Object Lessons: Material Culture on the World Wide Web

Abstract

The World Wide Web abounds with online exhibits cre ated by museums, historical societies, scholars, antiques dealers, and collectors. Clearly, the study and display of material culture has moved into a new medium, presenting new challenges and raising new questions about the methodology of interpreting artifacts (1). Within these online exhibits, we experience three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional envi ronment. What implications does this present for a historical method that is based upon on the three-dimensional artifact? With this question in mind, I ventured into teaching with technology for the first time with an undergraduate course in American material culture at Villanova University. In my course, I hoped that in addition to learning about artifacts as historical sources, my students would become critical consumers of material culture on the web as well as creators of their own material culture web pages. I hoped that they would recognize both the advantages and the limitations of material culture studies on the web. In keeping with the proliferation of web sites devoted to artifact-rich world's fairs, the Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876 became the focus of my course. The World Wide Web has become a platform for reimagining spectacles of the past. The potential of the Centennial Exhibition as a source for engaging students in the study of nineteenth-century culture was noted on the occasion of the Bicentennial by Thomas J. Schlereth, a professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2). The Centennial project at Villanova took its cue from Schlereth's writings and took advantage of the proxim ity of the exhibition site. The project also utilized sources from the exhibition, including its rich photographic record at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The course was divided into two parts (3). During the first half of the semester, we read books about material culture and applied the various methods of analysis that we encountered in these books by analyzing artifacts on our campus. We used computers in this part of the course as tools for introducing the historical periods addressed in the readings. Before starting each book, we met in the computer lab for an exploratory exercise using the historical resources of the Internet to orient the students to various historical periods. After spending the first half of the semester on methodology, we devoted the second half to the Centennial Exhibition, apply ing material culture methods and constructing a web site from the students' work. The students' research for the most part used traditional sources such as books and archival photographs; the web became the platform for presenting this research not only to their professor, but to the world. Each student in the class completed a small-scale research project on some material aspect of the exhibition?one country's exhibits, for example, or a particular building or artifact. The students turned these papers into individual web pages including text and, in most cases, images. These individual projects then served as source material for a second set of papers that strived to reach overall interpretations of the material culture of the Centennial. These analysis papers were conceived as introduc tory text for the web site and included links to various students' research projects, thereby serving as a gateway into the site (4). The key to this project was collaboration, in scholarship and in the construction of the web site. Collaborative web projects can communicate to our students the process of scholarship. They read what others have written, complete their own research to add to that