Museum Archipelago

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83. Chris Newell Forges The Snowshoe Path as the First Wabanaki Leader of the Abbe Museum Jul 06, 2020

Show notes

Chris Newell remembers the almost giddy level of excitement he felt when he visited the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine as a kid. Every summer, the family drove for more than two hours for his father to perform songs about their Passamaquoddy language at the Native Market and the Native American Festival hosted by the museum. But even as a young person, Newell could clearly see the difference between the the Native Market and the Festival, which were run by members of the Wabanaki Nations, and the Museum itself, which was not. Today, Chris Newell, a Passamaquoddy citizen, is the first member of the Wabanaki Nations to lead the Abbe Museum. When he took on the role, the museum changed his title to Executive Director and Senior Partner to Wabanaki Nations, one of many steps toward decolonizing the museum and shifting power. In this episode, Newell describes how to spot a colonial museum, how museums’ default colonial mindset—including when it comes to maps and language—harms everyone, and his plan for his tenure. Image: Beadwork by Kristen Newell (Mashantucket Pequot). Wabanaki double-curve motif with dawn time as the background. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Visiting the Abbe Museum 01:40 Chris Newell, Executive Director and Senior Partner to the Wabanaki Nations 02:05 Akomawt Educational Initiative 02:29 Museum Archipelago Ep. 68 with endawnis Spears 02:46 What is a Colonial Museum? 04:30 The Abbe Museum’s Decolonization Process 05:45 The Wabanaki Nations 06:31 What It Means to be Senior Partner to the Wabanaki Nations 08:07 Museums’ Default Colonial Mindset 09:06 How Do You Know If You’re Visiting a Colonial Museum? 09:30 Maps in the Abbe Museum 10:39 The Use of Language in the Abbe Museum 12:05 “There’s No Book” 13:24 SPONSOR: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green, Available Wherever Books Are Sold 14:27 Outro | Join Club Archipelago Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 83. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Chris Newell remembers visiting the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine as a kid. His father was hired to put on educational performances, to perform songs about their Passamaquoddy language, history and culture at the Native Market and the Native American Festival hosted by the museum. So every summer, the family would drive the two and a half hours from their home Motahkmikuhk. Newell looked forward to it year after year with an almost giddy level of excitement. But even as a young person, Newell could clearly see the difference between the surrounding events, like the Native market and the Festival, which were run by members of the Wabanaki Nations, and the Museum itself, which was not. Chris Newell: Back then, the Abbe Museum was more of a traditional ethnographic collection, a lot of lithics and things like that, so when it came to the museum itself, it did feel very much like a colonial museum. It was a Bar Harbor institution, not necessarily a Wabanaki institution. So I definitely felt a lot more connection to things like the events, the Native American festival and those because those were Native run and the Abbe supporting them. Although I knew what the Abbe had, I knew the special collection, I knew the treasure that they have as far as the history of my peoples, Passamaquoddy people as well as Wabanaki peoples in general. and so I've always been attracted to what is available in the Abbe. Back then as a child, I felt it was kind of two different spaces. Today, Chris Newell, a Passamaquoddy citizen, is the first member of the Wabanaki Nations to lead the Abbe Museum. Chris Newell: Hi everybody. My name is Chris Newell and I am the director of education for the Akomawt Educational Initiative, also a cofounder, and I'm also the executive director and senior partner to Wabanaki nations for the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. Chris Newell cofounded the Akomawt Educational Initiative in 2018 with endawnis Spears (Diné/ Ojibwe/ Chickasaw/ Choctaw) and Dr. Jason Mancini. Akomawt is a Passamaquoddy word for the snowshoe path. At the beginning of winter, the snowshoe path is hard to find. But the more people pass along and carve out this path through the snow during the season, the easier it becomes for everyone to walk it together. On episode 68 of this show, we interviewed Spears about how the Initiative was born out of their experiences seeing colonial museum practices across present-day New England.So what do we mean when we say colonial museum -- outside the context of Colonial Williamsburg, of course. Chris Newell: this kind of goes off of my colleague endawnis Spears who was on Museum Archipelago before: museums are colonial artifacts. The idea of a museum comes with colonization. And tribal museums, even in their own right, are using that colonial artifacts methodology as a way to present their native histories, although they do it in different in a tribal museum. In a non-tribal museum largely it's based off of the American Conservation Movement, which started in the 19th century. And when it came to museums and especially the way museum content was created, colonial museums would oftentimes focus on tribes that they felt at the time were less impacted, which would have been Western Plains tribes and Southwestern tribes. Chris Newell: So if you go into a non-tribal museum that has native content, a colonial museum, then what you typically see is a presentation of native cultures from through the lens of anthropology and archeology. And a lot of those voices, 99% of those voices, especially in the past were non-native voices that were framing that lens on how to view our cultures and so it's not uncommon to see things that may seem out of place. So to go to a Northeastern museum that has a Native collection and to see only Plains artwork or only Southwestern pottery and no Wampum art, no Ash Splint basketry is really kind of an old fashioned way of presenting things that goes back to a mode of thinking that really originated in the idea that Native people were going to vanish at one point, and that we needed our history saved by an outside force. And that's literally what the colonial museum represents is that mindset. And the Abbe Museum is rooted in that mindset. Opened in 1928, it housed the collection of Native American objects gathered by radiologist Robert Abbe in a purpose-built building. Newell was hired to lead the Abbe Museum in February 2020, just before lockdowns due to Covid-19 began. But the decolonization process had been going on at the museum for the past five years. Chris Newell: The Abbe Museum has gone through the past five years under the previous executive director, the president-CEO at the time, Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, a decolonization process. And part of that was not just in the content of the museum, which centers Native voices now, but also in the structure of the way the museum is run. And the Abbe has, over time, restructured its board to become a majority Wabanaki board. So, as a colonial museum that presents Wabanaki history, we are probably the only museum that has that structure, where the voice of the people that we are representing is now centered and also is governing the institution itself. When the changeover in directorship happened, the museum changed the title from president and CEO to executive director and Senior Partner to Wabanaki Nations as part of this decolonization process and the shift of power. Chris Newell: The Wabanaki tribes of today are five tribes, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Miꞌkmaq, Maliseet, and Abenaki tribes and the history, there was 20 tribes at one point , but currently there are five tribes. Wabanaki are, is an overarching term for the cosmology of the peoples in those tribes in the belief, in the Gloosekap stories, a creation named Gloosekap created our people from the ash trees and gave us the name Wabanaki, which is the anglicized version of in Passamaquoddy Wolastoqiyik, which would translate to the people of the Dawn. Collectively, that's how we see ourselves. We understand that we are the Eastern most tribes on the continent. And we are all connected in that way. So when it comes to that portion of my job, I take it very, very seriously. There's no book, right? There's no example for me to follow. I think about the museum world and the lack of representation by native people in the museum world. There's a history for the reason why that is, but what I always tell people is that it doesn't not do us any good as native people to be absent from these spaces. No matter what these spaces are interpreting our cultures and our histories and everything else, therefore we need to be present there. 85% of native people work in the museum field as an entry level of visitor services or security. And very few of us get up into the intellectual leadership positions and what I would want to do, in the long run, I would love to see the Abbe museum have full Wabanaki staff. I mean, that would be the, the biggest goal I could actually have, but how do I do that? I need to partner the community into the museum world. That way, the Abbe always feels like a welcoming space to any of the community members from the Wabanaki communities in Maine and beyond. Newell acknowledges that encouraging members of the Wabanaki Nations to work at the Abbe Museum can be an uphill battle because of the racist history of museums like it. Chris Newell: The way museums in the past have done things like hold on to Native American remains that has, you know, the older generation would not go into those physical spaces because of that. The Abbe museum is one of the places where we have repatriated all of those remains and we're making it into a welcome space and that's a big change for the museum world. But even outside of holding onto human remains, there are many examples of how museums’ default colonial mindset can—in addition to everything else—lead to a worse visitor experience. Chris Newell: As somebody that used to work in a tribal museum, it was not uncommon for me in that space for a non-native visitor, whether a child or adult to ask whether the tribe that we were presenting the history of still existed. There's a lot of people in this world that still think that Native people are all dead and gone, and that's oftentimes reinforced by their childhood experiences and their adult experiences going into a colonial museum and seeing artifacts that are only from the past or seeing our work that is only from the past. And so for museums to update or be decolonized the way that they present themselves. They really gotta get out of that mode of trying to save a vanishing culture, but rather hosts the art in the histories of the living cultures that exist here now. One of the easiest ways to tell if you’re visiting a colonial museum is if it doesn’t ask you as the visitor to normalize some aspect of the culture presented. So an Abbe Museum experience that only features maps with modern-day political borders, or is entirely in English, is not doing a good job of presenting the culture that members of the Wabanaki Nations share. Chris Newell: Two dimensional maps are, of course, a European a derivation or creation, Native people map the world in a different way. And we use songs, very long songs and orations to map our territory. But if you go into the exhibits, what we did was we did create a two dimensional map of all of Wabanaki territory, but we took out the roads and the cities and all the colonial borders. And then when you see the landscape that way, representative in that fashion, you see how it all of a sudden makes sense how our tribes existed, the riverways that separated our territories and all of those things. Chris Newell: And you can see how people traveled, great distances, how they would portage from one river to another. So it’s also is going to enrich the experience for the non-Wabanaki visitor, because they're really going to be able to, you know, see our perspective in our worldview in our language and the way we view land, all of those things, not an interpretation, but rather a first person perspective, which is really, really a powerful and impactful way. Bar Harbor, Maine is an international tourist destination—cruise ships dock there. Today, the museum’s exhibits and signage are mostly in English, but Newell hopes that under his tenure, much more Native language gets incorporated to the point where a non-Wabanaki visitor will have learned some Native words before they leave the museum. Chris Newell: Iit gets rid of the implicit bias that colonial museums have been feeding for so long. When the early English would arrive in the 17th century, they would use the word “improvement” as a reason for taking over and subduing land. Building things like farms, permanent housing. But nowadays in America we used a word development to do the exact same thing, but when we use that word development, what we mean is we're about to dig up a big plot of that life giving life cycle, and we're going to do something and build something, but really the process involved destruction first. Chris Newell: Viewing the landscape through the different languages really gives you a window into the different mindsets. The use of language I think is probably the best bridge that I can draw for making all of that happen. When an English speaker learns some of our language and learn some of our worldview through it, they have experienced something. And so for the non-Native museum visitor, the international visitor to come through and to learn our worldview through our language and to have it normalized, you know, to have the bathroom signs to say, “skitap” and “ehpit”, you know, instead of men's and women's,, and for people to figure that out with the international signs, you know, but they would learn, some of our wording and that’s a profound experience. As Newell says, there’s no book and there’s no guide for the process of transforming the Abbe Museum from a colonial, traditional ethnographic collection into a fully decolonized museum run by members of the Wabanaki Nations. But because of work like this, the snowshoe path becomes a little bit easier for other museums to follow. Chris Newell: We want to be informative to anyone who would walk through the door. But we also want to be informative to the Wabanaki person. And then by also doing that the Wabanaki people who already know that language come into a space that uses their worldview and then it doesn't become a Bar Harbor institution, to the Wabanaki visitor anymore. It starts to become a home away from home. We are in the land of the Dawn, no matter what. And so the Wabanaki visitor should feel that sense of welcoming one walking into that space. Chris Newell: This is really a passion of mine, a passion that was born out of my childhood, w…

Full show notes at the publisher

82. Statues and Museums Jun 15, 2020

Show notes

In the wake of the racist murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent 17th Century slave trader. Protesters rolled the statue through the street and pushed it into Bristol Harbor — the same harbor where Colston’s Royal African Company ships that forcibly carried 80,000 people from Africa to the Americas used to dock.

In this episode, we examine the relationship of statues and museums. Why do so many call for statues of people like Colston to end up in a museum instead of at the bottom of a harbor? Looking at examples from Dr. Lyra Montero’s Washington's Next! project in the United States, American Hall of Honor museums for college football teams, and statues of Lenin and Stalin in Eastern Europe, we discuss the town-square-to-museum pipeline for statues.

