Text Panels Research Articles

Evaluating Text Reading Speed in VR Scenes and 3D Particle Visualizations.

This work reports how text size and other rendering conditions affect reading speeds in a virtual reality environment and a scientific data analysis application. Displaying text legibly yet space-efficiently is a challenging problem in immersive displays. Effective text displays that enable users to read at their maximum speed must consider the variety of virtual reality (VR) display hardware and possible visual exploration tasks. We investigate how text size and display parameters affect reading speed and legibility in three state-of-the-art VR displays: two head-mounted displays and one CAVE. In our perception experiments, we establish limits where reading speed declines as the text size approaches the so-called critical print sizes (CPS) of individual displays, which can inform the design of uniform reading experiences across different VR systems. We observe an inverse correlation between display resolution and CPS. Yet, even in high-fidelity VR systems, the measured CPS was larger than in comparable physical text displays, highlighting the value of increased VR display resolutions in certain visualization scenarios. Our findings indicate that CPS can be an effective metric for evaluating VR display usability. Additionally, we evaluate the effects of text panel placement, orientation, and occlusion-reducing rendering methods on reading speeds in generic volumetric particle visualizations. Our study provides insights into the trade-off between text representation and legibility in cluttered immersive environments with specific suggestions for visualization designers and highlight areas for further research.

Museo Nazionale dell'Emigrazione Italiana (MEI)

Museo Nazionale dell'Emigrazione Italiana (MEI)

P13 Understanding unwarranted variation in surgical outcome - a Delphi study with perioperative professionals.

Abstract Introduction Current assessment of perioperative risk relies on patient and surgical factors. However, risk stratification is imperfect and significant unwarranted variation in outcome persists. We sought to identify factors that may influence outcome, but which are under-represented in the literature. Methods We used process mapping of stereotyped surgical pathways to identify participants for a multidisciplinary, three round Delphi across two United Kingdom hospitals. A three-round Delphi of 91 stakeholders, from 23 professional groups was conducted. Using a 5-point Likert-scale consensus was defined as a median of >3.5 or <2.5 with an interquartile range of <1. Results Response rates were Round one: 51%, round two: 38%, round three: 19%. In round one free text panel suggestions were combined with variables from existing risk scores. This yielded 410 variables. With new suggestions from round two, 468/519 (90%) of the statements ultimately presented to the panel reached consensus. These included patient factors (such as ethnicity and socio-economic status); organisational or process factors related to the hospital (such as policies, staffing, and organisational culture). 66/160 (41%) of the new suggestions did not feature in systematic reviews of perioperative risk scores or key process indicators. No factor categorised as ‘organisational’ (such as organisational culture or external pressures) was present in any examined perioperative risk score. Conclusion We identified broader insights into additional factors that may underlie variation in outcome based on the expertise of perioperative professionals. These results could support future research into how organisational structure and performance influences patient outcome. Take-home message Perioperative professionals view factors outside of patient and clinician control as relating to surgical outcome. Such factors appear to be absent from many commonly used risk stratification tools.

Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies, Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC

<i>Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies</i>, Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC

Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity

Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity

Doran H. Ross: His Fabulous Fowler Years

Doran H. Ross: His Fabulous Fowler Years

The recontextualization of art exhibition text panels for children: a comparative analysis of the semiotic resources in audience-sensitive texts

ABSTRACT It is currently part of the mission of art museums to actively involve children in learning experiences and empower them through a variety of programmes – including developing text panels specialized for children. To date, we have only a limited understanding of the semiotic resources in audience-sensitive exhibition text panels. Drawing upon Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper analyses and compares 56 text panels in an exhibition from the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia. They are comprised of two versions of text panels for 28 artworks, targeting different groups of audiences, respectively (children and adults). It is found that the children’s texts have been recontextualized to evoke interest in learning to paint, while the adults’ texts focus on aesthetic appreciation. The comparative analysis shows that audience-sensitive text writing is interrelated with its social context in view of field, tenor, mode, and genre. This paper further explores how the production of audience-sensitive text panels contributes to the pedagogic, commercial, and community value of art museums.

