Recent Museum Research Articles

Building Three-dimensional Virtual Historic Fashion Museum Exhibitions: From the Perspective of Technology Affordances

Museums are currently undertaking the task of digital transformation. Transformational technology generates revitalization of the curatorship, cultural heritage presentation, management model, and traditional roles of museums. The creation of three-dimensional (3D) virtual museum exhibitions is important to fulfill the revolutionary operational requirements and projections of recent museums through digital transformation. The objectives of this project were to (1) create realistic 3D virtual museum exhibitions accessible from the web, focusing on historic fashions, and (2) provide an analysis of the process and resources for creating 3D virtual museum exhibitions featuring object-focused exhibits. As a theoretical background of this project, the theory of technology affordances and the affordance actualization process were applied in the creation of 3D virtual museum exhibitions. The results of this project provide cultural heritage museums and institutions with useful precedents for the development of 3D virtual historic fashion museum exhibitions.

Prosthetic limbs on display: from maker to user

Prosthetic devices have been used in museums to tell clinical, technical and personal stories. Here we reflect on the ways artificial limbs and their users were represented in recent museum projects at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and at National Museums Scotland. We consider how these meaningful artefacts illuminate three overlapping themes in museum scholarship and practice: the representation of disabled people and disability in museums; reflections on conflict-acquired limb loss; and the presence or otherwise of user or patient voice in interpretation. In working with and representing people who design and wear prosthetics we advocate a balance between narratives of technique and of use.

The Uses of Mourning

The Uses of Mourning

Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman

Reviewed by: Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman Audrey Goodman (bio) Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman University of Oklahoma Press, 2020 THROUGH A NATIVE LENS DEMONSTRATES the many ways that Native people in North America practiced photography, participated in image production and exchange, and integrated photographs into their communities. By design, it is not a comprehensive study. Instead, it offers a selective, well-paced overview of situations, practices, and interpretations of images made of Native subjects and/or by Native photographers between 1840 and 1940. It presents a clear critical framework or "rubric" for approaching both familiar and archival images, and the extensive illustrations in the book complicate and enrich existing published records and recent museum exhibitions. Rather than delve into the politics of repatriation, develop a sustained theoretical argument, or explore in detail the ongoing social lives of the images, the book realizes the value of the author's extensive archival research by concentrating on the conditions and contexts of image production. Strathman examines in detail how Indian subjects crafted their public personas and identities on many scales. With its wide range of visual materials, appealing design, high-quality reproductions, and clear structure, this informative and well-researched book is a pleasure to view and read. Strathman worked extensively in state, territorial, and tribal archives, including the Autry National Center's Braun Research Library, the National Anthropological Archives, the Oklahoma Historical Society, the American Heritage Center, the University of Wyoming, the Yukon Archives, and the Cherokee National Archives. The book shares her discoveries through narrative sketches of each photographer's experience. Divided into two parts, "Native Participants" and "Native Practitioners," the book distinguishes between the agency exercised by subjects and that exercised by creators. Within those parts, each chapter assembles topics, figures, and visual materials according to the degree of the subject's public notoriety or the photographer's professional expertise. It reports on the origin and status of each archival collection and invites readers to view, interpret, and delight in the array of photographs on display. The book contends that Native subjects and photographers "used photography to assert their right of self-representation," whether through small [End Page 154] gestures of resistance visible in the photographs themselves, negotiations for payment, or running a successful studio (179). Part I advances this claim through discussions of leaders such as Red Cloud (Oglala), the Hawaiian royal family, and Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute), each of whom used portrait photography to craft political strategies and public personas. Other examples reveal how Native people negotiated with non-Native photographers to control the production and circulation of images: at times they restricted the events that outsiders could photograph, or adapted rituals to make only secular elements visible, or chose whether to admit a photographer to witness and record family life. While many of the images reproduced in this section will be familiar to readers, they continue to command attention and have a cumulative power. The most original and rewarding chapters of the book are found in Part II, where Strathman explores a broad cross-section of practices by semi-professional and amateur Native photographers: visual ethnographers and collectors such as Louis Shotridge (Yeilgooxu); Bureau of Indian Affairs employee Richard Throssel (Crow/Scottish/adopted Cree); Benjamin Haldane (Tsimshian), owner of a photography studio in Metlakatla, Alaska; Jennie Ross Cobb (Cherokee), whose archive flaunts the confidence, independence, and personal style of young Cherokee women during the Progressive era; and George Hunt (Tlingit/British), whose snapshots convey the Tlingit community's pride in hunting and other rituals. For each, Strathman deftly assesses the archive, probes the limits of the historical record, teases out stylistic and rhetorical contrasts between the Native photographers and their mentors, and summarizes the political, commercial, and cultural pressures of each location and moment. Through a Native Lens is a fascinating and beautifully produced record of Native photography as a diverse enterprise. As Strathman writes in the conclusion, "There is no single Native American way of practicing photography but, instead, multiple photographies" (177). The study is a substantial contribution to recent and ongoing appraisals and revisions of Native photographic histories by a diverse group of...