Image: CC Keir Gravil - Black Lives Matter Protest, Bristol, UK

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Tim Tebow Statue at the University of Florida
00:50 Football Hall of Honor Museums
02:02 Tearing Down Edward Colston’s Statue in Bristol
02:44 Dr. Lyra Monteiro
03:00 Episode 77. Washington's Next!
03:12 The “Slippery Slope” Argument
04:56 Dr. Sadiah Qureshi
05:33 Should Colston’s Statue End Up in a Museum?
05:58 Episode 5. Stalinworld
06:42 Grūtas Park
07:32 Episode 25. Museum of Socialist Art
08:20 Museums of Bristol Website
08:40 Number of Confederate Statues in the United States
09:55 Archipelago at the Movies : National Treasure is Now Free for Everyone
10:25 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 82. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

The statue appeared in 2011 on the path of my daily commute to the University of Florida, where I was a student.

It was a statue of a football player named Tim Tebow, and the strange thing about it was that Tim Tebow was still around. In fact, it was just a few months after he graduated, and it was commemorating events, like touchdowns, that I remembered. I remembered seeing him around campus, and now I was looking at him as a statue.

But it wasn’t just a statue. Behind the statue was the entrance to a Hall of Honor which featured football trophies.

But the space was not just a room with trophies, it was a story about the football program where the trophies were an inevitable consequence. In short, it looked like a museum. Reader rails and old pictures of the early days of the program were presented alongside pigskin footballs from the 1930s with good lighting.

But this wasn’t just at one university. All across the football conference, these trophy rooms looked like museum spaces.

At Florida State University, just a few hours away, the trophy room begins with artifacts from and descriptions of the Seminole Nation — even though these are tellingly light on the details. The point was to tie the athletic program’s success with that of historical figures fighting a US invasion. It is all done very deftly — one minute you’re looking at a map of what is now Florida drawn by a US general, and the next, you are looking at a tattered football jersey, the next bronze statue of the story’s heroes. There’s a bridge between statues and museums — they feed into each other.

So why do athletic programs adopt statues and museum-like spaces? Because they want to sell us a selective account presented as a neutral archive of the past.

[Audio of Edward Colston Crashing Down]

Last week in Bristol’s The Centre, Black Lives Matter UK protesters tore down a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent 17th Century slave trader.

[Audio of Edward Colston Rolling Through the Streets of Bristol]

Protesters rolled the statue through the street and pushed it into Bristol Harbor. The same harbor that Colston’s Royal African Company ships that forcibly carried 80,000 people from Africa to the Americas used to dock.

Before it was thrown in the harbor, the statue of Colston had been standing in the center of town since 1895. And it wasn’t as if the source of Colston’s wealth was just discovered last week.

Lyra Monteiro: The idea of how do we make visible, for instance, the enslaved people who are invisible at all of these sites of memory that were about white supremacy when they were created. And now they still are, but we don't talk about that. How do we make that visible? You know? That's something that I've been, I've been playing around with for a long time.

This is Dr. Lyra Monteiro, professor of history at Rutgers University Newark and cofounder of the Museum Onsite and the creator of Washington's Next!.

In our interview for episode 77 of this show, she explains — and answers — one of the arguments against taking down white supremacists statues in the context of the United States.

Lyra Monteiro: The slippery slope argument. And the people who make this argument tend not to be the ones who are like. Overtly gung ho and like, you know, it's our Southern heritage to honor Robert E. Lee. It's not those folks. It's more the people who are historians. Sometimes our historians, sometimes like museum folks. The argument that they make is that, well, yes, it's not good that there is a statue to Robert E. Lee. But the thing is if we take him down (and obviously using him to stand up for all the Confederate statues) if we take him down, well then where are we going to stop? Because the reason why he's not appropriate for us to honor and public spaces because of slavery. Well, there are other slave owners that we honor in public space, and of course the biggest ones there are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And of course, there's no way in hell we're going to get rid of those statues. Right? What we're going to take down the Washington monument? I don't think so. The idea is it's a slippery slope that we're setting up. If we are starting to tumble down, the minute that we start taking down the statues of people who supported and promoted slavery.

Monteiro’s answer to the slippery slope argument is yes, Washington’s Next.

Lyra Monteiro: The tone of voice in which I hear the slippery slope argument from scholars and from museum practitioners is, and from, you know, public parks officials is less one of panic and concern about attacking that legacy and much more one of, “Well, that's just silly! Obviously we wouldn't do that.”

Dr Sadiah Qureshi, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham writes in _Flux: Parian Unpacked_ about toppling statues, “critics accused protesters of wanting to ‘rewrite’ history. Yet... fail to engage with what is really at stake... namely identifying, acknowledging and removing endemic structural problems of racism in reparative form”

A suggestion offered by more than a few people is museums. Why not put the statues of problematic people in museums? Is the bottom of the harbor really the right place for a statue of Colston?

Of course, these questions tend to ignore that the bottom of the ocean is the final resting place for hundreds of actual people thrown overboard from Colston’s ships because they were deemed a poor investment for Colston’s company.

On Museum Archipelago, we’ve investigated what various Eastern European countries are doing with old statues of dictators like Lenin and Stalin.

Monika Bernotas, who was interviewed on episode 5 of this show, describes how her family’s native Lithuania removed it’s ubiquitous Soviet statues from city squares all across the country. The removals were events that helped build the young nation, but once the statues were removed from their original locations, no one knew what to do with them.

Many of them ended up at something called Grūtas Park — a kind of half-theme park that includes a massive statue garden. The statues are presented simply and somewhat randomly — each has a little description of the city and square where that statue used to stand. Many Lithuanians and the Lithuanian government have criticized the uncritical approach to the park’s layout. Visitors are free to do whatever they want.

Monika Bernotas: Once you get into the actual statue walk, it’s kind of funny because you can do whatever you want. So like, climbing on top of Lenin and Stalin, picking their nose, patting them on the head, doing whatever you want. But I like to think that I have some sort of connection, some sort of understanding, that these images might have been both scary and inspirational at different times in somebody’s life. For me, they’ve been images that were bad. When I was going up I always knew that Lenin’s face that Stalin’s face, these were the faces of terror that drove my grandparents out of Lithuania. But to be able to interact with them on this very humorous level is really interesting.

The situation at Bulgaria’s Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia is somewhat similar. The outdoor sculpture garden is littered with statues commemorating Soviet power placed wherever there is room.

I’ve visited many times and I’m never quite sure how to react. There’s a lot of power in deliberately taking these statues out of the context they were made for. What once may have been an imposing statue underscoring who’s in charge in a public square is now gesticulating impotently at a rose bush.

In Eastern Europe, the statues of Lenin and Stalin were erected during the Communist times, and were swiftly removed when the system fell. In the West, statues erected more than 100 years ago still stand without context.

Washington’s Next because the money he made from owning, working, and selling people isn’t a footnote -- it is the reason he was the first president.

Even at the Museums of Bristol website, Colston is identified as a “revered philanthropist / reviled slave trader”, in that order, as if the money he gave away to the city of Bristol wasn’t violently extracted from the people he enslaved.

It’s not a sufficient answer to put these statues in a museum. I don’t know if there’s enough museum space for all the Confederate monuments in the American South or enough museum space for all the statues of King Leopold in Belgium. But more importantly, the political exercise in selective remembrance neatly packaged as an unbiased archive that statues represent is the same exercise that museums represent.

Museums and statues are bridged together -- many of these statues are right in front of the museum entrances, priming the visitor for what they can expect to find inside.

Statues and museums share a centuries-long history of supporting white supremacist, colonialist, racist ideologies and helping them flourish, and providing the evidence for them and undergirding them through their placement, through their air of authority, and through their supposed neutrality.

The statues of American football players at American universities helps me think about this because the stakes are so low: the rivalry is clear. “Our football team has heroes and a long legacy.” And it is telling that the two tools that were employed make that point are statues and museums.

81. Living History in a Pandemic at Old Sturbridge Village Jun 01, 2020

Show notes

Old Sturbridge Village is a living history museum in Massachusetts depicting life in rural New England during the early 19th century. But the early 19th century isn’t specific enough for the site’s historical interpreters—to immerse visitors in the world they’re recreating, knowing exactly what year it “is” matters.

Tom Kelleher, Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village was tasked with choosing that “default” date. He chose 1838 in part because the social and political change of that time period would resonate with today’s visitors. But there’s another aspect of the year that will resonate with visitors today once the museum reopens after closing due to Covid-19: how people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s.

In this episode, Kelleher describes the difference between first and third person interpretation, and how visitors might react to seeing 19th century costumed interpreters with modern facemasks.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 What does the word interpreter mean?
00:56 Tom Kelleher, Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village
01:34 Old Sturbridge Village
02:30 First-Person Interpretation
03:30 Third-Person Interpretation
05:35 “Who’s the president?”
06:50 Picking a default year
07:40 How people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s
09:30 Living History Museums Interpreting Pandemics
10:00 Interpreters in facemasks
10:44 Archipelago at the Movies 🍿
11:56 Outro

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 81. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro]

Tom Kelleher first learned what the word “interpreter” meant when he applied for a job at Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum in Massachusetts.

Tom Kelleher: They posted a job for a research historian and being young and firstly minted as a historian. I thought I knew everything and I applied and they called back a few weeks later and said, I'm. Sorry, you didn't get a job. Tom. Um, and I went to hang up saying, thank you because it was nice of them to tell me. And they said, would you be interested in being an interpreter? And I thought for a minute and said, well, my Spanish isn't that good. I don't think I could do that. And they said no you don't understand. The people who explain the past are called interpreters. They interpret the past for the present.

Today, over thirty years later, Kelleher is Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village and one of the museum’s longest-serving employees.

Tom Kelleher: Hello, my name is Tom Kelleher. I’ve been working in the living history field, which is wearing the clothing of people of the past and trying to have the past make sense for the present.

I work at a living history outdoor museum in Massachusetts called Old Sturbridge village. And I literally and figuratively wear a lot of hats. And one of them is, I'm the one in charge of initially training all our new costumed historians or historical interpreters depending on what term you like.

A living history museum recreates historical settings to simulate a past time, providing visitors with an experiential interpretation of history. Old Sturbridge Village is a living history depicting life in Rural New England, set on a couple of hundred acres. The museum features over 40 historical buildings -- most are antique buildings that have been moved and restored to the site. There’s also three water-powered mills and a working farm with animals.

Tom Kelleher: It's not a recreation of the town of Sturbridge or anywhere else. It's more like a slice of life, a historical sampler. So in a couple hours of walking around, a day of walking around, you can get an idea of what life was like in early 19th century New England.

And one of the ways the museum gives visitors an idea of what life was like in early 19th century New England is historical interpreters. In the business of historical interpretation, it turns out, there are two broad categories: first person interpretation and third person interpretation.

Tom Kelleher: What's called first, first in a role, playing, pretending you're a person from the past explaining how the past worked over a particular time and place. You, me as the historian pretends that I don't know anything past whatever year I'm portraying. For example, Plymouth Plantation, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, there are costumed staff that pretend it's 1627. They have this confusion thing, which then I think puts a burden on the public because then instead of being an interpreter, you're not making things clearer, which is what an interpreter should do, but just confusing the situation. An example, I give my new staff all the time of bad roleplaying interpretation is people ask, where's the bathroom? And you get this at some sites, you know, you say, excuse me, where's the bathroom?

And they go, “Bath? Why I haven’t had a bath! You'll catch your death of cold bathing. I wash my face, I wash my hands with water, but oh my, why would anyone immerse themselves?”

So you know, the kid there, he got a kid who needs to go to the bathroom, for heaven's sake, just point right over there!

The historical interpreters at Old Sturbridge Village interact with visitors in third person.

