I) had an exciting conversation.

We realized that most of us, and the many people interested in, broadly, the material culture of technology don’t often go to SHOT or are not particularly involved in that Society, but we do generally make the rounds of other conferences and associations, such as NCPH, AAM and Museums and the Web, where we talk about our work among people in intersecting, but not exactly the same fields.  We are museum people, scholars, public historians and digital historians and have no particular disciplinary homes–so how can we connect, coordinate and collaborate?

We quickly realized that working only within SHOT was probably not useful for us, and we don’t have any interest in forming a new professional association**–so what’s next?  We’re thinking about an informal coordinating committee with one basic aim being to improve communication with some further goals relating to collections (cooperative loans and exhibits), and an interest in nurturing and developing better tools for digitizing material culture (and the mat cult of technology in particular).

What’s next?  Well, who’s in?  Also, we need to develop a catchy name and a basic timeline of plans and goals.  What do you think?

 

*I have no idea what the E stands for.  Engineering?  Or is it just for euphony?

**The way that professional organizations are broken is one of my personal hobby horses.

 

SHOT report

I had a lovely time in Pittsburgh last weekend with a crowd of historians of technology.  Here, the highlights of the conference from a Suzanne perspective.  140 character highlights can be found by searching the #shot09 hashtag (which was mostly me).  

 

Travels

I’ve been having a busy fall; you can see some of the results on the museum’s blog and some will be announced later.  I’ll be making the rounds of some fall conferences, so here’s the details:

10/15 (this Thursday):  I’ll be poking my head in at the Michigan Museums Association conference in Ann Arbor before heading on the road to Pittsburgh

10/15 to 10/17 In Pittsburgh for the Society for the History of Technology conference .  My session is bright and early on Friday morning.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16

8.30-10 AM

3.   Web 2.0 and the History of Technology

Chair: Sheldon Hochheiser (IEEE History Center)

Commentator: Thomas J. Misa (Charles Babbage Institute)

Organizers: Michael N. Geselowitz (IEEE History Center) and Thomas J. Misa (Charles Babbage Institute)

Stephanie H. Crowe (Charles Babbage Institute): Experimenting with Web 2.0 at the Charles Babbage Institute

Suzanne Fischer (The Henry Ford): The History Museum as Communication Platform

Michael N. Geselowitz (IEEE History Center): The IEEE Global History Network

10/21 I’ll be attending TEDx Detroit, along with my THF colleague Eric Reasons.

11/5 to 11/7 In St Louis for the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference.  Yes, I’m clearly not a moving image archivist, but I’m excited to have been asked to speak on an awesome panel about open media and to bring lessons from public history to moving image archives colleagues.

Saturday, November 7

10:45 AM – 11:45 AM
The Problem of Open Media

Chair
Jack Brighton – Illinois Public Media

Speakers
Peter Kaufman – Intelligent Television, Inc.
Rick Prelinger – Prelinger Library & Archives
Suzanne M. Fischer- The Henry Ford
Karl Fogel – QuestionCopyright.org

The term ‘Open Media’ has gained currency with the explosion of online archives. Some media collections are open for people to download, share, mashup, and reuse. Others seek to prevent their works from being copied. To the extent that there is an “open media community,” it envisions a large and active public media commons, providing global access to historical, cultural, and other materials relevant, and in many cases vital, to the public interest. Meanwhile, copyright and intellectual property laws add layers of confusion and conflicting interests, while new technologies make controlling and monetizing media problematic for all concerned. How might we solve the problem of open media? This session will address some of the obstacles and opportunities, and suggest new business models that allow content to breathe freely while still paying the rent. We’ll also discuss the role of the archivist as key to an open media future.

 

Win/lose

We’ve had some sad preservation stories recently here in southeast Michigan, with a few bright spots nationally.

• Old Tiger Stadium (near my house in Detroit) is now almost totally down, and folks are gathering pieces as mementoes.
• The Lafayette Building in downtown Detroit is being readied for demolition.
• The Michigan State Fair, the country’s oldest, really is shutting down (I was hoping for a deus ex machina).  The Archives of Michigan has been gathering Fair records–and don’t ask me what’s going to happen to the big stove.
• HAL itself is in limbo.
• Michigan History magazine has moved from HAL to the Historical Society of Michigan, but there were calls to privatize the magazine. (h/t Lisa Craig Brisson).