Western Message Petroglyphs indicate historic beaver presence in a San Francisco Bay Area watershed

Recent museum, archaeological, and observer record evidence suggests that North American beaver (Castor canadensis) were historically native to the watersheds of California’s coast, including San Francisco Bay. A wide variety of animals are abundantly represented in Native American petroglyphs and pictographs with their representations fulfilling intentions ranging from the mundane to ceremonial and mythological purposes. However, beaver symbols are poorly represented in California rock art and absent from the San Francisco Bay Area. A novel record, in the form of Western Message Petroglyphs, suggests that a beaver lodge was present in the late nineteenth century in the Alameda Creek watershed, potentially the last evidence of beaver prior to their extirpation in the region by the fur trade.

Visitor-artwork network analysis using object detection with image-retrieval technique

Recent museum exhibitions are becoming a means by which to satisfy visitor demands. In order to provide visitor-centric exhibitions, artwork must be analyzed based on the behavior of visitors, and not merely according to museum professionals' points of view. This study aims to analyze the relationship between museum visitors and artwork via a network analysis based on visitor behavior using object detection techniques. Cameras installed in a museum recorded visitors, and an object detector with a content-based image-retrieval technique tracked visitors from the videos. The durations spent with different artworks were measured, and the data was converted into a bipartite graph. The relationships between different artwork types were analyzed with a visitor-centered artwork network. Based on the visitors’ behavior, significant artworks were identified and the artwork network was compared to the arrangement of the museum. The tendency of edges in the artwork network was also examined considering visitors' preferences for artworks. The method used here makes it possible to collect quantitative data, with the results possibly used as a basis and for reference when analyzing artwork in a visitor-centered approach.

Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity curated by Kathryn Gunsch

Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity curated by Kathryn Gunsch

The five million bird eggs in the world’s museum collections are an invaluable and underused resource

AbstractThe ~1.97 million egg sets (~5 million eggs) housed in museums have not been used in proportion to their availability. We highlight the wide variety of scientific disciplines that have used egg collections and the geographic locations and sizes of these collections, to increase awareness of the importance of egg collections, improve their visibility to the scientific community, and suggest that they offer a wealth of data covering large spatial scales and long time series for broad investigations into avian biology. We provide a brief history of egg collections and an updated list of museums/institutions with egg collections worldwide. We also review the limitations, challenges, and management of egg collections, and summarize recent literature based on historical and recent museum egg materials.

Meanings of the “Museum Boom” in Contemporary Poland and Elsewhere

ABSTRACTThe “museum boom” is a global phenomenon with various local manifestations and wide‐ranging antecedents. The recent museum boom in Poland, in which a number of national museum complexes have either opened or undergone significant remodeling, is related to changing evidential discourses about collective identity. These discourses are part of the national narratives surrounding the Polish state. This essay asks what can be learned from the Polish museum boom. Notably, museums and museum‐like institutions within Poland serve as a space for education and dialogue that both complements and contrasts with history education in schools and written history books. Through comparative case studies, this essay addresses how the museum boom is rooted in the particularities of Poland’s history. Museums elsewhere are experiencing similar shifts, and we ask here what these changes can tell us about the transformations of history museums in Poland.