Tom Kelleher: When you're in third person, you're wearing the costumes, the clothing of an earlier time and place. And you're doing the work of an earlier time in place, but you are not pretending that the people you're talking to are wearing strange clothes and our magic inventors with all their electronic technology. You just try to have conversations with them to try to relate to how the past in present, interact, or as I like to say, you don't know where you are until you know where you've been. And so I think while I do a lot of role playing at Old Sturbridge village, most of us are not in character at any one point in time, but we're just portraying the past to try to make it make more sense to the present.

In a museum without historical interpreters, the date and place don’t necessarily have to be specific.

But a historical interpreter exists in a specific date and place. Whether they are first person or third person interpreters, the visitor experience depends on that anchor in time and space.

Tom Kelleher: One of the drawbacks if you will of living history of portraying clothes is, is that you do have to narrow down your time period. And truthfully, we as an institution at Old Sturbridge Village, wrestled with that for a number of years. When the museum was founded, we opened to the public in 1946.

It was kind of like, well, you know, about 200 years ago, about 1800. About, about, about, it was hazy. But they weren't doing a lot of costumed interpretation at the time.

But in the early 1970s, Old Sturbridge Village and a number of other sites in the United States and Canada especially started getting serious about making sure our clothing was more accurate. And the tools and techniques we were using, the recipes the ladies would cook in the houses, that kind of thing, were more authentic. And it started dawning on us that you couldn't just show a 50 year old span. I mean, if you're trying to show a 50 year time span from 1970 to 2020. How should people dress? How should they act? What kind of devices should they be using? And so it gets confusing.

An example is a visitor asking an interpreter: who’s the president?

For first-person interpreters at Plymouth plantation, that’s a difficult question to answer: in 1627, not only was there no United States or heads-of-state who used that term, organizations that might have used the word president were few and far between.

But even for a third person interpreter at Old Sturbridge Village, answering that question requires a specific date.

Tom Kelleher: Well, it depends. Andrew Jackson was president from 1829 to 1837 Martin van Buren was president from 1837 until 1841. So what specific year are you in? And so they might go into the shoe shop and ask the Shoemaker, “who's the president?” And it'll say, Andrew Jackson, and he'll be right.

And the same people might be in the printing office later in the day. And the printer says, Martin van Buren. And the guy said, well, wait a minute. The guy in the shoe shop thinks it's Andrew Jackson. So we decided that you have to pick a year. And frankly, about 10 years ago, the administration told me, “Tom pick a year.”

I agonized and justified it. And I arbitrarily, not arbitrarily, but with a lot of reasons that nobody needs to know about, picked 1838. And so that's our default year. We don't really make a big deal of that to the public, but our staff knows that when push comes to shove, when somebody asks, what year is it, who's the president? We’re 1838.

Picking a specific date also allows the museum to go back in time. People in 1838 would be using objects and recalling events from earlier decades.Kelleher points to more rapid means of communication, widespread substance abuse, a widening disparity of wealth, rapid technological development, rising consumerism, and growing political divisions as aspects of the 1830s that resonate with visitors today.

But there’s another aspect of 1830’s that resonates with visitors today -- or at least it will once the museum opens up again after its closure due to Covid-19: how people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s, also known as second cholera pandemic.

Tom Kelleher: At Old Sturbridge Village, we interpret health and healing a lot of ways. Cholera is an infectious, uh, bacterial disease, usually from poor sanitation. Is that still fairly prevalent on the planet.

In the 19th century, people didn't understand until the late 19th century, didn't understand bacteriology didn't understand what caused diseases, how diseases are spread.

Even more so than Covid-19, it was very scary because even though there's a lot that's unknown.

The second cholera pandemic would have been in recent memory to people in 1838. And even before the current pandemic, Old Sturbridge Village portrayed 19th-century diseases and medicine as part of its presentation of the lifestyles of the time.

Tom Kelleher: We do sometimes talk about the cholera epidemic and we talk a lot about a lot of diseases. I mean, the early 19th century was a time when people didn't really have a germ theory. So there was especially in the popular mind, there's very little separation between the spiritual and the physical world. There were ideas then. There was a health reformer in the 1830s named Sylvester Graham who had made a name for himself as a temperance preacher, preaching on the evils of alcohol. And he took advantage of the cholera epidemic when it came to the United States in 1832 and basically started advocating a vegetarian diet, very regular meals, no snacking, whole grain breads. So he guaranteed that if you followed his regime that you would not get cholera.

A lot of people then, in the 1830s, blamed immigrants for the cholera.Softentimes, people do point fingers and scapegoat. It's “them” making “us” sick.

Kelleher sees living history museums as uniquely suited to interpret public health, historical pandemics, and medicine.

Tom Kelleher: Some sites actually have special event weekends that focus on epidemics. There's a place in Georgia called Westville that used to have, I think, yellow fever days, and they'd have a weekend about the panic when a yellow fever epidemic would sweep through the American South.

Old Sturbridge Village, like most museums, is currently closed to the public. The farm animals and gardens are being tended to. As Kelleher and his team plan for the reopening, they know that the costumed interpreters will sport a new item of clothing when the museum opens: an anachronistic face mask.

Tom Kelleher: Our museum, when we reopen, we, the costume historians are going to be wearing face masks. I mean, we're not necessarily in roll, but it is the 21st century, and that's going to be a constant reminder to the public that, you know, we're in a different time and place: not so much in the 1830s, a different time in place, but during the Covid-19 world. So yeah, I think it will be a constant reminder and perhaps even a minor shock to people that is going to be a necessity because we are, we're where we are. And how people are gonna react to it and deal with it. I don’t know.

[Outro]

80. British Museum Curator Sushma Jansari Shares Stories and Experiments of Decolonising Museums May 04, 2020

Show notes

The British Museum’s South Asia Collection is full of Indian objects. Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum, does not want visitors to overlook the violence of how these objects were brought to the UK to be held in a museum. So for the 2017 renovation of the South Asia Collection, Jansari, who is the first curator of Indian descent of this collection, made sure to create unexpected moments in the gallery. She highlighted artifacts bequeathed to the museum by South Asian collectors and presented photographs of a modern Jain Temple in Leicester, where she’s from. In this episode, Jansari talks about giving visitors the tools to think about the colonial interest in items in the collection, why she started her excellent podcast, The Wonder House, and how not to let the decolonization movement’s momentum evaporate. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Seleucid–Mauryan war 00:45 Megasthenes 01:30 Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum 02:00 How Events Are Transformed Through History 03:00 Decolonising Museums and Collections 04:21 39. Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum With James Delbourgo 04:50 Empire and Daily Life in the U.K. 05:46 Being the First South Asian Curator of the South Asia Collection 06:30 Working on the 2017 Renovation of the British Museum’s South Asia Collection 08:00 Creating Unexpected Moments in the Gallery 08:15 Mathura lion capital 09:30 Visitation Trends Since the Update 10:58 “Not Just One or Two Tweaks” 11:10 Why Jansari Started The Wonder House Podcast 12:10 “Every Movement Has Its Moment” 12:30 Subscribe to The Wonder House Podcast Apple Podcasts 13:30 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS 14:28 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode. Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦 This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SRISYS Inc - an innovative IT Apps Development Company with its Smart Products like Project Eagle - an agile messaging platform and PIGEON - a real-time, intelligent platform that uncovers the power of wayfinding for your museum, enabling your visitors to maximize their day at your venue. Using SRISYS's Pigeon, the museum's management can gather real-time data for managing space effectively about visitors while improving their ROI through marketing automation. Visitors can navigate the maze of a museum with ease, conduct automated and personalized tours based on their interest, RSVP for events, and get more information about the exhibits in front of them. Pigeon is a flexible platform and can be customized to work for your museum. And because the platform takes advantage of low-cost Beacon technology, the app works offline as well! This means less data transmission costs for the museum and bigger savings for visitors when using this app outside their home territory. Click here find out how Pigeon can help your museum. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 80. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] There’s a way to look at history that focuses on the events themselves. And then there’s a way to look at history that focuses on the fallout. In the 4th century B.C.E., Seleucus who was one of Alexander the Great’s successors, and Chandragupta, who was the first Mauryan emperor in Northern India, met for the first time by the banks of the river Indus, and they had some kind of military encounter. What kind of military encounter? Well we don’t really know. What we do know is that, following the encounter, Greek ambassador Megasthenes was sent to the Indian interior for the first time. Sushma Jansari: And he wrote an ethnography called the Indica, and it sort of described India for a Greek audience, based on, personal observation, but also the, you know, there's lots of strange storytelling as well and it, this particular text has sort of formed the, the foundation of Western knowledge of India for generations. And you can just imagine that, soldiers, British soldiers in the 19th century took translations of this particular text with them to the Northwest of India when they were exploring. So it's had a very long life, and it's a particular moment that that continues to resonate. This is Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum. Sushma Jansari: Hello, I'm Dr. Sushma Jansari. I'm the Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British museum, and when I'm not at work, I work on my podcast, which is very much a passion project, and this is called The Wonder House. We’ll get to the Wonder House in a minute, because it’s an excellent podcast, but first, as a doctorate at the University College London, Jansari studied this ancient encounter, of which only Greek descriptions survive. Sushma Jansari: that moment of meeting and connection has been completely transformed. It was transformed during the colonial period by British and Indian scholars. And you have British scholars saying, Oh, you know, so, because once ward, and he defeated this Indian general, whereas the Indian scholars wrote the complete opposite. Their take was that Chandragupta got to defeat this incoming European and he became a great leader and ruler. So actually, because of this uncertainty, I think it tells us a lot about the time we live in right now and how moments have been transformed in the past. What we can study is the fallout -- how people interpret these historic events and how that reflects on the moment they are living in now. And of course, what better way to see -- in the form of a building -- how people interpret historic events than a museum itself. Sushma Jansari: I think this is why the whole idea of decolonizing museums and collections is so important because I think up till now we've all been complicit and telling very partial stories, under the guise of trying to be neutral. And as we know, that neutrality is quite problematic and it tells a very, very, partial truth or partial version of a story. Museums are a great way to see what historic events meant to the museum builders, and I can think of no clearer example than the British Museum. Sushma Jansari: We have, you know, really incredible exhibitions on say, you know, when you're thinking of ancient South Asia, they're often on Buddhism or Hinduism or Jainism. So they have a very close religious focus. But what they don't tend to address, very rarely that I've ever seen anyway, is how did those collections arrive here? What was the colonial interest in that material and how has it been interpreted? How has it been presented? And also why, why in those particular ways? How, how has that changed over the last, you know, century or so? It's too easy to present, so-called neutral view of the ancient past and of ancient religions. But I don't think that's particularly ethical. I think if you’re going to be doing that, you need to be telling that fuller story. In episode 39 of this show, we examined Hans Sloane and the origins of the British Museum. Funded in large part by his marriage into the enslaving plantocracy of Jamaica and the Atlantic slave trade, and aided by Britain’s rising colonial power and global reach, Sloane assembled an encyclopedic collection of specimens and objects from all around the world that became the bases for the world’s first public museum, The British Museum, a place where anybody could freely enter to see the glory of the British Empire. Sushma Jansari: I think empire enfuses pretty much every aspect of life in the U.K., whether we're all aware of it or not, you know, whether it's the names of the streets, we walked down, the, the museums that were founded, the collections, they are hold the structures we still all inhabit. When we actually look around at the museums, most of the museums, I'd say in the U.K., they hold the contents of empire, you know, objects that were collected around the world by colonial officials, by soldiers, by sailors, people working abroad. You can't disentangle the two, when you are telling a story, you need to be honest and tell the whole story, or at least as much of it as you can possibly share. Because otherwise you're telling a very, very partial one that often overlooks the violence of an object's collection. and the situation and circumstances it was created, taken, purchased and brought here to the U.K. to be held in a museum. Today, Jansari is the first curator of Indian descent of the South Asia Collection at the British Museum. Sushma Jansari: In the past, truth be told, I didn't really think about it very much. I think it's only when I look at my curatorial practice and how I approach my role, the collections, who I want to work with and how I realized that actually there is a difference between what I do and what other people, you know, in a whole range of institutions bring to their role and at first I was really uncomfortable about that. I thought, my goodness, you know, is it just because of who I am and what I am? What about, you know, my academic side, and you know, all of that and my skills and knowledge, but actually I think it's. My ability to do my job is it's somehow richer. I bring a slightly different perspective to what I do and how I do it. The South Asia Collection at the British Museum is so enormous that it can capture the sweep of history of South Asia, from the Paleolithic period to the present day. The gallery reopened in 2017 and before that, it was last refurbished in 1992. Sushma Jansari: It just happens to be the largest gallery in the museum, so, Hey, no pressure. and I. Yeah, exactly. And everyone's looking, you know, the, so, you know, try not to fail on your first go. So it was, it was really tricky. and so we started by thinking, well, who actually comes to the museum and does, I mentioned over 70% of our audience comes from outside the U.K.. And if those people, a huge proportion, they. They're not very well versed in the history, cultures and religions of South Asia, so how would you present your collections in a way that shares this really incredible part of the world with people who don't know a great deal about it? And so we, decided to have a chronic thematic kind of approach. So we started with the paleolithic, which is about one and a half million years ago, and ended at the present day. The encyclopedic collections at the museum permits us to be able to do something like that. And as part of that, I sort of worked on the ancient to medieval sections, which is, the, the, the collections I cover along with, the bulk of the anthropological collections and also the textiles. It's got a mammoth collection that I look after. But as part of that, I was very keen to introduce moments where, you know, slightly unexpected stories and people were presented. So for example, in the main aisle, you walk down, one of the first sculptures you encounter is the Mathura lion capital, which dates about the first century A.D. And it was actually excavated and request to the museum by a South Asian collector, Bhagwan Lal Indraji. And I put a portrait of him on that, on the label as well as a little bit of text explaining it. Cause I wanted people to be confronted by South Asians in the South Asia gallery. It's not enough to, you know, display “their” culture and “their” collections and “their” history. I think it has to be a shared enterprise and, you know, in another section, for example, in the Jainism in Western India, the medieval section, I included photographs of the Jain temple from Leicester, which is where I'm from in the U.K.. I wanted to show that the sculptures on display, they are just as much part of British culture, as it was, you know, back then in the medieval period, it's not just some alien religion and alien culture. It's, it's our shared culture now. I think it's really important to sort of connect the dots. So you do share this, sort of broad sweep of history and culture, but then you want to also intersperse it with these other really important moments linking, you know, who and what you might see around you as you're going about your everyday life in the U.K. and linking it with, with the past as well. I asked Jansari if she’s noticed changes in who visits the gallery and how much time they spend there since the update. Sushma Jansari: I'm very interested in who's there, how they engage with different displays, how I can sort of tweak them to make them more engaging. And I have definitely noticed that there are more, South Asians in the gallery space, the South Asia section. This is a really tricky one because, although you hope that a museum is for everybody. The reality is that as you say, a lot of people don't feel that the museum is for them and it's, it's, it's, it's terrible because obviously the museum is for everybody, but once again, when you have very neutral displays and people aren't addressed. People aren't consulted, you aren't working with members of the community. I think it's understandable why they might feel somehow excluded from these spaces. And you know, we've all had moments where we've been chatting to people and they assume that a museum is not for them. It's somehow seen as a very different othering space. And when you see the workforce inside the museum, also predominantly white, and. There are very few members of, you know, black and minority ethnic staff in the museums. Once again, what sort of message are you trying to share with everybody else? You're saying, Hey, come come to our museum, but you got work here. You know how, how. How do you change that? And I think it's not just one or two tweaks. I think it's a fundamental reimagining of what exactly a museum is and who exactly this museum is for and how do those parts come together? I'm not sure that we yet have those answers, but what I think is really, really important is that we start having these conversations and we start experimenting. And this is one of the reasons why Jansari started the Wonder House podcast. The podcast, which is completely independent of the British Museum, is a way for Jansari to share the most innovative contemporary approaches to decolonization. Sushma Jansari: And so I got in touch with some people whose work I really respect, and I asked them if they were willing to talk about their work, what they learned, what they, what they thought didn't work quite so well, and share their stories and experiments with decolonizing so that everybody could have a chance to listen in on a friendly conversation. See what aspects might work for them, their collections, their institutions, and sort of feel supported and encouraged to experiment. What I love about The Wonder House is being able to listen in on these conversations that might not be happening in museums themselves, but are happening at coffee houses and pubs nearby. And the show explores the scale too -- you hear Jansari, who works at one of the largest institutions in the world in conversation with people who might be their museum’s only curator. Sushma Jansari: Because I think I really worry that the decolonize that the decolonizing museums, sort of incredible energy that it has right now. It's quite easy for that to evaporate. Every single movement has its moment, and unless we embed this kind of, knowledge and approaches, it's going to evaporate and not just the colle…