Review: Apsáalooke Women and Warriors. Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois

Review: <i>Apsáalooke Women and Warriors</i>. Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois

Virtual Reality Action Interactive Teaching Artificial Intelligence Education System

Comprehensively improving the level of vocational education and teaching quality has become an important initiative to meet the new round of technological revolution and industrial change. The traditional teaching mode can no longer meet the needs of industries and enterprises for job competences, and all higher education institutions are actively thinking about how to carry out teaching reform. Virtual reality (VR) can effectively solve the above-mentioned drawbacks, but the hardware facilities of the existing VR systems are extremely expensive, making it impossible to popularize it in teaching. In this context, this paper is based on VR for the design of an interactive teaching platform. This paper discusses the key technologies of virtual reality, introduces the relevant theoretical foundation, and describes the current virtual reality devices with high popularity and their advantages and disadvantages for systematic analysis. From the perspective of teaching design, the design of human-computer interaction teaching process using VR technology to develop learning scenes is studied, introducing 3D modeling techniques, model construction, the production of picture and text panels, the production of video materials, and the establishment of virtual tour guide 3D scenes. The principle of this paper is to build a 3D vision for building 3D views of educational needs to design high quality images and video animation using 3DMAX and unity 3D engines. Then, we introduce the use of VR glasses (entry-level), smart phones (android/ios), and Bluetooth wireless handle to build a simple interactive teaching platform; the platform is of low cost of construction and student coverage, to solve the teaching resources shortage, equipment conditions lagging behind, the curriculum content aging, teachers and students who cannot interact in real time, and a series of problems.

The Downfall of the Diorama

Abstract Over the course of the twentieth century, millions of American children conducted their first science experiments by participating in science fairs. In tracing the development of a new visual medium of the 20th century – the science fair display – this paper captures the unruliness of scientific representation from a child’s eye view. The essay traces this phenomenon against the backdrop of broader debates regarding the role scientifically inclined youth would play in shaping the nation’s future. Science fairs also raise important philosophical questions regarding the epistemology of children’s experimentation. Over the course of fifty years, three-dimensional dioramas of the Progressive era were supplanted by postwar argument-driven text panels, capturing a distinct rupture in scientific representation. The essay argues that science fair displays provide an entry point for understanding how adolescents conceived of science on visual, material, social, and epistemological terms.

Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life ed. by Michael Katakis

Reviewed by: Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life ed. by Michael Katakis Kirk Curnutt Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life. Edited by Michael Katakis. New York: Scribner's, 2018. 212 pp. Hardback $35.00. Scholars fortunate enough to have visited the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston understand what a treasure trove of material awaits discovery there. Not simply a repository for manuscript drafts and discards and correspondence—as valuable as those are for the simple reason that most of them remain unpublished—the collection also includes photo album upon photo album of images that few have ever flipped through, much less catalogued or requested permission to reproduce in a biography or critical study. Along with a large variety of keepsakes and ephemera, these goodies are hardly the typical flotsam and jetsam that your average pack rat accumulates over time. (It goes without saying that nary a description of the collection exists that does not describe Hemingway as a "notorious" pack rat). Rather, these objects, whether a scrap of paper, a ticket stub, or an expired passport, lend a material immanence to Hemingway's life nearly six decades after his death. Yet not every Hemingway aficionado can make his or her way to Columbia Point. In recent years, the collection has scanned bits and pieces for online access, most notably five volumes of Grace Hall Hemingway's scrapbooks on Ernest covering 1899-1917. Unless one is only interested in the writer's childhood and adolescence, though, the scrapbooks are fun but prefatory. They can only begin to challenge the visual stereotypes that stamp the culture's limited sense of Hemingway's iconicity, whether his beefy brio, that late-stage white Papa beard, or the omnipresent wine bottle. Most of these signifiers come from a handful of widely reprinted photos, from the 1924 image of the emerging author with his hands stuffed in his pockets outside the Paris apartment at 113 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to Yousuf Karsh's famous 1957 close-up portrait of the literary lion in a turtleneck sweater thick as a Bundt pan around his throat. There is so much more to the man to discover, though. The omnipresence of photos like these are one reason that Michael Katakis's handsomely designed Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life is such a game-changer. Hemingway scholars know Mr. Katakis as the formidable gate-keeper to estate permissions; what they may not know is he is also a talented writer, editor, and historian in his own right, with books on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Native American photography, and expatriation to his credit. As a curatorial guide to the collection, he offers in this coffee-table book an [End Page 134] arresting tour of cornerstone Hemingway moments that feels both fresh and visually intoxicating, punctuated with thoughtful commentary from Hemingway Letters Project director Sandra Spanier, Carol Hemingway, former Kennedy Library director Tom Putnam, as well as "text panels" by Declan Kiely and a preface and afterword respectively from Patrick and Seán Hemingway. Thankfully, Katakis eschews a strictly chronological organization, which can feel stultifying in its familiarity to those who study the biographical arc. Instead, he divides the book into thematic sections ("Beginnings," "Key West, Cuba, and Spain," "Artifacts from a Life," and "Endings") that collectively create the appearance of that crucial modernist device, the collage-like juxtaposition. This strategy—dare I call it cubistic?—emphasizes the contrasts in Hemingway's life and recreates the experience of scouring photo- and scrapbooks, where the randomness at any moment can transport us into the thickness of an associative memory. The verso to the table of contents, for example, features a Spanish Civil War-era Hemingway, looking slightly frazzled and unkempt with the tail of his necktie straying from his sport coat, staring warily off-center of the camera aperture (viii). Set against this photo (which also serves as the book cover) is a small reproduction of the writer's 1944 World War II noncombatant identity card. Even with a thinner hairline and a white beard, ursine but clearly combed, Hemingway appears healthier if not younger in this latter photo, if only because he...

