tellinglivesblog.com

Seneca Village descendant talks about New York Divided

Normally I post clips of a responders comments that are poignant or highlight a theme I am exploring in my study of the Telling Lives audiences. This responder I felt needed to be heard in his entirety, so I edited all his answers to the four questions into a continuous clip. This New Yorker has traced his family roots to 1827, and knows that his ancestors lived in Seneca Village, so the New York Divided exhibit resonated strongly for him.

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Telling Lives at American Association of Museums conference

Richard Rabinowitz recently discussed listening to audience voices through the Telling Stories story capture booth at the American Association of Museums conference. Below is the information he gave to attendees and the video clip he showed. He raises some interesting questions, feel free to respond in the comments section:

Memory, Meaning, and Story:
Making the Museum Experience Matter

“And Then We Went to the Museum…”:
The Role of Narrative in the Visitor’s Experience

Richard Rabinowitz, PhD
American History Workshop
Brooklyn, New York

Incorporating American History Workshop’s TELLING LIVES visitor-response video capture station into exhibitions like Slavery in New York and New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War at the New-York Historical Society has allowed us to understand the museum visit as a richly motivated action. More than 6,000 visitors have devoted up to ten minutes each to detail their reactions to these exhibitions. In many cases, visitors present a narrative of their own visits, paralleling the exhibition’s story with an account of their own personal reactions. And then they often proceed to link the “visit narrative” and the “exhibition narrative” to a broader story about their own or their family’s history, the “life narrative.” One African American woman, for example, pondered that she had never been taught how important slavery was to the founding of colonial New Amsterdam and New York, and then vowed that she would, upon her return to work on Wall Street on the following Monday, view the city differently because “so much of it was built by people who looked like me. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel like an outsider.”

Learning from this, exhibit developers might consider ways to enable visitors to reframe or reconstruct personal and family narratives. Critical to this process is stimulating visitors to adopt a more engaged position vis-à-vis the exhibition content; they need to care, positively or negatively, about what they are encountering. In that case, the “exhibition narrative” may become an opportunity for visitors either to affirm or challenge their pre-existing life narratives.

Discussion Questions:
How can exhibition content be shaped around (contemporary) issues about which visitors care enough to generate the motivation to reframe their personal narrative?

Is this compatible with good history teaching?
How can exhibition elements be designed to assist visitors in constructing a memorable narrative of their progress?

Jerome Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)

Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).

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Telling Lives Blog added to Museum Blogs listings

Museum Blogs is an important web portal that collects, organizes and promotes museum related blogs. We were added to their site, and founder Jim Spadaccini of Ideum Media & Design recently blogged about the flowering of museum blogs in the short time the site has existed. Check out the search box in our sidebar that allows you to search Museum Blogs and see the exciting ways museums are starting to utilize social web tools.

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Learning in Museums

Watching the audiences respond to the exhibits while still in the museum space is a powerful example of the unique way that museums educate.

Here a high school student almost seems disarmed or surprised by his level of engagement and learning with New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War.

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Slavery resources on the internet

Here is the website for the International Slavery Museum opening this summer in England.

The Library of Congress’ American Memory Project Presents Voices from the Days of Slavery oral history collection.

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New-York Historical Society’s Hidden Sites of Slavery and Freedom podcast

Here is a link to the N-YHS and museumpods.com’s audio and video podcasts produced as a companion to the Slavery in New York exhibits.

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Telling Lives on YouTube

We are using YouTube to house and broadcast on this blog the clips from the Telling Lives video capture. This also means they are part of the greater YouTube library. It has been fascinating to monitor the amount of plays, comments and rankings they get via the site. Here is link to our video collection. Feel free to rank, comment and create play lists!

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Young African American male responds to Slavery in New York

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Text messaging from the exhibit floor

I was struck how this responder talked about using her phone or PDA to email friends and colleagues about Slavery in New York from the exhibit floor. Communication technology, like hand held devices, Ipods and digital video are expanding how we discuss, share and make sense of our surroundings. The communicative circle that we have to socialize our learning is forever widening.

This responder had a moving experience touring the exhibit because of the diversity of her fellow museum goers and she was aided in processing this emotion by digitally communicating with her non present peers and talking back to the museum via the Telling Lives booth.

How can the exhibit design allow museums to join and facilitate these conversations?

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Audience Response Video from Slavery In New York

Here is the video package we created from responses to 2005/06’s Slavery in New York exhibit at the New-York Historical Society.

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