Full show notes at the publisher

79. The Future of Hands-On Museum Exhibits with Paul Orselli Apr 20, 2020

Show notes

The modern museum invites you to touch. Or it would, if it wasn’t closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The screens inside the Fossil Hall at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC say “touch to begin” to an empty room. The normally cacophonous hands-on exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco sit eerily silent.

Museum exhibit developer Paul Orselli of Paul Orselli Workshop says he’ll be reluctant to use hands-on exhibits once museums open up again. But he hopes that future hands-on exhibits are more meaningful because museums will work harder to justify them.

In this episode, Orselli predicts what hands-on exhibits could become, the possibility that the crisis will encourage museums to adhere to universal design principles instead of defaulting to touchscreens, and how Covid-19 might finally put an end to hands-on mini grocery store exhibits in children's museums.

Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 Hands-On Exhibits in Museums
01:00 Michael Spock
02:04 Paul Orselli
02:40 The Growth of Hands-On Exhibits
03:30 “The last thing I want to do is rush into a super-crowded museum”
04:40 “Empty Interaction”
06:50 27. Yo, Museum Professionals
07:30 The Future of Touchscreens
09:14 Universal Design Principles
10:20 The End of Mini-Grocery Store Exhibits
11:00 “Constraints Are A Good Thing For Creativity”
11:40 Archipelago at the Movies : National Treasure is Now Free for Everyone
12:15 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS
13:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦

This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SRISYS Inc - an innovative IT Apps Development Company with its Smart Products like Project Eagle - an agile messaging platform and PIGEON - a real-time, intelligent platform that uncovers the power of wayfinding for your museum, enabling your visitors to maximize their day at your venue.
Using SRISYS's Pigeon, the museum's management can gather real-time data for managing space effectively about visitors while improving their ROI through marketing automation. Visitors can navigate the maze of a museum with ease, conduct automated and personalized tours based on their interest, RSVP for events, and get more information about the exhibits in front of them.
Pigeon is a flexible platform and can be customized to work for your museum. And because the platform takes advantage of low-cost Beacon technology, the app works offline as well! This means less data transmission costs for the museum and bigger savings for visitors when using this app outside their home territory. Click here find out how Pigeon can help your museum.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 79. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

The modern museum invites you to touch.

Or it would, if it wasn’t closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The screens inside the Fossil Hall at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC say “touch to begin” to an empty room. The normally cacophonous hands-on exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco sit eerily silent.

And the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia-- which is inviting you right there in its name--has presumably stopped running commercials.

Please Touch Museum Commercial: “No need to keep your hands by your side here. Exhibits are rich in detail, encouraging children to touch, feel, and see the way everyday things in our lives work… to learn more and to plan your visit, visit pleasetouchmuseum.org.

Interactivity in museums in the form of hands-on exhibits has been a trend since 1962, when Michael Spock, director of the Boston Children's Museum, removed “do not touch” signs from the display cases.

Since then, hands-on exhibits have served as a way for museums to indicate they’re free of their paternalistic past; that knowledge doesn’t come from on high, but instead comes from the vistor’s own curiosity, investigation, and play.

Paul Orselli: Traditionally in science centers there were all of these science content that lend themselves to physical and interactive demonstrations and in a children's museum, they were very much concerned about multi sensory approaches and engaging, different types of learning styles. You know, full body and kinesthetic. When the bulk of your audience is preschoolers, they can't read, so you need to engage them in some other way. I think that's traditionally where interactive have lived in science centers and children's museums.

This is Paul Orselli of Paul Orselli Workshop, who knows a lot about science centers and children's museums.

Paul Orselli: Hello. My name's Paul Orselli. I'm the chief instigator at Pow: Paul Orselli Workshop. That's my company that specializes in museum exhibit development and consulting. Before I started running my own business, and I worked inside museums, I sort of oscillated back and forth between the science center world and the children's museum world.

But hands-on exhibits spread further than science centers and children's museums. They spread to art museums and history museums and natural history museums too.

Paul Orselli: And I think the reason that interactive approach expanded was that those other types of museums realized that this interactive or immersive approach helped them reach a broader audience. As more and more museums become more and more concerned with reaching a broader audience, one of the opportunities for them to explore, or one of the tools in their toolbox are interactive exhibits and experiences.

So, the question is, will visitors still want to use hands on exhibits once museums open again? Is the trend that started in 1962 over?

Paul Orselli: as a museum designer and as a visitor, the last thing I think I want to do immediately after museums open up again is to rush into a super crowded museum. We're sort of training people in the era of covid-19 and maybe future pandemics to socially distance and be careful about touching surfaces and objects and so on and so forth. Part of me wants to say, especially as it relates to children's museums, even before covid-19, it wasn't like they were the most rigorous cleaned places in the world.

So the thing is, it's kind of hard, for my friends in the museum world with a straight face to say, well, we're. We're just gonna, be more rigorous with our cleaning schedules and our cleaning regimen. I mean, are you really gonna trail after hundreds of visitors in a, in a decent size museum and sort of wipe down everything they've touched after they touch that.

One thing that Orselli can see happening is that hands-on exhibits will need to work to justify themselves a little harder during the planning stages. He sees the end of so-called “empty interaction.”

Paul Orselli: There are lots of good examples, but maybe there are also some examples of things that I would consider primarily empty interaction. And a good example of that is a flip label. You know, here's one piece of texts and information on a little flap or a door, and to encounter the rest of the information or to get an answer to a question, you have to open up the flap and you get the rest of the textual or graphic information. I mean, that's interactive in the sense that you had to do something to sort of complete the informational circuit, but that might be about the lowest level of interaction possible. When I teach graduate students, one thing I often say is the flip label is the last vestige of an exhibit scoundrel. You know, it's like somebody who's not really somebody who's not really putting in the work, you know, they just sort of mailed it in. “Oh, we can put a bunch of flip labels here, or we can put a flip label here, and then that's something for kids to do.” It's sort of a challenge because now that I mentioned that about flip labels, it's sort of like, whoa, could you actually design a flip label experience that is more of a conversation or open-ended or engaging in terms of an intellectual sense and not just sort of this base level, tactile or mechanical sense. And, you know, I'm sure you, I'm sure you can. It's that when it's misused or thoughtlessly used. You know, the end results are just bad. We can't just so glibly and unthinkingly employ something like a push button as we did before. And I, and honestly, I don't know that that's a bad thing because then it sort of forces us to think, well, how could we provide a satisfying experience and what are the interfaces or other kinds of opportunities that we could provide that would let people, you know, that would carry the content, that would carry the emotional ideas that we want to carry across?

In episode 27 of this show, I argued that there’s a certain type of content that digital media is best suited to: systems simulation. Understanding Concepts like climate change requires thinking about how complex systems interact with one another, and computer simulations allow for that type of enquiry. It’s almost like a video game: visitors try to find the edge of the rules of the world, expect in an exhibit about climate change, those rules are the rules of atmospheric and oceanic physics. Right now, the best understood and most common interface to digital media is a touchscreen.

Paul Orselli: There is a certain segment of people who love their touchscreens. You know, they would, if they could fill up their museum with touchscreens, they would do it. And you know, again, I'm agnostic, touchscreens and touch tables: they are amazing tools, but now we have to be realistic. So now you're going to bring somebody into a new museum and ask them to crowd around with several other people and poke at a touchscreen after what has just happened in the world? That's a toughie.