Feeling the Grid: Lorna Simpson’s Concrete Abstraction

Feeling the Grid:Lorna Simpson’s Concrete Abstraction Lex Morgan Lancaster (bio) LORNA SIMPSON’s The Park (1995) is a photograph of a city park at night, blown up and screen printed onto a large grid of six felt panels (Fig. 1). Approaching the image, our perspective is destabilized, even rendered sublime: we look down through the small forest of trees at a clearing of grass illuminated by scattered spotlights that suggest a walking path. In the distance, rows of buildings and skyscrapers create an expansive grid of windows that echoes the larger gridded structure of the felt canvas. Two narratives flank the installation of the gridded, felt image. To the left of the image, a felt text panel reads: Just unpacked a new shiny silver telescope. And we are up high enough for a really good view of all the buildings and the park. The living room window seems to be the best spot for it. On the sidewalk below a man watches figures from across the path. And to the right: It is early evening; the lone sociologist walks through the park, to observe private acts in the men’s public bathrooms. These facilities are men’s and women’s rooms back to back. He focuses on the layout of the men’s room—right to left: basin, urinal, urinal, urinal, stall, stall. He decides to adopt the role of voyeur and look [End Page 131] out in order to go unnoticed and noticed at the same time. His research takes several years. He names his subjects A, B, C, X, Y, and O, records their activities for now, and their license plates when applicable for later. Flanked by the perspective-shifting projection of these texts, the gridded image becomes a scene of observation and seriality. The grid of felt tiles offers an analogue to the sidewalk’s squares of pavement and the side-by-side rectangular Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Lorna Simpson, The Park (1995), serigraph on felt, six felt image panels with two felt text panels, 68 x 67.5 in. Image courtesy of the artist. [End Page 132] openings of stall by stall. The shiny new telescope, which both enables voyeuristic habit and beckons toward the years of a sociologist’s research, suggests a sense of duration that corresponds to the boundless intervals of the grid itself. Although no one appears in the images, the scenes offer multiple viewing positions from which to project narratives of private and public acts; such implied acts, like our spectatorship, are at once intimate and impersonal. An image about the erotics of serial looking, The Park is not only comprised of parts but is also itself part of Simpson’s larger “Public Sex” series. In each of these installations, black and white photographs of public spaces are blown up and screen printed onto separate felt panels arranged in grids. Pictures of uninhabited places become the implied locations of sexual and voyeuristic acts described in narrative text panels: they present a landscape, a city, a staircase, a theatre, a hotel bedroom, but they are devoid of bodies. Rendered abstract and fuzzy in their expansion to felt, the images depict scenes of sexual encounters we never see. The absence of bodies in this series may seem a departure from Simpson’s previous work, which characteristically features black women as central figures. But the texts included with the “Public Sex” pictures also call to mind the absent bodies, as well as the oblique, abstracted body that appears consistently throughout her previous work—a body that is so often framed by different versions of the grid format. The encounter between text and image that populates the scenes and renders them as sites of sexual encounter and sexualized looking is notable, I argue, for its recourse to the grids that mediate the installation. In the context of The Park, the grid enables certain forms of relationality that, I mantain, do queer work. Not only do the narratives reference the gay cruising sites of public parks and men’s restrooms, as well as the voyeur(s) who observe them, but also the gridded image further references the grid’s ambivalent...

