Poster Session (Asynchronous Session)
Collections Histories for Accountability and Transparency Project at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History View Digital Media
Poster Session Catherine Ahern, Greg Polley, Molly Kamph, Alice Fornari, Megan Viera
In July 2020, a working group of Collections Program Museum Technicians at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) proposed a collections initiative to highlight the forgotten, obscure, and too-often erased histories of those who have contributed their time and energy in service to the museum, its mission, and ultimately its collections. The Collections Histories for Accountability and Transparency (CHAT) working group project aims to document donors, collectors, creators, and contributors to the NMNH collections through short biographies intended for incorporation into the museum’s collections database. Within this poster session, the CHAT group outlines the inspiration behind the project, current statistics of the NMNH collections’ contributors, examples of biographies, and plans for implementation at NMNH.
Designing Social Stories for a University Museum: Making the Museum Accessible as an Opportunity to Innovate Academic Teaching View Digital Media
Poster Session Marta Brunelli
The intellectual accessibility is a great challenge for museums since cognitive disabilities are many and diverse, and requiring varied and personalized approaches. The contribution illustrates a pilot project in which students, trainees, and undergraduates of the Masters degree courses in Management of Cultural Heritage and in Educational Sciences participated in the design and implementation of two prototypes of Social Stories for the Museum of Educational History, with the aim to make the museum more inclusive and accessible. The case study was proposed in the following academic years 2019/20 and 2020/21. Although the lessons were delivered online during the lockdown period, and working on the experience and analysing the Social Stories produced, made students gain greater awareness of the many issues related to intellectual accessibility as well as acquire specific skills in writing Easy Read museum texts. Given the first positive results, the teaching method experimented will continue to be implemented and developed in the university museum context. The experience confirmed how university museums could rethink their action by turning the implementation of new services into an extraordinary training opportunity for pre-service museum educators to acquire knowledge and skills about accessibility.
Feel the Art: A Sensorial Experience View Digital Media
Poster Session Ming Zhao
My graduate design research focuses is on Multisensory Design. Specifically, I’m exploring new approaches to design and opportunities for engaging all five senses. Humans process the world using more than one sense, I am seeking ways to stimulate sensory responses to enrich visitors’ interactions with artworks to offer them a comprehensive connection with the artists’ intention of creating the pieces. As a designer, I am passionate about creating opportunities for diverse individuals and communities to participate in art - both as makers and audiences. Most exhibitions make me realize how sight is just one of the senses we use to engage with art. This realization, with a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with selected porcupine quillworks done by one of the Quill Sisters -Cheryl Simon at the exhibition (Mateus Revisited) in Mary E. Black Gallery, Halifax, Canada. The Quill Sisters: Melissa Peter-Paul, Kay Sark, and Cheryl Simon have dedicated their time, passion, and creativity to reinvigorating the unique and dynamic tradition of Mi’kmaw quillwork embellishment on birchbark forms. This exhibition inspired me to propose a new and multi-sensory design project: A Multi-Sensory Interpretive Box. The Box intends to understand how multisensory exhibition design can help connect audiences with intellectual, neurological, and developmental disabilities to the culturally specific Mi’kmaw knowledge, expertise, and artistic practices in this exhibition. The box enables participants to feel the material used in the art pieces, smell a specific scent, and have a better understanding of the story behind the quillworks.
Online Curation Tools for Community-led Cultural Context Creation : Beta Testing the Co-design of Metadata for Curated Knowledge View Digital Media
Poster Session Amanda Figueroa, Alison Guzman
People worldwide are seeking the revitalization of traditional knowledge, culture and history, and museums have an incredible opportunity as anchor institutions to provide this service in a changing and healing planet. Curationist (curationist.org) aspires to be a community-led organization in this mission. We bring together local practitioners and global scholars in the ongoing conversation about how to engage museum collections with online tools to augment and co-design the access to an ever-growing diverse range of open-education resources in cultural heritage materials from all corners of the planet. In the past, research projects involving cultural materials might have required extensive travel to far-flung repositories and multiple bureaucratic requests for images that could take months or years to fulfill. However, the pandemic has taught us that access to research and culture should be more efficient and accessible. Our beta-testing research examines how the Curationist.org platform can provide confidence and authenticity to community users and teachers, providing an opportunity to curate their own multivariate voices for themselves and for future generations. Curationist is researching what assistance smaller institutions and under-resourced individuals need in order to share their collections online. The research process invites complex and nuanced dialogue between curationists, community practitioners, students and teachers, to name a few. The output will provide feedback on their infrastructure and capacity needs, which will influence and direct Curationist’s future directions. This presentation outlines our methodology and learnings to date, focusing on areas of revitalizing traditional knowledge, enhancing community-led practices, and rewriting local history.