So what are some interfaces that allow visitors to interact with digital media, without a touchscreen and without requiring the visitor to touch anything with their hands?

Paul Orselli: And if I think for example, of a large floor projections system. Where you could even just tap with your foot to control some different parameters or different people may be on the different corners of this large projection area could be controlling in real time different parameters. I could imagine that actually being a positive and a worthwhile experience that still takes into account a social aspect, but also a social distancing aspect as well as, you know, something that is sort of full body and it doesn't involve people touching their hands and that you don't have to sort of sanitize the floor cause people are tapping it with their feet and doing things.

In his most optimistic moments, Orselli hopes that a new approach to hands-on exhibits can bring universal design front and center.

Paul Orselli: Flexibility or control with something like tapping of a foot, which could easily also be somebody wheeling their wheelchair over the active area too. I mean, I think this brings the notion of universal design to a different place and a positive place. You know, these, these limitations and this triangulation between post Covid-19 perception and the notion of universal design. I'm going to be optimistic, and maybe that puts us in a, a better place, in a more thoughtful place, in a more satisfying place, ultimately, in terms of interactive experiences for visitors, which I suppose is really what this sort of all boils down to. How supported are museums as institutions in the various countries or parts of the world where they exist or how resilient our particular museums or museum structures that let them withstand these sorts of events.

But Orselli sees a silver lining: an end to all those mini grocery store exhibits at children's museums.

Paul Orselli: Although this might finally be like finally be a good reason for all the children's museums in the world to get rid of those horrible mini grocery store exhibits! A small room filled with lots of tactile objects that kids are just constantly pouring over and checking out and throwing into their mini baskets, and then they get put right back on the shelf.

Already already it's a gigantic entropy experiment, so if you're going to keep that experience, are you, after everyone has touched something, hundreds of things, wipe and disinfect them all, and then replace them for people, you know, to just do this. I think constraints are a good thing for creativity and now we've just been thrown some public health and perceptual constraints.

And we have to, we have to think about that because certainly our visitors are going to be thinking about that. Then if we don't show that, at least we're sensitive to that. Our visitors could rightfully think that we are insensitive. Not only to those design constraints and those design considerations, but insensitive to them as people who want to have fun and want to be safe.

[Outro]

78. How Museums Present Public Health with Raven Forest Fruscalzo Mar 30, 2020

Show notes

Museums across the globe are now closed because of Covid-19. Some of those shuttered galleries presented the science behind outbreaks like the one we’re living through.

As Raven Forrest Fruscalzo, Content Developer at the Field Museum in Chicago and host of the Tiny Vampires Podcast points out, the fact that museums are closed is an important statement: they trust the scientific information.

In this episode, Forrest Fruscalzo discusses the people that make up public health, how museums can be a trusted source of public health information, and examples of museum galleries that incorporate public health.

Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World at the National Museum of Natural History
01:06 Raven Forest Fruscalzo
01:45 Public Health
02:08 Information Deficit Hypothesis
03:29 Museums and Trust
06:10 Museums That Present Public Health Topics
06:38 The Ancient Americas | Field Museum
07:04 Northwest African American Museum
07:40 Visitor Experience at Outbreak
08:40 Museum Closings Because of COVID-19
10:10 Tiny Vampires Podcast
11:00 SPONSOR: Pigeon
12:30 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 78. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

A few months ago, before reports of a new form of coronavirus now known as COVID-19 started appearing in the news, I visited an exhibit called Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

The exhibit laid out the coordinated detective work that public health workers and many other professionals do as they identify and respond to infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola virus, and influenza. There was even a touchscreen game that invited me to work cooperatively with other visitors to contain an outbreak before it spread further.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: So the funny thing about public health and a lot of the scientists that contribute to the knowledge that public health workers use, is that if you're doing everything right, nobody realizes that you're doing it right. It's the opposite of a glamorous job.

This is Raven Forest Fruscalzo, a professional science communicator and writer who works as a content developer and production assistant at the Field Museum in Chicago, and hosts the excellent science podcast, Tiny Vampires.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: Hello, my name is Raven Forrest Fruscalzo, I am the host of the Tiny Vampires podcast and my day job is at the Field Museum here in Chicago. So public health is a little bit of a complicated thing because there are a lot of people who do public health that maybe people don't consider them to be public health workers.

Forest Fruscalzo lays out three broad groups of people working in public health: scientists, public health workers, and clinicians. The scientists generate new knowledge, the public health workers apply that knowledge by creating plans to prevent disease and increase access to treatment, and clinicians carry those plans out by directly treating people.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: As a science communicator, I think one of the issues between scientists or health workers and the public is this thing that we say insights, communication called the information deficit hypothesis, which is basically we're assuming that people don't know things and if only we could just give them the information, then they would know and understand. Using that model, which is basically how most science has been communicated in the past. It causes a lack of trust because it's kind of this assumption that on a scientist's standpoint that other people are ignorant and we decide what information they need. That has created this massive rift of this massive trust issue because the public doesn't trust the scientists because the scientists are assuming that they're ignorant and the scientists are not trusting the public to understand. With healthcare in particular, there's a lot of emotions, people are afraid of getting sick and they also have a lot of their own personal experiences that they're trying to incorporate into what public health officials are telling them.

And this is where museums come in.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: So museums, which I think is something that you've talked to a lot of on your show about is that they have a lot of trust, their credibility is really high. There's a lot of information out there about disease and different public health aspects that are kind of all over the place. For example, burning a tick with a match. So when you have an exhibit about why it's important to remove a tick with forceps or tweezers instead of burning it with a match, if a public health worker tells them that they might be skeptical about it. This is the way that my family has been doing it for years and years. Whereas with a museum they have that credibility and they have that ability to show in more detail and in a lot of different ways why that's important. People will take that information and internalize it more than with an organization that they might not trust as much. A lot of museums are starting to do exhibits that not only incorporate what we know, but also how we learned what we know. And that really increases people's trust in that information.

One of the advantage of presentations of public health within a museums is simply the context.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: A lot of museums are starting to do exhibits that not only incorporate what we know, but also how we learned what we know. And that really increases people's trust in that information.Because if I just tell you a fact, you might be skeptical, you should be skeptical and want to look into that deeper. But if I tell you a fact and then explain to you how we got that information, your ability to trust that information vastly increases. I think a lot of exhibitions and a lot of museums have started to put a priority on that. And I think that's really important because museums in the past have done and said some really terrible things and we're constantly trying to acknowledge and move past that or at least the Field Museum is. And I think one of the ways of accounting for that is starting to tell people how they know what they know. Because if that was the philosophy of museums back when they were presenting a lot of racist information, they would not have been able to support it with scientific information or scientific research because it's not there. The new way of doing things is you can't just say things, you have to back it up. And I think that is a really important way of accounting for the past.

There are a number of museums that present public health topics, either as outreach or by focusing entirely on the subject.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: There are actually a few museums that, that's all they do. There's a public health museum in Massachusetts and then the CDC actually has a museum of their own. Museums really have the ability to make a large impact when they do public health sorts of exhibits or incorporate public health into their existing exhibits. So a good example of that is like at the Field Museum, part of our Ancient Americas exhibit is about the smallpox transfer from Europe to the Americas and how that impacted the native people of South and central America. So that's not what the exhibit was about, but it is incorporated into it. So another great example is the Northwest African American Museum in Washington. They did a really cool exhibit that was about five diseases and conditions that disproportionately affect the African American community. And there are a lot of art museums around the country who have art therapy programs that aid people who are being treated for mental illness. So there are a lot of different museums that are starting to think about what their role is when it comes to the health of their community.

The Outbreak exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History opens with videos of planes taking off and landing at various airports around the world -- underscoring one of its main points that the world is connected. As I was walking through the exhibit -- and I can’t stress how abstract the threat of viruses seemed to me at the time -- I was suddenly aware of walking through the gallery with many other people. Reading about infectious diseases, I was less eager than usual to use the touchscreen exhibits with my bare hands.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: It really is a testament to the power of that exhibit when you're pulled out of the exhibit and then realize that what it's about is something that you're currently participating in. I think that's where museums really fit in. Because they have so much experience in helping people to understand complex ideas and using lots of different types of media to make that happen.

We’re broadcasting during this pandemic: the end of March 2020. Almost all of the themes presented in the Outbreak exhibit seem relevant today: that diseases aren’t “exotic, in other words, they don’t all arrive from distant places. That a connected world has advantages even during a pandemic. But as Forrest Fruscalzo points out, the fact that the National Museum of Natural History is physically closed because of COVID-19 -- and so is the Field Museum and every other museum we’ve ever featured on this show is telling in itself.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: So museums closing I think is a really important statement that they're making. That they trust the scientific information that is being put out there. There's a lot of scientists who work at museums, but that does create a gap. Museums are where people get a lot of their scientific information, especially adults. Once you're out of school there really isn't as much access to scientific information, a lot of it's behind paywalls. So museums are institutions that the public is relying on. COVID-19 has really changed my view on how important digital media is to how the museum is interacting with the public.

On her podcast, Tiny Vampires, Forrest Fruscalzo avoids the assumptions of the info deficit hypothesis as she communicate science to her listeners. Each episode is instead guided by questions sent in by listeners about insects that transmit disease and the scientists that are fighting them. And like a good museum exhibit, the question is answered with background information and the story of how scientists were able to shine a light on that particular mystery.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: People are far more intelligent and far more understanding than the scientists, public health workers of the past gave them credit for. This whole concept of talk to people like their fifth graders is exceedingly condescending. We're all in this together regardless of our educational background or anything. So yeah, it's definitely a... We're all figuring this out and just being good stewards of the information and having really good communication.