The changing symbolic meaning of the extinct great auk and its afterlife as a museum object at the Natural History Museum of Denmark

This article examines the historical context and afterlife of the great auk as a museum object. The focus is on the changing meaning of the bird as it travels across cultural boundaries, material forms and historical periods. It starts by focusing on how the bird was contextualized within Ole Worm’s cabinet in the 17th century and then moves on to more recent museum representations. By conducting interviews with museum staff and professionals and analysis of items stored and/or exhibited at the museum, the symbolic meanings and representative functions of the great auk are brought into light. As proposed in this paper, certain characteristics, values and meanings stem from the materiality of the objects but also from their travels and re-locations. The investigation reveals how the role of the great auk in relation to collective museum (and human) challenges such as emerging ecological limits and biodiversity loss has been developing.

Making Fun of the Museum: Multidisciplinarity, Holism, and 'The Return of Curiosity'

Museums are curious institutions in two senses, one arising from the eccentricities and peculiarities of their histories, and the other from their ongoing desire to display, provoke, and satisfy their visitors' curiosity about the world in which they live. As the critical literature has shown, we can think about Western museums as material deposits of the different forms curiosity has taken in the course of four centuries of European imperial expansion and colonial domination - as sites where the properties of things could be disciplined according to Western knowledge structures and deployed to create a comprehensive picture of the world. Although this consciousness has shaken the foundations of museums and dislodged the collections they hold, their value as places where colonial legacies can be negotiatied and shared concerns addressed remains compelling. Responding to Nicholas Thomas's The Return of Curiosity, to Actor-Network-Theory's insistence on connecting disciplinary knowledges, and to Indigenous reaffirmations of holistic knowledge formation, this article explores a range of recent museum projects that invoke curiosity to transgress the museum's modern disciplinary boundaries.

‘A Bastion of Colonialism’

This article uses visitor research to explore public attitudes to the British Museum and perceptions of its relationship to the history of the British Empire. Firstly, it provides an analysis of direct messages received by the Museum over a twelve month period via letters, emails and comments on social media platforms. Secondly, it draws on short interviews undertaken with visitors upon arrival at the Museum before entry. Thirdly, it draws on formative and summative evaluation for two recent British Museum special exhibitions that explicitly addressed imperial and colonial histories, ‘Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilization’ (23 April – 2 August 2015) and South Africa: The Art of a Nation’ (27 October 2016–26 February 2017). Finally, it draws on focus groups (April 2018) held to explore perceptions of the Museum held by culturally active non-visitors. Collectively this insight highlights the Museum’s vast potential to inform contemporary debates about empire by developing new approaches to displaying and interpreting its collection.

Lost in Translation: Video Games Becoming Cultural Heritage?

Recent attention to the question of preservation and exhibition of video games in cultural institutions such as museums indicates that this media form is moving from being seen as contentious consumer object to cultural heritage. This empirical study examines two recent museum exhibitions of digital games: GameOn 2.0 at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm (TM), and Women in Game Development at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, Oakland (MADE). The aim is to explore how games are appropriated within such institutions, and thereby how they are configured as cultural heritage and exhibitable culture. The study uses actor-network theory in order to analyse heterogeneous actors working in conjunction in such processes, specifically focusing on translation of games and game culture as they are repositioned within museums. The study explores how games are selectively recruited at both institutions and thereby translated in order to fit exhibition networks, in both cases leading to a glossing over of contentious issues in games and game culture. In turn, this has led to a more palatable but less nuanced transformation of video games into cultural heritage. While translating video games into cultural heritage, the process of making games exhibitable lost track of games as culture by focusing on physical artefacts and interactive, playable fun. It also lost track of them as situated in our culture by skimming over or ignoring the current contentious nature of digital games, and finally, it lost track of games as being produced and experienced in a particular context, or games of culture.

Chiseling Away at the Dogma of Dietary Specialization in Dipodomys Microps

Dipodomys microps, the chisel-toothed kangaroo rat, is heralded as one of few mammalian herbivores capable of dietary specialization. Throughout its range, the diet of D. microps is thought to consist primarily of Atriplex confertifolia (saltbush), a C4 plant, and sparing amounts of C3 plants. Using stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen as natural diet tracers, we asked whether D. microps is an obligate specialist on saltbush. We analyzed hair samples of D. microps for isotopes from historic and recent museum specimens (N = 66). A subset of samples (N = 17) from 2017 that were associated with field notes on plant abundances were further evaluated to test how local saltbush abundance affects its inclusion in the diet of D. microps. Overall, we found that the chisel-toothed kangaroo rat facultatively specializes on saltbush and that the degree of specialization has varied over time and space. Moreover, saltbush abundance dictates its inclusion in the diet. Furthermore, roughly a quarter of the diet is comprised of insects, and over the past century, insects have become more prevalent and saltbush less prevalent in the diet. We suggest that environmental factors such as climate change and rangeland expansion have caused D. microps to include more C3 plants and insects.