Optimized inter-stimulus interval (ISI) and content design for evoking better visual evoked potential (VEP) in brain-computer interface applications

Brain-computer interfaces have been adopting visual evoked potential (VEP) signals to evaluate real-time cognitive responses, which have been shown to differ depending on the system’s panel design and inter-stimulus interval (ISI). The objective of this study was to determine the optimal ISI and display contents for improved VEP signals. The panel contents consisted of six Korean texts or symbols from a television remote controller, and three levels of ISI were used. Subjects concentrated on a target stimulus while the panel randomly flashed different texts or symbols. Six local areas were measured by electroencephalogram based on the Extended International 10–20 system. P3 and N1 amplitudes and latencies were analyzed to determine the optimal combination of panel contents and ISI. Text-based panels were found to produce superior P3 and N1 responses compared with symbol-based panels. The ISI of 300 ms induced the best ERP responses for both text and symbol panels.

Odd Duck by C. Castellucci

Castellucci, Cecil. Odd Duck. Illus. Sara Varon. New York: First Second Books, 2013. Print.Theodora is an eclectic, routine-regimented duck that swims with a teacup on her head to maintain perfect posture, eats uncommon food items like fruit salsa, and reads books that haven’t been signed out of the library in years. Constellations are one of Theodora’s interests and every night she wishes, on the first star she sees, that nothing in her blissful life would ever change. In Theodora’s eyes she is a normal duck who lives a very ordinary life.Theodora’s peaceful life is interrupted when a duck named Chad moves in next door. His lack of manners, carefree attitude and messiness scare, but also intrigue, Theodora. As winter approaches and the other ducks migrate south, Theodora counts down the days until Chad departs. However, Chad foils Theodora’s hopes of a return to normalcy by staying home for the winter, just like her. She continues to ignore Chad and carries on with her daily routine when, one night, Chad invites Theodora to look at the stars through his telescope. Through their love of constellations, Theodora realizes Chad might be the friend she has secretly yearned for.The two ducks’ friendship blossoms until, while walking through town, they hear another duck snicker and remark “Look at that odd duck!” The comment sparks an argument between the friends that leaves them angry and estranged. Is this the end of their friendship, or will both accept themselves and each other as the odd ducks that they are?This is an excellent beginner graphic story to share with primary aged students around themes of friendship, acceptance and self-awareness. The text panels are easy to follow and readers will love the wacky humour and amusing side notes utilized throughout the story. The soft pastels used by Sara Varon in her illustrations really bring the story to life and there are plenty of beautiful hidden details in the images that are sure to visually stimulate the reader. Overall, this is a brilliant book that emphasizes the importance of getting to know people before making judgements and addresses issues of self-image and the effects of stereotypes.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Jackie HeinrichJackie Heinrich is the teacher-librarian at Wiltse Elementary School in Penticton, BC. She is currently working towards her Masters of Education Degree in Teacher Librarianship and enjoys helping students become lifelong readers.

Unpopulated Images: Absence of Figure and Presence of Voyeur

Lorna Simpson, an African-American artist and photographer, has explored various media and techniques, including two-dimensional photographs as well as silk screening her photographs on large felt panels. Simpson had earned her reputation for the repeated images of ‘blackness’ as the antithesis to a white supremacist view. She was often engaged in the issues of race and gender by exploring black female bodies and juxtaposing the images with provocative text in her work. In the mid-90s, however, Simpson entirely removed figures her photographic images serigraphed on felt panels. Her felt photographs were replaced by gloomy shots of cityscapes urban parks, ? buildings, etc. and paired with text panels also printed on ? felt. Seemingly objective photographs do not allow the view’s efforts to decipher a meaning of the image. The juxtaposed texts further obscure possible interpretations of each image without ratifying a particular reading. The felt serigraphs destabilize traditional rules of reading and looking photographs and present a photograph as a relational, unstable image rather than a fixed and static image. In the absence of figures, Simpson explores the dynamic relationship between image and text and the role of photographer, subject, and the viewer.

Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies

Hung in what would otherwise be considered a hallway bypass between the Hall of African Mammals and the African Peoples Gallery is the exhibit Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies. The 20 sets of images included in the exhibit all resulted from ongoing research projects at the American Museum of Natural History and have been produced through advanced imaging technologies. The relationship between science and art presented here does not breach any conventional popular views. The notion that “science happens here” need not be explained once inside the hallowed halls of the Museum. That this science can also be aesthetically pleasing appears to be a revelation for the curators and a tool with which they hope to entice the general audience into a dialogue with science. The exhibit is composed of various components that work to contextualize these images as either scientific or artistic. Thus while it implicitly, and on occasion explicitly, separates out art and science as independent pursuits, the resulting overall effect of the exhibit almost succeeds in locating these images in both spheres. Each image, or set of images, is presented as part of the work of a specific museum scientist and includes a description of the imagemaking process. In each case, the visual image is depicted as solving (resolving) a specific scientific question/problem. A developing tear in one of the famous taxidermied African elephants from the aforementioned Hall is explained through an x-ray of the elephant’s head. The creation of photomontage aids in the identification of various species through advanced imaging of specific anatomies. These images are to be understood as part of the scientific work of the Museum and not as products unto themselves. While the captions for the exhibited images work to contextualize them as scientific, the gallery is designed to legitimize them as art. To this effect, the exhibit adheres to the conventions of gallery art, including mounting and color, in a nod to Warhol and other pop artists. The deep maroon gallery walls and blindingly artificial colors used in the images hark to the 1980s and an era of early computer graphics. The coloration of the images is very rarely addressed. The images are all mounted with corresponding information panels that uniformly provide a description along with three categorical identifiers: the researcher, the topic—intriguingly labeled as either “discovering or understanding”—and the technology used to produce the image. Each of these categories defines the images within the context of scientific work. Noticeably, none of the images are dated, giving the impression that this is current and cutting edge. These panels have been designed not unlike a computer app and almost invite the observer to click on each of the categories for further information. Although they are static text panels, they appear as if they could be digital and, therefore, interactive. For all the information on the scientific processes at work, there is an absence of information on the aesthetic design of each image. Just as the colors go unexplained, so too do issues related to scale, perspective or repetition. The emphasis on these images as tools of scientific research seems to imply that these components are incidental to the process. This contributes to the overarching message that science editor-in-chief Michael Punt . managing editor Bryony Dalefield associate editors Martha Blassnigg, Hannah Drayson, Dene Grigar, John Vines A full selection of reviews is published monthly on the LR web site: . leonardo reviews

“Enlightenment, Advertising, Education, Etc.”: Herbert Bayer the Museum of Modern Art's Road to Victory

“In the beginning was virgin land and America was promises.”2 So began the text panel located in the opening panorama of the photo exhibition Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War that the Museum of Modern Art organized in 1942 and circulated between 1943 and 1945. Years before Edward Steichen became curator of photography at MoMA and organized the global blockbuster exhibition The Family of Man, he combed government, press, and corporate archives to select the photographs for Road to Victory, his first curatorial project at the museum. Encircling the opening text were large photographic panels of picturesque landscapes, stern Native Americans, and a few buffalo. The largest panel—of pristine mountain valleys—was sixteen by twelve feet, making the viewer about the same height as the three portraits of Native Americans. Exhibition designer Herbert Bayer, recent Austrian émigré and former Bauhaus master, removed the walls from the second floor of the museum, using the large-scale photographs to structure the exhibition architecturally. Arranged in a semicircle, these opening panels welcomed the viewer and urged him to follow the curve into the exhibition.