77. Trump Asks, “Who's Next?” Lyra Monteiro Answers, Washington’s Next! Mar 16, 2020

Show notes

The statue of George Washington in New York City's Union Square commemorates him on a particular day—November 25th, 1783—the date when the defeated British Army left Manhattan after the American Revolutionary War. The statue celebrates the idea that Washington brought freedom to the country, but professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro researched how many people of African descent that Washington was enslaving on that same date: 271. Representing these people formed the heart of Washington's Next!, a participatory commemorative experience focused around that statue. In this episode, Monteiro describes how a tweet from President Trump was the inspiration for the name, how passersby reacted to the project, and the subtle ways that public monuments have power. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 George Washington in Union Square 00:30 Evacuation Day 01:50 Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro 02:35 Trump’s Tweet 03:30 The Slippery Slope Argument 05:30 George Washington Viewed As Beyond Reproach 07:26 Washington's Next! 09:10 Making Something the Public Wants to Engage With 11:05 How Public Monuments Have Power 12:50 Museums on Site 13:20 Episode 25. The Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia, Bulgaria is Figuring Out What to Do With All the Lenins 13:40 Outro / Join Club Archipelago Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 77. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] There’s a statue of George Washington in Union Square in Manhattan. It’s the oldest statue in New York City’s Park service; it was erected before the Civil War. it is cast to present Washington on one particular day -- November 25th, 1783 -- otherwise known as Evacuation Day. On that day, which was just after the end of the American Revolutionary War, the defeated British Army departed New York City. Lyra Monteiro: Because Manhattan was their stronghold. And most of the black people who had joined the British side with the premise of freedom were evacuated from in defiance of George Washington's terms for this surrender, for the British surrender and all that. But this particular statue of George Washington is commemorating a hugely important date for this city. It's commemorating and marking and celebrating the idea of freedom being brought to the country, and hence as a moment to look at and draw attention to the hypocrisy of all of that. That at the same time that he's being celebrated for freeing the country, he's actively enslaving a number of other people, most of them in Virginia, some with him there, and actually a couple of them getting onto boats and going up to Nova Scotia with the British because they had escaped and joined and joined that immigration. So again, that's why the specificity of this statue mattered. The number of Black people enslaved by Washington on the day commemorated by the statue is 271 -- and these people are at the heart of Dr. Lyra Monteiro’s project Washington’s Next! Lyra Monteiro: The idea of how do we make visible, for instance, the enslaved people who are invisible at all of these sites of memory that were about white supremacy when they were created. And now they still are, but we don't talk about that. How do we make that visible? You know? That's something that I've been, I've been playing around with for a long time. Lyra Monteiro: Hi, my name is Lyra Montero and I am an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University Newark, where I also teach in the graduate program in American studies and the African American and African studies department. Okay. And I also am the cofounder of the museum onsite and the creator of our most recent project, Washington's Next. The name, Washington’s Next comes from one of President Trumpʼs tweets following the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. Trump took the opportunity to argue against movements to remove statues of Confederate generals like Robert. E. Lee, which live in prominent public places in U.S. cities. One of these tweets read, You can’t change history, “Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson - whoʼs next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!” I’m a little bit sorry to ask this, but could you lay out Trump’s argument, such as it is? What he is trying to say? Lyra Monteiro: I can explain the argument that he is referencing. How about that? Whether or not he actually understands it, I don't know. But Donald Trump took an argument that has existed, you know, probably just about as long as we've had, you know, controversies over these statues honoring Confederate leaders. That is the slippery slope argument. And the people who make this argument tend not to be the ones who are like. Overtly gung ho and like, you know, it's our, it's our Southern heritage to honor Robert E. Lee. It's not those folks. It's more the people who are historians. Sometimes our historians, sometimes like museum folks. The argument that they make is that, well, yes, it's not good that there is a statue to Robert elite. But the thing is if we take him down and obviously using him to stand up for all the Confederate statues, if we take him down, well then where are we going to stop? Because the reason why he's not appropriate for us to honor and public spaces because of slavery. Lyra Monteiro: Well, there are other slave owners that we honor in public space, and of course the biggest ones there are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And of course, there's no way in hell we're going to get rid of those statues. Right? What we're going to take down the Washington monument, I don't think so. You know, so. The idea is it's a slippery slope that we're setting up. If we are starting to tumble down, the minute that we start taking down the statues of people who supported and promoted slavery. So part of it, part of that slippery slope that you're describing is that, to the extent that someone like Washington encapsulates our founding myth, we can't let it touch that myth. It's too sacred and we're protecting them by protecting the statutes around them. But the things that Washington represents, the thing that, the things that I learned as a school child in the floor of the public schools about George Washington were things about his honor, and his honesty and how, thank goodness he wasn't a tyrant because America would look a lot different there as a result. And that is a very, very powerful thing. Lyra Monteiro: And the implication there is also that America is a wonderful and beautiful place. I very much come from the perspective that enslaving other human beings is one of the most dehumanizing things imaginable for the person who's doing it, too. You summed that up really well in terms of, you know, the role that George Washington, much more so than Thomas Jefferson serves as being the father of the country. It's impossible to imagine questioning anything about him. Anything about his character, as you said, he's this honest person, all of these things, we should look up to him. And you know, a lot of that is just good old fashioned nationalism and the need for a coming-out-of-nowhere nation state like the United States to create these religious symbols and these religious narratives about where it comes from. And how important it is, and then how powerful it is. And yeah, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, they are just so central to that. And so I think that when people are saying that, honestly, like when the tone of voice in which I hear the slippery slope argument from scholars and from museum practitioners is, and from, you know, public parks officials, and also frankly from Donald Trump is less one of panic and concern about attacking that legacy and much more one of, “well, that's just silly! Obviously we wouldn't do that.” And the way that he phrased that tweet really kind of like set it up very nicely for us. You know, who's next? Washington's Next! We added the exclamation point under the title also because, because our fearless leader really loves exclamation points, so, we thought it would be an appropriate thing to add. The centerpiece of Washingtonʼs Next! was a participatory commemorative experience, focused around that statue of George Washington in Union Square. Monteiro and the Washingtonʼs Next! team placed 271 empty chalkboards on the ground in front of the statue, to represent each of the 271 people. The empty chalkboards invoked erasure -- how these people are forgotten in favor of the man we’re supposed to admire. For a few hours, these chalkboards stood empty, reflecting the absence of these people from public memory, in contrast to the man depicted in the statue. Then the Washingtonʼs Next! team invited passersbys to honor individuals Washington enslaved by reading their biography and writing their name on one of the chalkboards. Lyra Monteiro: So the project actually went through several iterations. You know, the, the core of it, focusing on that statue, on the date, and on the people who were enslaved by him at that date. That quarter of the project was there for many, many months. But the, how it manifested in physical space was something that went through a number of changes. And one of the reasons was making sure that we were presenting something that would draw people in. And it turns out, yeah, I mean, those, I remember the first time that we did a test with the actual chalkboards we ended up using on the easels. It was crazy. I mean, cause you know, New York is New York has seen everything. But you would be surprised, like all kinds of other things that we'd put on the ground or other things that we'd done, you know, with different kinds of like, you know, you know, formations and costumey things that we were playing with, you know, nobody cares. But the minute they saw these like easels on the ground that were blank at that stage, everyone was like, “what's that>” And so that was when we knew. That is the thing we need because of it. You know, it doesn't make sense. I don't know what that is. You know, it's not a protest sign. It's not just some random shit on the ground. Monteiro’s philosophy is that it is important to create something that members of the public would want to engage with -- and then stick with them as they go about their lives. Lyra Monteiro: Everyone who was working the event in Union Square on that day was wearing a black t-shirt that had Washington's Next! on it. So you'd be pretty identifiable. And also holding onto these little handouts that we had. So then if people came up to us and were like, “Hey, what's going on?, we'd give them a handout. Usually the questions were much more specific. Like, “Oh, I don't get it. What's the statute?” Okay. Well, and then the thing about the handout was that it was designed very carefully to answer all of those questions live and in front of that statue. You know, here's the picture of the statue from another angle. So you can see more clearly. So this is statute George Washington. It was built in, right? You know, “George Washington had slaves?” Yeah. So here's a description of his slave ownership and blah, blah, blah. And you know, in general, and here's Mount Vernon and a map of the different plantations that he had around Mount Vernon that are not part of the tour anymore, of course, you know, and things like that. So like basically, and even though we had, we had the image of that particular tweet as well, it was part of that pamphlet. But again, you know, we weren't, we were never asking people to take it. Lyra Monteiro: They were asking us for it. And then on top of that, then we rely on word of mouth, right? So somebody does come up to us, gets a pamphlet, talks to us about the things they have questions about. They're still looking at it. Another person comes up and sees, they have a pamphlet and goes, what's this about? Lyra Monteiro: Um, because. You know, that I think has a lot more power than us being like, hey, “we're smarter than you and we know a lot of stuff. Pay attention to us!” Washinton’s Next! Ties into Monteiro’s academic work about public memory and stories around how we commemorate people in public space. Lyra Monteiro: When I teach a public introduction to public history class to undergraduates, one of our, one of the main projects they do involves studying a monument or ,emorial in Newark, so near our campus, and you know, finding out who made it, spending time by it and watching how people interact with it or don't. Inevitably, of course, usually nobody interacts with it. And if they look over it all, it's because they're like, why is the student hanging out there in this like, kind of dreary weather, you know? And the number of times that they themselves are like, yeah, I used to walk by it all the time. I never even looked. Right? And then that weird thing about monuments and what I think makes them so powerful, and any statues in of people in public space is that we don't think about them having power or mattering. And yet they do, in some ways because we don't think about them, you know, until there's a threat to them until somebody says, “Oh, yeah, no, I think I'm going to take that down.” You know, like my. Seriously, like all of my students and, and, and Rutgers-Newark is the most diverse university in the country and has been since these things have been measured. You can probably imagine that most of the statues in Newark are not to People of Color to put it mildly. And it's amazing how over the course of that project, how many of them just develop this like ferocious, cause I'd taken that project in different ways. And one of them at one point had to do with like, do you think your statute should go, especially after Charlottesville? Do you think the statute should be torn down, or should we, you know, keep it, and if we want to keep it, how would we enhance it to make it more relevant? And I was, it's always interesting to see how many of them just get so devoted to the idea of keeping the statute to the person that's already there. Even if they've never heard of that person. There's something that there's just so much power in having something set in stone, you know? Washington’s Next! is a project of Museums on Site, which is dedicated to helping people understand their worlds through free, site- and community-specific experiences. You can find more information about Washington’s Next!, see a panel discussion about the project called Monumental Racists, or get involved in other ways, by visiting washintonsnext.com. [Outro] Lyra Monteiro: My favorite joke around that to this day remain…

Full show notes at the publisher

76. 400 Years Post-Mayflower, the Provincetown Museum Rethinks Its Historical Branding Mar 02, 2020

