Musician Alan Chadwick of the Chicago Music Exchange plays a history of rock and roll in twelve minutes using one hundred guitar riffs. Rock and roll is broad category of different music styles, so here’s an example of how to explain the diversity quickly to an audience. If it’s possible to interpret a complex history with an intangible collection, can it be adapted for physical sites that cover many centuries and families?
Author Archives: Max van Balgooy
Managing Timelines for Research and Interpretation
Aeon Timeline by Scribblecode.
If you’ve ever been involved in researching or interpreting an historic site, you’ve no doubt assembled a timeline to keep track of events and understand connections between the site, region, and nation. After you assemble a lot of data, managing those relationships becomes incredibly complex and you’re continually updating charts and reshuffling cards. Help may be on the way through Aeon Timeline by Scribblecode, a timeline tool for fiction writers which can be easily adapted for historical research and interpretation. It’s currently only available for the Mac for $40, but next year they will introduce a version for PC.
Like any timeline, you can plot dates of events, put them into categories (e.g., local or national), and display them neatly and chronologically. Even better, it can zoom in or out so you can examine the details or see the big picture. That’s nice, and you might be able to figure out how to manipulate a document, spreadsheet, or database to do this for you. But Aeon Timeline goes further by allowing you to tag events and add notes to provide depth, and you can add layers for people or places to visually keep track of what happens to whom or where. If you’re exploring narrative non-fiction or using storytelling techniques in historical interpretation, it will help you construct arcs and identify turning points. Watching the introductory video can explain the features better than I can, but if you’re creating a tour, exhibit, or article, this might help you organize ideas much better than the traditional outline or stack of cards. You can download a 20-day demo version for free but if you want to buy it, Aeon Timeline is available for a 20 percent discount until June 14 at http://www.scribblecode.com/summerfest.html.
National Youth Program Award Finalists Offer Inspiration to Sites
The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and its cultural partners, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, recently recognized 50 exceptional programs for their work in providing rich arts and humanities learning opportunities for young people. The National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award is the nation’s highest honor for out-of-school arts and humanities programs that celebrate the creativity of America’s young people, particularly those from underserved communities.
According to the IMLS news release, “From small towns to big cities, the 2013 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award Finalists reflect the diversity of disciplines and settings of these wonderful programs that are taking place from coast to coast.” Hmm. The 2013 finalists are overwhelmingly heavy with Continue reading
Video: Food Critic Reviews Museum Cafe
Tom Sietsema, the food critic for the Washington Post, provides a rare video review of Mitsitam, the cafe at the National Museum of the American Indian. It is one of the few good places on the Mall to eat (which is a culinary wasteland for the most part) and does an outstanding job of interpreting cultures through food.
A New Way to Brainstorm and Mindmap using Scapple
I’m always looking for ways to effectively work with groups to generate and organize ideas. My usual tactic is flipcharts and colored pens, but you quickly realize the limitations as you run out of space or illegibility reigns with scribbled words and connecting lines. One answer is to use a huge sheet of paper on the walls, but space isn’t usually available because of pictures hanging on the wall or windows. More and more I rely on a digital projector and a laptop with a program like MindManager or Visio. It’s much more legible, items can be easily moved around, you never run out of space, and you generate a nice clean document at the end. One of the major disadvantages is mind mapping programs force you to start at one point and work your way out (like a hub and spokes) and brainstorming doesn’t usually happen that way. Ideas come in randomly and are not always related, so there are several individual ideas floating around at the same time.
There may be a solution at hand with Scapple, a new application from Literature and Latte. It’s only available for the Mac but it’s simple (once you master a few keystrokes), handles random isolated ideas, can easily reorganize and group ideas, and can be exported to png, pdf, and txt. And for $15, it’s a bargain. I’m working with the free 30-day demo version to try it out on my current projects, but it’s definitely something I’ll consider for my next group meeting. Alternatives for Mac are Curio, MindNode, Tinderbox, and Omnigraffle (but I don’t recommend Shapely) and if you’re in a Windows environment, look at MindManager (which is also available for Mac) and Visio. Each offers different features and fill different needs for brainstorming, writing, presenting, and collaborative meetings. Indeed, you may want a couple different ones for different situations. If you found a program that works for you, share it in the comments below.