A Taste of Singapore: Singapore Food Writing and Culinary Tourism

A Taste of Singapore: Singapore Food Writing and Culinary Tourism

Hidden Treasures at the Medical Museum

Health & History, 2014. 16/1 107 Exhibition Reviews Hidden Treasures at the Medical Museum Western Australian Medical Museum Nurses Memorial Trust of Western Australia, corner Barker and Railway roads, Subiaco No website; phone (08) 9340 1506 Permanent exhibition Open Wednesday 10.30am to 4.00pm, Sunday 2.00pm to 4.00pm Admission $4 for adults and $1 for children Viewed 23 March 2014 The Western Australian Medical Museum is housed in the heritage listed Harvey House, Subiaco about five kilometres west of Perth city. Harvey House was built in 1897 and initially served as a government industrial school for both boys and girls. In the 1910s, as the trend to incarcerate‘delinquent’childrendecreasedandtheneedforadedicated maternity hospital became evident, the building was converted into Western Australia’s first public maternity hospital (Chinnery, 2002). King Edward Memorial Hospital (KEMH) opened in 1916 and was soon at full capacity; after only five years, construction of additional buildings and wards began on the site. The function of Harvey House changed as the hospital site expanded, serving many different purposes including housing an X-ray department until 1988, when the Western Australian Medical Museum was opened in the building. I visited the museum on a Sunday afternoon. There was no specific entry statement relating to the establishment of the museum or previous uses of the building. After I stepped through the door, I saw two large didactic panels; one titled ‘Silver Chain Caring in the Community since 1905’and the other, ‘Community and Remote Area Nursing’. In front of these panels is a cabinet of surgical tools, with labels indicating their previous use but not directly stating why they are on display. The absence of a general introduction to the museum however is made up by the volunteer guides who greeted me in the foyer and revealed the history of the building and explained the museum layout. Some of the guides have a link to the medical profession and volunteer their time to open and maintain the museum. We chatted for a few minutes and they then left me to explore the museum by myself. the museum consists of a foyer and eight rooms. 108 EXHIBITION REVIEWS The museum aims to examine different themes in the development of Western Australia medical practice through both material culture and interpretive text panels and A4 printouts. Most displays speak of local and regional stories, which allude to a state narrative of medical history. A panel in the foyer indicates the themes in each of the eight rooms: Room One KEMH 1916 Ward, Room Two World War I and World War II, Room Three Flying Doctors, Room Four Doctor’s Surgery, Room Five Iron Lung, Room Six Operating Theatre, Room Seven Dental, and Room Eight X-ray. The museum is bursting at the seams with displayed objects, photographs, documents, text panels, hand outs, machines, and mannequins. There was so much visual stimulation that I found it difficult to take in the different themes. I soon realised the variety of material displayed in the entrance, some of which does not directly related to specific themes, is a portent of how the whole museum is set out. I expected one theme per room, as listed on the museum directory, but was greeted by much more. Along with the room themes, the museum also examines infant feeding, health clinics, history of microscopes, Goldfield nurses in the 1800s, leprosaria, bush medicine, early colonial health issues such as hygiene and typhoid, Perth apothecaries, pathology, massage and medical gymnastics, electrotherapy, physiotherapy, and anaesthesia. Nevertheless, I enjoyed poring through Room One which contains a recreated 1916 KEMH ward. It is very busy, but there was a real sense of celebration of the nurses who worked here. There are two re-creations of how women gave birth in the past, either at home or in hospitals, separated by a divider. Through this display method, the room establishes a dialogue between home and hospital births in the 1850–1920s period. It highlights the advances in paediatrics of that era and how the establishment of the KEMH benefited women and newborns in WA. The homebirth side has a birthing chair, midwife, woman in bed, and a didactic that states many...

Anastasia's Journeys: Two Voices in a Limited Space

Anastasia’s Journeys was a temporary exhibition in the Australian History Museum, Macquarie University, Australia. Developed from the oral history of a post-World War Two Russian immigrant who survived Stalin’s policies of forced collectivisation and engineered famine, the display communicated primarily through audio tracks, supported by text panels and objects. This article articulates the creative tensions between theory and practice of public history which were encountered when planning the target audience, content, and design of the exhibition. It describes the process by which the oral history was placed at the centre of the presentation while objects were used both to illustrate changing social situations and introduce an opposing interpretation. The attributes of the oral history which made it suitable for an audio presentation are then discussed.