The good news is all cliffhanger saved-in-the-nick stories:

• Every library in Philadelphia was set to close, but, perhaps due to the public outcry, the state legislature passed a budget and saved the libraries.
• Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (who has tried to defund museums in the past), as well as Sen McCain of Arizona, proposed amendments to the FY2010 transportation bill to prohibit transportation funds from being used for museums or historic preservation.  These were happily defeated in the Senate last week.

For good historic preservation news, the National Trust has some interesting content on Latino heritage in preservation.

 

My dissertation

If you’d like to read my dissertation, here it is.

Please cite as:

Suzanne Fischer, “Diseases of Men:  Sexual Health and Medical Expertise in Advertising Medical Institutes, 1900-1930,” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2009.

Diseases of Men: Sexual Health and Medical Expertise in Advertising Medical Institutes, 1900-1930 by Suzanne M Fischer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

 

Wilderness

This week, a blow for preservationists in Orange County, VA. The county board has approved Walmart’s plans to build a store on the outskirts of Wilderness battlefield, which will radically change the character of the historic site.  Local historians have been fighting the store, but aren’t surprised by the decision.  There is some possibility, however, of a continued fight or appeal.

This news, combined with continued preservationist losses here in Detroit, is disheartening.  I can’t shake the feeling that we’re turning into CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.  Readers, do you have any positive history news to share?

 

What history museums can learn from the web

Next week I’ll be in Providence, RI, attending a workshop on the future of history museums with a small group of public history types.  We’re all writing short think pieces about the future of history museums (posted on the workshop’s blog; for starters, check out Dan Spock’s piece about nostalgia); here’s mine. (more links TK, sorry)

How can web 2.0’s culture of transparency,  possibility and massive collaboration help us think about the future of history museums?  Though when we talk about the web, we tend to talk about tools, the tools are not the point.  How can we use the ways in which web is destabilizing our culture to do what we do better and keep history museums relevant, sustainable and vital?

Network effects

I recently visited a very small history museum, The Bank of Memories, in Orient, Iowa.  Located in one room in a former bank building, the museum features a large reproduction of a Mormon family and hand-drawn wagon, with a mural of the LDS migration across southern Iowa, along with a small amount of photographs and documents of local celebrities.  That’s all.  The museum is open very limited hours, and staffed entirely by volunteers.  But  it’s part of a cooperating network of museums, historic sites, and even historic wheel tracks on the Iowa Mormon Trail, part of the Mormon Pioneer Trail National Historic Trail, and a member of the private nonprofit Mormon Trails Association.  The tiny Bank of Memories becomes one stop (or “start,” as Nancy Proctor describes the quanta of mobile tours) on a long journey of stories about Mormon migration, America’s move West, and religious history, and both the small museum and the larger trail are enriched.

The idea of network effects is a commonplace: cooperation is good, and the more participants you have the more valuable—and the more surprising and exciting—the results, but recent projects on the web such as the Flickr Commons have shown that a cooperating network of museums and cultural institutions builds a larger, more diverse network of users, who bring new enthusiasm to the physical museums.

Value amateurs

Cooperating and collaborating with other institutions, joining databases, opening collections and cross-promoting are all useful, but history museums could also become more open to the contributions of amateur historians (I like to say “citizen historians”).  Sincerely involving amateurs means communicating more clearly what we do: making our policies more transparent, our collections more open.  “Renegades” are doing history already; how can we help them?  How can they help us?

Value young people

In the web space, people in their twenties and thirties program and develop, start companies, serve on boards, are thought leaders, and are generally respected as valuable colleagues, contributors and leaders, not despite or because of their age.  History museums need to do a better job of hiring, promoting, and respecting younger people and emerging professionals as colleagues and professionals.

In some ways, valuing young people needs to extend to interpretation.  The ubiquitous Victorian parlor reflects what the largest generation of history museum founders and workers remembered about their grandparents, not an inevitable avenue for talking about American social history.  The past’s vision of the past is not necessarily ours, and we need to make space for new stories and the way new people tell them.

Return of the local

With the increasing globalization of information, especially news, the local, and particularly the hyperlocal—location-aware information on news, businesses, environment, people in close proximity—has been taking on a new importance.  As newspapers go bankrupt across the country, media companies have been (paradoxically?) founding and funding local information sites.  Local history museums (and big history museums, which always exist in a place) have an opportunity to become hubs and resources for the local, for historic photos and maps, for environmental history, for helping to ground our visitors in not only time but place.

In short, the culture of the web can help move history museums toward institutions John Cotton Dana would admire:  universal, connected, accessible and relevant.