Fracture behaviour of historic and new oak wood

Recent museum studies have indicated the appearance of cracks and dimensional changes on decorated oak panels in historical Dutch cabinets and panel paintings. A thorough analysis of these damage mechanisms is needed to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the causes of damage and to advise museums on future sustainable preservation strategies and rational guidelines for indoor climate specifications. For this purpose, a combined experimental-numerical characterization of the fracture behaviour of oak wood of various ages is presented in this communication. Three-point bending tests were performed on historical samples dated 1300 and 1668 A.D. and on new samples. The measured failure responses and fracture paths are compared against numerical results computed with a finite element model. The discrete fracture behaviour is accurately simulated by using a robust interface damage model in combination with a dissipation-based path-following technique. The results indicate that the samples dated 1300 A.D. show a quasi-brittle fracture response, while the samples dated 1668 A.D. and the new samples show a rather brittle failure response. Further, the local tensile strength of the oak wood decreases with age in an approximately linear fashion, thus indicating a so-called ageing effect. Numerical simulations show that, due to small imperfections at the notch tip of the specimen, the maximal load carrying capacity under three-point bending may decrease by maximally 7 %. A comparison between a calibration of the experimental results by isotropic and orthotropic elastic models shows that the peak load is 10–13% higher for the orthotropic elastic model. Finally, no significant dependence of the fracture toughness on the age of the oak wood and on the orientation of the fracture plane has been found. The strength and toughness values measured can be used as input for advanced numerical simulations on climate-induced damage in decorated oak wooden panels and panel paintings.

Identifying and Transforming Racism in Museum Education

In a recent anti-racist museum education workshop, we asked the audience of close to 400 museum educators to raise their hands if they had ever heard one of the following statements: “She's just no...

Countering the <em>Sharī‘a:</em> How Material Culture Constructs A Narrative of an “Islamic” Identity that Counters the <em>Sharī‘a</em>

This essay argues that the Western caricature of Islam as inherently uncivilized and irrational elicits a construction of Islamic material heritage that positions itself in opposition to the Sharī‘a. I use evidence from two recent museum exhibitions of Islamic material culture to show that a positive representation of an “Islamic” identity is typically cast in ways that run counter to the Sharī‘a. The two case studies analysed here are drawn from the history of science. In each case study, “Islamic” is conceived as related to rational and civilizational values rather than those based on religious textual authority. I argue that the cultural narrative articulated by these case studies has arisen as a reaction to the Western representation of Islam and Muslims as bound to religious dogma, and thus ipso facto, as being irrational and uncivilized.

Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display by Peggy Levitt

Reviewed by: Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display by Peggy Levitt Scott Magelssen ARTIFACTS AND ALLEGIANCES: HOW MUSEUMS PUT THE NATION AND THE WORLD ON DISPLAY. By Peggy Levitt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015; pp. 268. Peggy Levitt writes out of a sense of concern. In a world “plagued by economic crisis, heightened ethnic and religious strife” in which “one out of every seven people is an internal or international migrant” (133, 142), more and more individuals face “declining social protection … outside the traditional nation-state framework” (133). Museums have, since their inception, seen themselves as civilizing and uplifting their populations, but as the world becomes increasingly global and transnational, Levitt finds bankrupt the traditional model of a national museum that organizes and stages a comprehensive vision of a stable and unified nation-state for its own citizens and the world. Institutions all over the globe are feeling the push to incorporate more cosmopolitan visions into their exhibits to keep apace with changing politics and human migration. Indeed, museums themselves are part and parcel of the new reality where national power is being decentered, as seen in a global museum industry increasingly built and programmed by a transnational class of curators and “starchitects,” such as I. M. Pei. Levitt begins by categorically refusing to offer a grand unifying theory of recent museum history; instead, she aims for a broad inventory of practices in a book accessible to readers from the museum profession to academia to her “ninety-five year old father” (12). Nevertheless, several central arguments and threads emerge in the introductory and concluding chapters. Based on her interviews and field research, a picture emerges in which museums are “messy arenas” (5), where cosmopolitanism and nationalism fall along a continuum and “mutually inform and transform one another” (3). Levitt posits that cultural institutions’ practices of responding to increased diversity are specific to the history and context of the cities within which they develop, what she terms their “cultural armature,” and that “[h]ow cities manage difference contributes to but is not always the same as how difference gets managed nationally” (3). How Boston and New York perform cosmopolitanism, for instance, might differ from the ways that other parts of the US negotiate the presence of others, whereas city-states like Singapore and Doha, Qatar, can basically be used interchangeably with their respective nations. Furthermore, in spite of perceived efforts toward progressive change, the nationalist and imperialist genealogies of a particular institution can thwart true democracy and egalitarianism (7). [End Page 440] The three chapters that comprise the body of Artifacts and Allegiances serve as a kind of loosely structured travelogue documenting Levitt’s case studies, described in the conclusion as giving “equal credit to what the hedgehog or the forest-seer contributes—a broader, thinner, but equally valuable snapshot that complements, rather than tak[ing] a backseat to, deeper, narrower, long-term approaches” (139). Chapter 1 describes museums in Scandinavia, such as the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, the Nordiska Museet and Ethnografiska Museet in Stockholm, and the Museum of World Culture in Gothenberg. Chapter 2 looks to North American institutions like the Brooklyn Museum in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, while the third chapter focuses on museums in the Middle East and Asia, such as the National Museum of Qatar and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the Asian Civilizations Museum (ACM) in Singapore. Each chapter carefully situates its institutions within their city’s “cultural armature.” Levitt provides her Swedish examples, for instance, with a full backdrop of Sweden’s historic flux between medieval global superpower and a much less puissant though fairly well-to-do modern nation that, based on its robust cultural export industry, the rest of the West would never guess was one-fifth immigrant (34). On the flipside, in Singapore, while the ACM boasts a story of a diverse and hybrid nation connected to the global, what gets left out “is a discussion of the assumptions underlying the diversity management regime in place and the absence of human rights,” which “would challenge the government and the status quo...

Sound, mobility and landscapes of exhibition: radio-guided tours at the Science Museum, London, 1960–1964

From 1960 to 1964 the Science Museum in London experimented with the technique of audio guide known as the radio-guided tour. The scheme formed part of a Museum-wide initiative dedicated to the education of the ‘average visitor’: a growing body of the museum-going public with a popular interest in science and technology. This paper positions the radio-guided tour within a period of rapid development at the Science Museum characterised by the reconfiguration of its landscapes of exhibition. It shows how the radio-guided tour helped to navigate new techniques of exhibition display, particularly that known as ‘exhibition as landscape’, which aimed to cultivate the appropriate sets of emotion necessary for an appreciation of, and, importantly, a feeling for, science and its applications in technology. The paper contributes to literature on the sonic and mobile makings of landscape, in particular that which has called for a critical phenomenological approach concerned with the social, cultural and political dimensions of embodied engagements with landscape practice. It also contributes to recent museum studies literature with its foregrounding of the body and the sensorium in the configuration of the spaces of knowledge at the museum.

Survivance Stories, Co-Creation, and a Participatory Model at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center

AbstractSince opening its doors in 1998, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center (MPMRC) has had an identity as both a tribal center and a museum committed to challenging the public’s conventional understandings of Native history in New England. Over a 15-year period, museum staff and the tribal community learned to work more collaboratively in an effort to document and illuminate Pequot survivance—the histories of Mashantucket families living and working in and against the modern world. A review of recent museum projects clarifies the benefits of collaboration while revealing how new exhibits and programs are impacting visitor experiences and understandings. Another kind of museum space is envisioned in which visitors, staff, and tribal members actively co-create exhibits and programs centered on Pequot survivance, using content informed by ongoing archaeological studies. In that space, co-creation practices would encourage social interaction—a collaborative pushing-and-pulling of ideas and stories in a shared search for new understandings of survivance at Mashantucket and beyond.