Show notes

Sometimes, a historical event is all about the branding. And the brand of Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts as the spot where the Mayflower pilgrims first disembarked 400 years ago this year is pretty strong. The branding is strong enough to override the fact that the Mayflower actually first landed on the other side of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown. The Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum commemorates that site. And even within a museum that’s trying to correct an inaccuracy, it has its own to grapple with: the museum used to portray the meetings between the members of the Wampanoag Nation and the Mayflower pilgrims with dehumanizing murals. In this episode, Courtney Hurst, board president of the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum, describes how the museum is working to correct these inaccuracies by working closely with the Wampanoag Nation. And as the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower arrival approaches, the museum is in the middle of yet another rebrand. Just as the word pilgrim was reframed by Mayflower passenger William Bradford as a way to tie his journey to stories in the Christian Bible, the museum is reframing the word pilgrim to include recent Provincetown history. This episode was recorded at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum on February 22, 2020. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Plymouth Rock and Historical Branding 02:00 Courtney Hurst 02:20 Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum 03:55 Portrayal of the Wampanoag Nation 04:30 Our Story 05:20 Corn Hill 06:00 Provincetown 400 07:00 Reframing The Word Pilgrim 09:30 Spiritus Pizza Riot of 1990 10:17 Historical Brands are Powerful 11:30 Archipelago At the Movies 🎟️ 12:20 Outro/Join Club Archipelago Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 76. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Sometimes, a historical event is all about the branding. And the brand of Plymouth Rock as the spot where William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims first disembarked is pretty strong. In the American tradition that I grew up learning, the Rock symbolized the Pilgrim’s arrival in what is now the United States, and the beginning of their interactions with the Native Nations who lived nearby. Plymouth Rock is an easy visualization tool, a shorthand, something that sticks in your mind. But, the Mayflower didn’t first land on Plymouth Rock, or even near what is now Plymouth Massachusetts. Its first five weeks -- including the signing of the Mayflower compact -- happened in a bay on the other side of Cape Cod, near a city now called Provincetown. Courtney Hurst: I grew up in Provincetown, and when you grow up in Provincetown, and it’s all you know, it's all you ever know. So I grew up knowing that the Pilgrims landed here. And we were always taught the importance of that, the Mayflower compact, and to go out in the world and realize that not everyone was taught that is just fanicanting. They spent five and a half weeks here exploring our shores, there were a lot of significant moments before they realized that the terrain was just too rocky, not as protected from the weather. So they got back on the boat and headed to Plymouth. For whatever reason, in history books and when kids were thought, it just picks up in Plymouth. After those five weeks, the Mayflower continued on to Plymouth, where the pilgrims settled. It’s really easy to compress five weeks, particularly if they happened 400 years ago. The quest here is not just accuracy -- it’s not about saying, “well actually.” It’s to be aware that we’re all participating in historical branding -- and that monuments and museums are perhaps the best brand ambassadors. Courtney Hurst: Hello. My name is Courtney Hurst and I'm president of the board at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum. So it is interesting. Even recently, unfortunately there was some graffiti on Plymouth rock just last week. And in the news, you know, every news feed was running it, especially here locally. And it was saying Plymouth, the landing place of the pilgrims. So we were, we were calling to correct people and say, that's actually not true. The Provincetown Museum sits under the Pilgrim Monument -- a slim granite tower that dominates the skyline of Provincetown. The monument was completed in 1910 to draw attention to the fact that the Mayflower landed here first -- good branding. As a school kid, Hurst said that the top of the tower was a great place to escape with friends, and since the museum was free, she would hang out there whenever her school was between sports seasons. But during those childhood visits, she was unaware of another type of dehumanizing branding happening in the exhibits. Courtney Hurst: A whole wing used to be aligned with these huge murals, almost life size. As a kid, they felt life-size. And now that I'm talking, I see they're not, but they're big. And each one depicted a different moment in the Pilgrim's arrival and the impact on that Wampanoag Nation. So it’s their first interaction. And the Native people all look exactly alike. There's no definition in their faces. Their hair is exactly alike. They all look really aggressive, really angry, and that they're on the attack. The pilgrims all have very distinct features. They're wearing different clothes, their expressions, they look almost fearful. They are cowering. They almost look like they are under attack. So you can even start to go layers deeper and deeper and deeper in the inaccuracy is, but when you just look at it, the stereotype that it was portraying on a subconscious level. The portrayal of Wampanoag people like this isn’t unique, but it serves the narrative of the pilgrim's virtue and nobility in the face of a hostile world—not only were they persecuted in Europe, that narrative goes, they were also persecuted in the new world, which creates a justification for anything that happens afterwards. All this is buttressed by the implied neutrality of the museum. Courtney Hurst: And they were so inaccurate that we're actually going to leave one of them up in this new exhibit as a, can you point out what's wrong? And is part of the interactive of the exhibit will be to show what’s wrong. The new exhibit, which is called Our Story, is a partnership between the Provincetown Museum and members of the Wampanoag Nation. Courtney Hurst: So Our Story, we’re working in conjunction with the Wampanoag Tribe, Paula Peters and Steven Peters specifically have been the real brains behind it and the execution of it. We have learned in the last few years through working so closely with the Wampanoag tribe that a lot of the story was wrong. And then it wasn't told accurately. So we have worked with them to create a whole entire new exhibit. We've gutted the room and we're rebuilding it, and it's called Our Story. And what's interesting about it is it will be told from their perspective as far as how they were living here before the pilgrims showed up. An example of a story from those first five weeks that has been told exclusively from a colonial lens is the story of Corn Hill -- the spot near Provincetown where pilgrims “found” stores of corn preserved by the Wampanoag. Courtney Hurst: it was always positioned as they just simply found the corn, and that's how history tells it. It was actually stolen corn, that it was clear the way that it was stored, the way that it was kept, that it had been put there by people. There's no way that you could have been able, they even say that in their log. So it was clear people were living here, they just hadn't come across them yet. The Our Story gallery opens later this year to commemorate the 400 Year Anniversary of the Pilgrims Arrival, under the initiative Provincetown 400. The initiative is planning for a much different commemoration than the 300th anniversary in back 1920. Back then, it was called a celebration, not a commemoration, and included pageants and parades. Courtney Hurst: It's not a celebration for everyone and that it is. Somewhat more solemn and that, yes, you know, the pilgrims came here and they did some good things and they were brave for coming here and seeking. And that's part of the story. But it's not all to be celebrated. So we've been training ourselves for the last two years. Even that small nuance of a word, but it's not a nuance when you see how important it is. So everything from that word choice will shift to things like, we're not having a parade. You know that that was an initial brainstorm idea. You think like, Centennial, let's do a parade. And things like that, we're not going to do that. Cause that would be seen as disrespectful and we understand that. So the collaboration has been so tight throughout that I think it's going to feel a lot different in all those ways, I hope. But the Provincetown Museum is also in the middle of another, maybe even bigger branding change: connecting the pilgrim story of 400 years ago to the modern history of Provincetown. Over past 100 years, Provincetown has attracted artists, playwrights, and the LGBT+ community. Today, Provincetown is perhaps the best-known gay resort on the U.S.’s East Coast. Hurst wants to expand who we think of as Provincetown’s Pilgrims. The word “pilgrim” has been intentionally used to describe the passengers of the Mayflower because of a passage in William Bradford's journal, therefore connecting his journey to the Christian Bible. That’s good branding. But Hurst sees a throughline to Provincetown’s more recent history as well. Courtney Hurst: We're hoping to reframe the word Pilgrim and for it to symbolize a group of people and really what they're seeking, which is to be accepted for who they are, whatever that be, whether it’s religious freedom or any freedom at all, seeking a place for them to be themselves. I think there's a sense that this board and this team are committed to telling a more accurate story of Provincetown. And the Mayflower pilgrims were the first pilgrims to arrive here 400 years ago, and they came seeking acceptance and tolerance and freedom. And then pilgrims of all sorts have come to Provincetown shores since them, they were the first, but so many, the fishermen, the artists, the LGBQT community, so many. So we're really hoping that we can take each of those stories, each of those pilgrim stories, and tell a cohesive history of Provincetown. Growing up here, the AIDS epidemic was so close to us, and again, you just grow up thinking that's what most people saw and life. And to think that my mom would like cruise dinners by guy's house that were struggling and had no one, and how many of them came here to, in some cases, die and how this town, these Portuguese women in the community just took them in and loved them and really took care of them. That's a story that's, you know, it's Provincetown story, but it's, it's the AIDS story and it's a national story. And that's a case that likely might be in the new updated version of the museum. So when we say that we want to tell a more accurate, it's even just a more comprehensive story cause it does have a thread in the nation's history as well. An example of a future exhibit might be about the Spiritus Pizza riot of 1990, which Hurst says was Provincetown’s analog to the important Stonewall riots in New York City. Courtney Hurst: When the bars would get out at night. And typically the gay bars would get out and not just gay bars, but gay people would come into the street and they would all eat pizza and it would be really hard to get through. Well, one night there was a police officer was giving some, giving them trouble unnecessarily, shouldn't have been, and the group rioted. So these moments that were happening here in our Cosmo, but shifted the town and the town shifted legislature on what used to be called gaybashing and putting more laws in place and protecting them even further. And it was this moment that for us changed perception and culture in Provincetown. Historical brands are powerful. In the same way that a single moment can shift a town’s legislation for the better, a photogenic rock can diminish five weeks of history in the minds of millions of students, and the word choice that a museum uses can turn a bushel of stolen corn into just an innocent lucky find. As the 400 year anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival approaches, the Provincetown Museum is preparing for the commemoration by changing things up. They don’t use the word branding—but, like the Pilgrims themselves, they’re expanding the word pilgrim to include recent Provincetown history, they’re working to tell the story of members of the Wampanoag nation directly instead of through the lens of the colonists. And they want people to know that the Mayflower landed here first before moving on to Plymouth. Courtney Hurst: So we obviously want to shine a spotlight on the fact that the pilgrims actually landed here and the time that they spent here. But beyond that, we're hoping to cast a spotlight on Provincetown as a place that is welcoming to pilgrims. And that message for us in today's time feels just as powerful.

Full show notes at the publisher

75. Museduino: Using Open Source Hardware to Power Museum Exhibits Feb 17, 2020

Show notes

Proprietary technology that runs museum interactives—everything from buttons to proximity sensors—tends to be expensive to purchase and maintain.

But Rianne Trujillo, lead developer of the Cultural Technology Development Lab at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU), realized that one way museums can avoid expensive, proprietary solutions to their technology needs is by choosing open source alternatives. She is part of the team behind Museduino, an open-source system for exhibits and installations.

On this episode, Rianne Trujillo and fellow NMHU instructor of Software Systems Design Jonathan Lee describe the huge potential to applying the open source model to museum hardware.

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 75. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

On Museum Archipelago, we focus on power in museums. On how cultural institutions have a tremendous amount of unchecked power.

But power takes many forms and one of these forms is control over the technology that delivers museum content to visitors.

From a button that plays a bird call when you touch it, to a projection screen that plays a story about the Battle of Gettysburg when you get close to it, every museum interactive requires a technological solution.

Rianne Trujillo: Oftentimes, museums will purchase proprietary solutions. Oftentimes they're very expensive, especially to maintain them, and if they break you are sort of forced to rehire the same company or rebuy new equipment, and that can be fairly costly really quickly.

This is Rianne Trujillo, lead developer of the Cultural Technology Development Lab at New Mexico Highlands University.

Rianne Trujillo: My name is Rianne Trujillo. I'm the lead developer of the Cultural Technology Development Lab at New Mexico Highlands University, and I’m also an instructor of Software Systems Design.

The Cultural Technology Development Lab is an R&D program where university faculty and students, museum professionals, and other partners work together on technology and design solutions for cultural institutions. Through working these institutions across New Mexico and the U.S., Trujillo realized that one way museums can avoid expensive, proprietary solutions to their technology needs is by choosing open source alternatives.

Rianne Trujillo: So by using open source hardware, we can basically solve that issue of cost by using fairly inexpensive, off-the-shelf components from various electronic suppliers.

And that’s how Museduino came to be. Museduino is an open source hardware controller designed specifically to be used in museums. Using this hardware controller, which is about the size of an altoids tin, and a little bit of technical knowledge, museums can create and control their own interactives instead of always hiring an outside company.

Rianne Trujillo: We built Museduino to solve our own needs when building exhibits.

Jonathan Lee: It's all open source, and if we want to put it out there, we can show anyone else how to build that and they can implement it in their museum.

This is Jonathan Lee.

Jonathan Lee: My name is Jonathan Lee. I'm a professor of Software Systems Design at New Mexico Highlands University. Either they can implement it by buying the same parts or just downloading our code if it's off-the-shelf components and then inserting their content into it as well.

Both Lee and Trujillo see a huge potential to appling the open source model to museum hardware.

The phrase open source comes from the software world: open source software is a development model where the source code of a piece of software is freely available to anyone who wants it.

We all use open source software every day, whether we realize it or not. Most ATMs, web servers, and cash registers rely on open source software simply because it’s the cheapest and most secure -- the source code is freely available so bugs are identified and fixed quickly.

Open source hardware projects, like Museduino, borrow from the software world by making the instructions of how to build and program them freely available. Yes, you still need to pay for someone to manufacture the physical components, but they are commodities -- there’s multiple vendors that can make you the exact same thing.

Jonathan Lee: We have used an open source program to create the printed circuit board design and so if you wanted to, anyone could download that circuit board design and they could actually have however many they needed printed.

This together makes for a radical way to approach exhibit hardware -- where the technical solutions that a museum comes up with aren’t confined to just one museum.

Jonathan Lee: One of the originators of the project said they liked the Linux model of put it out there, let other people make it better, make it, fix it, build something for the platform that we make and then set it free.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened with Museduino: it was built upon another piece of open source hardware, a single-board controller called Arduino.

Rianne Trujillo: What Museduino is, is essentially a Arduino shield that extends the footprint of the Arduino via four RJ45 or standard Cat-5 cable cabling in four different directions. We've tested it with up to 200 feet away. So if you're building a very large scale museum exhibit and you need a sensor in one location and an output maybe 10 feet away, you can control all of that with the one Arduino, using our system.

Exhibits components tend to be far away from each other, even in small museums, because the gallery is designed for the visitor moving through the space. The specific problem is that, unlike wireless devices like internet of things or IOT -- light bulbs or buttons, museum hardware needs to work 100% of the time, and right now, the best way to do that is with wires like the standard cat-5 cable.

Rianne Trujillo: We're from New Mexico where we work with a lot of cultural institutions, where the walls are adobe, and there's always not great internet connection in the space, or also remote sites where there might not be internet connection, so we try to stay away from IOT boards and we use our system to have solid hardwired connections because those other systems could be a point of failure for the exhibit.

From the outside, or even from the inside if you’re focusing on the museum from purely a visitor experience perspective, exactly what tools museums use to create interactives might not seem like that big a deal. But it is a big deal for the museum itself to own its means of production.

Rianne Trujillo: We primarily work with institutions who don't have a lot of funding to be able to purchase these proprietary systems. So open source hardware allows us to build relatively inexpensive exhibits. We've heard instances where maybe they purchased a piece of software from a company and then like a month later they didn't exist anymore. So that can happen to people, especially if you're putting thousands of dollars into it.

Hardware lock-in mirrors software lock in: many museums use a video player called a Brightsign. These are little closed-source purple boxes that allow museum staff to play and schedule videos. They are designed to solve a problem: to help museums not have to worry about playing videos for their visitors. But they also remove the ability of museum staff to fix the system if something goes wrong.