 

History terminal

Talk about a museum as community hub:  the Wapello County Historical Museum in Ottumwa, Iowa, is also the Amtrak station and bus depot.

 

The real and the true: on alternate history

History museums are in the business of helping people make meaning out of the past, often through historic objects.  Stories and personal connections in history help people feel the emotional meanings of objects, engaging with the past in a creative and intimate way.

Supporting the historical imaginary, though, could mean tolerating, supporting, even promoting stories that are not accurate.  For museums, whose brands rest on their authenticity, alternate histories can be a minefield–but I’ve been seeing a clear trend toward them.  Should we develop these kind of experiences?  Or do we have a moral duty not to?  Can museums make space for the historical imaginary?  How can we make space for visitors to dream themselves into the past?  Can museums support the whimsical and untrue while making clear what we have evidence for, and what we don’t?

The Ghosts of a Chance alternate reality game at SAAM is a great example of the way alternate stories can coexist with the real objects and stories in the museum.  In the ARG story, young curators are haunted by restless spirits whose demands visitors need to discover and propitiate through the making of objects related to SAAM’s collections and other tasks.  The story was told through the web and the museum, and despite the this-is-not-a-game epistemology of ARGs, it was clearly an alternate story (ghosts, curators in their early twenties with myspace profiles, the bodybuilder at ARG-fest-o-con).  If the Smithsonian can support alternate history storylines, can your museum?  Or is the Smithsonian’s perceived authenticity so high that something like Ghosts of a Chance can’t hurt it?  And is it easier for an art museum to support an alternate history story than a history museum, whose mission is to research, preserve and interpret the past?

Recently the museosphere has been talking about the Powerhouse Museum’s clever Odditorium, where the writer and artist Shaun Tan was given the opportunity to write fictitious labels about some curious objects from the museum’s collections.  The “real” labels for the objects (the label text is headed “what they actually are!”) are all put together in a separate area in the exhibit, while Shaun’s labels accompany the artifacts. Visitors are also encouraged to write their own (Balderdash-type) labels for these interesting objects, and visitor participation has been enthusiastic.

Nina Simon recently posted on the project, and suggested that this kind of space for play and alternate or subversive meaning-making should be “tucked into the corner of every collecting museum.”

In the Odditoreum, you know you are being given a little space to have fun and poke at the rest of it all. The rules of the museum still exist, and it’s more powerful to subvert them in little bits than to throw them out altogether.

If an alternate history space is clearly but not didactically set aside, as in the Odditoreum, I’m more optimistic about the mission fit of such a space. For instance, I’ve been thinking about how to encourage steampunk enthusiasts at my museum, and this might be an interesting model.

History is stories, of course, not just one narrative (one museum recovering and telling a true narrative different from the canonical one is the National Museum of the American Indian), and a history museum, to do good public history, needs to tell its stories responsibly.

Instantiating alternate history at museums can do a disservice to objects.  Some of the Powerhouse’s curiosities considered for the Odditoreum, like the 2nd-best collection of barbed wire in Australia, are strange true stories.  Museums like the Mutter in Philadelphia arguably tell as unusual, unbelievable and unfamiliar stories as the (entirely fabricated) Museum of Jurassic Technology.  Maybe one compromise tactic is bringing more curious and wonderful objects onto the floor, ones that resist conventional interpretations.

 

Camping trip

Over the last few months, the museum blogosphere has been talking about conferences.  Are conferences broken?  Yes.  (Particularly in environmental terms.)  Do we still need f2f conferences? Yes! Folks have been discussing other models, like virtual conferences, conferences as discrete points in ongoing conversations, Maker Faire (or skillshares in general?)  and camp.

I’m happy to say that I’m going to camp,  THATcamp, this weekend at CHNM.  There will be a bit of a mw2009 reunion there, it looks like (a conference that is not broken), and many of my favorite digital historians will be there, including many internet friends whom I’ve met and many I’ve yet to meet.  I expect that this will be an extremely well-tweeted conference, and also watch the THATcamp blog for ideas both already presented and emerging.

I see my role at THATcamp as mostly jumping up and down to say “What about museums?  What about material culture?”  That was basically my proposal:  ”I’d like to talk about how to make museum collections, particularly three dimensional artifacts of material culture, part of ongoing digital humanities work. What are the challenges involved in 3D imaging, providing access, building ways for visitors and scholars to interact and engage with non-scanner-ready historical collections?”  Luckily, it looks like other campers are thinking about these issues too!  I’ll keep you posted on our discussions.