AAM Annual Meeting: Report to the Field
Last week’s annual meeting of the American Alliance of Museums was held just 30 miles from my house but I wasn’t able to attend due to other commitments. I missed seeing so many of my friends! Fortunately, Terri Anderson, a colleague working at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, shared her experiences:
Terri Anderson
I had a great time attending the American Alliance of Museums annual conference this week, held in Baltimore, Maryland. AAM put on an excellent conference, full of interesting sessions. To be completely honest, I haven’t said that about an AAM conference in a while. I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting and informative each session was. Also a first for me was being completely blocked from a session. “How We Did It: The Move of the Barnes Collection” was so full, the AAM volunteer had to close the doors and wouldn’t let in any more people even to stand in the back. All the sessions I attended (in the collections management track) were full or over-full—I hope AAM can get arrange for bigger rooms for its collections sessions next time.
A great feature of this year’s conference is that Continue reading
Video: Atlanta Lamppost
This video is one of the forty multimedia stops in a new “story-caching” application that allows users to visit and learn more about various historic events and landmarks in Georgia as part of sesquicentennial of the Atlanta and Savannah Campaigns of 1864 and the semicentennial of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Once installed on a GPS-enabled smartphone or tablet, the application guides users to a site with a “story-cache”–a streaming multimedia presentation that “projects” the past onto the present location. Atlanta high-rises yield to Civil War trenches; Martin Luther King, Jr. is suddenly standing and speaking just where he once did, giving users the illusion of being transported back in time to become a member of his audience. Content is activated simply by being in the right place and pointing your smart device at a particular sign or statue or object. This project is developed by ARwerks, an augmented reality design and production company (their web site isn’t fully operational, so they remain a bit mysterious).
Interpreting Bondage and Freedom in the Chesapeake
Visiting Annapolis a few weeks ago, I had a chance to see the nearly completed installation of Freedom Bound: Runaways of the Chesapeake, a year-long exhibit about the resistance to servitude and slavery in the Chesapeake Bay region from the colonial period to the Civil War. Heather Ersts and Ariane Hofstedt of the Historic Annapolis Foundation graciously provided a personal tour of the exhibit, which is installed in several museums and historic sites around the city. It’s an exhibit worth seeing not only for the content, but also the design, and several items jumped out at me:
1. The exhibit looks at the varied experiences of people through nine persons. Seven of these persons were enslaved Africans, but two are white–a convict servant and an indentured servant–which will surprise most visitors. It complicates the usual narrative that only Africans were held in bondage (of course, being owned as a slave is very different from being incarcerated as a convict) and it’s by encountering the unexpected that people are more likely to learn. The typical exhibit about slavery trots out the same 1850 drawing of the slave ship Brooks, a pair of iron shackles, and perhaps a tag from Charleston. Yes, those are all authentic and true, but the constant repeat of these items renders them Continue reading
Vinyl Banners that Look Sharp, not Saggy
Anderson House: exterior sign at a distance
Anderson House: exterior sign, side 1
Anderson House: exterior sign close-up
Anderson House: exterior sign, side 2
Anderson House: velcro across top of exterior sign
Anderson House: bolts in bottom corner of exterior sign
The other week I passed by Anderson House and was so struck by their full-color monument signs that I had to take a closer look. They’re the common vinyl banners that can be made by nearly every sign and banner store, but they were incredibly neat and clean–none of the usual sagging, wrinkling, and rippling. Mounted across the top and bottom with Velcro onto a metal frame, the bottom corners of banners are also secured with bolts to keep them from flying away in the wind or easily taken by admiring thief. The frame is made of square tubing, whose legs slide onto a corresponding set of tubes set in the ground. Emily Schulz, the deputy director and curator, generously provided more details:
“We installed the banners on the front lawn in mid April 2012, so they’ve been up pretty much exactly one year. They replaced a small sandwich board sign that was put out every morning and Continue reading
Video: African American Cemeteries of New Jersey
For today’s break, a beautifully produced yet simple 3:44 video by Adam Worth about the historic African American cemeteries in New Jersey, many of which are abandoned and slowly disappearing into nature. It discusses their historical significance as well as current preservation challenges.
Engaging Places 