Museduino is already installed at many museums and cultural institutions around the U.S., like Acadia National Park’s nature center, the Carlsbad Museum, and the Bradbury Science Museum at Los Alamos National Labs. From the beginning, Trujillo and the other members of the Museduino team have been sharing their knowledge with the wider museum world.

Rianne Trujillo: We go to conferences and share Museduino and just also a general Arduino tutorials and things like that. We do workshops at these museum related conferences to get people interested in open source hardware in hopes that they can start thinking of ways to incorporate it into their museum exhibits.

Museduino represents a radical approach to exhibit technology design. By allowing museums big and small more control over the installation and maintenance of the technology in their galleries, the Museduino team shows how the principles of the open source movement fit within the museum landscape.

Rianne Trujillo: Since we've presented at these different conferences, people got to take home Museduino, so we know that it's in institutions in several places. The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in California, they just recently did a project with it, where they actually made a pneumatic tube system with the Museduino for donations. They said their donations went up 10 times the amount that they normally had before. Of course, it was probably somebody with a bin or it was a drop box where you can donate. And now when you donate a dollar, you see this whole theatric thing happen where you get to watch your money go up in some twos and some lights flicker.

You can find more about Museduino at https://museduino.org, and keep an eye out for a workshop near you.

74. 'Houston, We Have A Restoration' with Sandra Tetley Jan 13, 2020

Show notes

Every time an Apollo astronaut said the word Houston, they were referring not just to a city, but a specific room in that city: Mission Control. In that room on July 20, 1969, NASA engineers answered radio calls from the surface of the moon. Sitting in front of rows of green consoles, cigarettes in hand, they guided humans safely back to earth, channeling the efforts of the thousands and thousands of people who worked on the program through one room. But until recently, that room was kind of a mess. After hosting Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Shuttle missions through 1992, the room hosted retirement parties, movie screenings, and the crumbs that came with them. Spurred by the deadline of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2019, the room was carefully restored with a new visitor experience. The restoration project focused on accurately portraying how the area looked at key moments during that mission, right down to the ashtrays and soda cans. In this episode, Sandra Tetley, Historic Preservation Officer at the Johnson Space Center, describes the process of restoring “one of the most significant places on earth.” Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:14 Apollo Mission Control Center 00:49 Sandra Tetley 02:00 “History Keeps Going” 02:35 Becoming a National Historic Landmark 04:00 Starting the Restoration 04:40 Gene Kranz Steps In 05:15 Mission Control Visitor’s Galley 06:30 The Visitor Experience 08:10 The Drama of the Room 09:37 Independence Hall 10:10 Coffee Cups and Cigarettes 11:15 Apollo Flight Controllers Get to Celebrate 13:04 Archipelago At the Movies 🎟️: Lisa the Iconoclast 13:50 Outro/Join Club Archipelago Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 74. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Every time an Apollo astronaut said the word Houston, they were referring not just to a city, but a specific room in that city -- mission control. In that room, NASA engineers -- average age: 26 -- answered radio calls from the darkness of space. Sitting in front rows of green consoles, cigarettes and cigars in hand, they guided humans to the moon and back, channeling the efforts of the half a million people who worked on the program through one room. Sandra Tetley: I realized the value of this room to American history and to the world history. It's one of the most significant sites on earth. But up until a few years ago, that room was kind of a mess. Sandra Tetley: It was open to anyone who could get into the building. You could actually go into that room, you could sit in the chairs, you could dial the phones, press the buttons. They would have the co-ops come in their first day and they could have coffee and breakfast at the consoles. The Department of Defense used to have their retirement celebrations in there. It was looking pretty ragged when we first started restoring it. This is Sandra Tetley, historic preservation officer at the Johnson Space Center. Sandra Tetley: Hi, my name is Sandra Tetley. I am the historic preservation officer and real property officer at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Tetley and her team at the Johnson Space Center or JSC just compleated a restoration of the Apollo Mission Control Center, also known as MOCR-2 or -- because space programs are built on acronyms -- simply, “moker.” Putting aside the room being used for retirement parties and breakfasts, the real challenge of the restoration was simply the fact that history keeps going. MOCR-2 served as mission control before and after the Apollo missions to the moon. Sandra Tetley: So it started out with Gemini. It flew all the manned Apollo missions. Then it did the Apollo Soyuz test project, Skylab and then began into Shuttle. And we actually lost the Shuttle Challenger out of this same room. So if the goal is to restore the room, how do you know which is the most significant mission? How do you know which era to restore it to? Well, in this case, it’s clearly Apollo. Sometimes history is messy as its layers overlap, but here it’s pretty clear. And this is a widely held-view. In 1985, the room became a National Historic Landmark or NHL, specifically because of its role in Apollo. Sandra Tetley: The building is a National Historic Landmark based on the man in space survey, which was a survey done of all the NASA centers. When the building was designated that they have a series of performance, which was from Apollo 11 and then through Apollo 17, which is when man landed on the moon. Of course except for 13. But that was the period of significance of the room, meaning that in this designation of an NHL, this is what the big focus would have been about. By 1992, the room was no longer being used for any missions and this gave way to the era of retirement parties and breakfasts. Sandra Tetley: That's where the Texas historic commission stepped in. And they really fought to keep that room from being completely gutted and modernized. You know, we were in the throws of Shuttle and Space Station and so we did not have the budget or you know, really the interest to do an actual restoration of that room. And because it was a National Historic Landmark, and what happened is the Texas state historic commission made an agreement with NASA and with JSC to leave that room alone. To basically preserve it or restore it for posterity because that is where we landed men on the moon. The restoration really got underway around 2014 when Tetley started applying for grants with the national park service. The interest was there, but it wasn’t obvious what the next steps were. Sandra Tetley: We began to try to get buy-in and support to do the restoration. And there was a lot of consternation because that room is so visible and it is so important. Various organizations on site wanted to control it and they wanted to control the restoration. So there was a big battle on who would do that and how it would work and how it would go. Tetley pushed for a restoration rather than a simple renovation. Gene Kranz, who served as chief Flight Director of the Apollo missions, decided to leverage the upcoming 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 to get it done right. Sandra Tetley: Only after Mr Kranz wrote what I call his nuclear letter and got the, an article in the newspaper, Houston Chronicle, and he wrote the Park Service, the advisory council, both our senators, the NASA Administrator. I mean, everyone got a letter saying it is time to restore this room. You're running out of time. It needs to be ready for the 50th anniversary. And that finally got everybody kind of on, you know, off dead center to get going. That’s when the restoration really started to take shape. During the missions, the room featured a visitors gallery behind it. The idea was that media and family could watch what was going on without disturbing the engineers on the floor. Since they were making life-and-death decisions, the engineers couldn’t be interrupted. Today, that same visitors gallery serves the same purpose -- to keep visitors off the floor. Sandra Tetley: One of our biggest battles that we had, was to begin to lock it down and prevent people who go into the consoles and going into the room. And that continues to be our biggest battle is to keep a limited number of people off the floor of the MOCR. This is not a unique problem to human heritage on earth. And once we create a museum at the Apollo 11 landing site on the moon, it won't be a unique problem to human heritage off of the earth either. There’s only so many people can visit the cave before the cave paintings are ruined. Sandra Tetley: Now that it's restored, the best vantage point is from the viewing room because all the consoles are lit up and there's furnishings and documents and so forth all over the console. That’s the best view because noone goes into the console room at all except for the retired flight controllers. The restored room looks exactly like it did in 1969. As visitors enter the gallery above, t he room comes alive in a 14 minute experience that portrays five different parts of of the Apollo 11 mission with historical accuracy: the descent and landing, the first step, the reading of the plaque on the lunar module, President Nixon calling the astronauts, and finally, the recovery after splashdown. The lights on the consoles, the projected graphs and maps, the buttons, and even the clocks change to display how they would have at those moments. Sandra Tetley: Space Center Houston, who's our visitor experience, wanted more of a Disney-esque type experience. Where you heard the, the chatter about the main landing, but that you saw it at a computer generated imagery on the screen of the moon, of the, the LM landing on the moon. What a restoration is that you try to make it be historically accurate. And that wasn't historical accurate. They never had any film or any imagery of them landing on the moon until they returned. So the only thing that was showing on the screen was data, whatever was showing from a console, they would project up there. They showed the map where they were expected to land. The lunar map and information like that, that they were making these decisions. So we have to go through all of the film that was ever filmed in mission control. We had to go through all that and then we had to recreate every single thing that was on all five of the summery display screens and all the clocks and then sync it all up to the actual audio. What I like about this approach is that it lets the drama of the historical events play out because there is a lot of drama in the room itself. Having all the real-time information come through maps and numbers and the astronauts own voices -- particularly as a decision-maker -- is an incredibly intense experience on its own. Sandra Tetley: We wanted people to really understand what the flight controllers were doing and what decisions they were having to make. You hear backroom loops of people saying, we've got, you know, another 1201 alarm. No, keep going, keep going. You know, and you've got the, you're hearing these decisions and you can feel the stress, and what they're having to do. And then even when they land, you continue to hear, okay, we've got a stay and no stay, you know, and then they begin to make that. And so it's very intense. And that is what we want to portray to people. We want them to understand that these men whose average age was 26 years old, we're having to make these, these real time decisions based on these numbers. And if you look at the screens on the consoles are crazy. I don't know how anyone can make heads or tails out of them and they're having to sit there and make these decisions for these men's lives. And you know, what will happen and what do I do and how do I do this? And, and they, you know, they did it. And that's what we really want people to, to get in there and just go, Oh my gosh, this is so cool. This is great. And I think it really comes across very well. When you visit Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed, you see that the desks in the Assembly Room are staged with quill pens and spare parchment as if the signers just had to step out for a moment. The restorers did the same thing here, but instead of quill pens, the studied the binders, cigarettes, ashtrays, bottles of coke, the engineers Han in hand from old film and video. Sandra Tetley: When you go into to and view the MOCR, everything there is place for a reason, based on films and still photography. And we placed them all there during the mission for the flight controllers. And it is a little bit of a blend of flight controllers. For example, one may drink coffee and we'd have this coffee cup that we may have the RC Cola can there as well. So we didn't try to just isolate it to one particular, there were different shifts during that time. And there was also lots of people in the room. It wasn't just the one flight control. I mean there was four or five people around each flight controller. So there was stuff everywhere. We have briefcases, we have sports coats that were their jackets and, and sack lunches that they brought in and ashtrays. We realized that we didn’t quite get it without ashtrays. Our cigarettes are ashtrays or are full of cigarettes and, and if anything about the ashtray we have, they have those big amber ashtrays because they're cigar ashtray. And the reason why they got the big cigar ass tradings cause they smoke so much that they would fill up the smaller ashtrays too fast. The restoration opened on July 20th, 2019, exactly 50 years after the room guided humans to the lunar surface for the first time. In attendance were Gene Kranz and other flight controllers and engineers. This time, though, they didn’t have life-or-death decisions to make. They could simply enjoy the room. Sandra Tetley: So on the 50th anniversary, the flight controller said, we really want to have that list to ourselves. We don't want a big crowd. We'd like to take our wives in there too because I very rarely I will to the family and their wives on the floor during missions. And that never happened during missions. One of the things the flight controllers said is that when they landed man on the moon, we did not set to celebrate. So the 50th anniversary came around, stay really celebrated. And we had them all come in and we showed them all the visceral experience because a lot of them, that was the first time they've seen it. And then we brought them on the floor and all of them could just go and look at all the consoles and you know, they told us, they told us so much, no it didn't look like this, you know, is this look like this? And Oh my gosh, how did you find my coffee cup? That's just wild, you know, a lot of comradery and then we took their pictures. So we took each flight team pictures at their console. So we have these really great photographs. A lot of them were very emotional and, and, uh, you know, just sort of were able to really relive it and realize what they've done at this point. And so that was very special. That kind of topped it all off. This has been Museum Archipelago. 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Full show notes at the publisher