Lab Museum Design & Interpretation

You asked for candid....

The process of creating the Germanna exhibit perhaps best reflected real-life situations in its limitations and frustrations.  While work would no doubt be broken up among several individuals to create a similar exhibit within a museum setting, I do find it hard to believe that those individuals would remain as insular as our three groups were throughout the process.  Despite the occasional briefings on what each group was doing, there was little sense of connection between the disparate groups and products.  I do believe, however, that our division of labor resulted in a much greater breadth of research than each group individually thought existed on the subject of Germanna.  By narrowing the focus within each group, there was remarkably little overlap in what each group found, which is certainly to the benefit of the final product.

That said, our final product is perhaps a bit too heavy for the casual visitor to digest.  This is where closer collaboration between the groups would have been beneficial, to cut out what little there was that did overlap between the sections of the website and to break down the barriers between the sections to create a more cohesive unit.  I think our concept is good as presented on our homepage, a very simple breakdown into three seemingly disparate aspects of research into Germanna.  We looked at it from the straightforward perspectives of pure history and archaeology, then examined the more nuanced myths surrounding the site-this satisfies a broader audience than just one of these aspects alone would.  Within those sections, however, it becomes clear to the insider (me), if not to the general audience, that those of us making the exhibit were more than a little uncertain of what we were making.  I think that the archaeology section remained truest to its focus; while neither of the other sections is by any means poorly rendered, I do think that both have areas that could have been scaled back, and again, greater collaboration between those two groups might have firmed up a sense of what each group should cover and what should be deferred to the other groups.  To play devil's advocate against the archaeology group, though, they did have the most clear-cut body of work to present, and the easiest way to present it, given the quantities of documentation that naturally result from an archaeological excavation.

Hindsight being what it is, I think the exhibition might have emerged as a more cohesive unit had we separated the research and production aspects.  If we had done the research within our groups, with our respective purposes, as we did to produce the greatest possible amount of research, then come together as one unit to decide what to do with the research we had uncovered, I think we might have been able to reimagine something a bit less rigidly structured and more organic and accessible.  This might additionally have lent a more uniform style to the website, with a more cohesive writing and formatting style decided upon as a class rather than taking eleven distinctly different writing styles and putting them all together unedited for a uniform tone, but that's just my pet peeve.

My own role was often that of a frustrated bystander, albeit not a bystnader in the sense that I did not contribute.  Rather a bystander in matters of personality; I am somewhat accustomed to taking a leading role in group projects although I am more than willing to relinquish that role to one more qualified that I.  In this instance, however, not only was I not a group leader, I was in fact delegated very little responsibility and what I did do was, partly by my own fault, not recognized until matters were clarified toward the end of the project.  Once everything was cleared up in that regard, I felt I made a positive contribution to my group's section of the exhibition, contributing two pages (although I haven't been able to get one of them, the page about Caruthers' Knights of the Horseshoe, to open).  I felt that my voice was better heard in our group's preparation for our video interview with Dr. Sanford, during which I was able to contribute more to my liking to the development of our questions.  In many other cases, my offers to contribute what time I could were summarily dismissed, probably in the mistaken belief that I had been neglecting my primary responsibilities.

With all this said and done, looking into my own future (I'll be starting my Master's in Museum Studies in the fall), I'm still on the fence about the impact that these kinds of Web applications will have for Museum Studies.  Maybe I'm just not visionary enough to think otherwise, but I can't imagine that anyone will ever get the sense of occasion from going to a website that they could from going to a museum.  I'm also not sure just how widely online exhibitions will be sought out for recreational learning.  To be certain, they represent a valuable online resource for researchers unable to travel to museums, and they do offer a similar accessibility to people who might not otherwise have that access, but I frankly don't know how enthusiastic a broad public is going to be about seeking out such exhibitions online as opposed to visiting physical exhibits.  I guess the final argument is that it's an adjunct to, not a replacement for, the traditional museum, a way to reach out to (perhaps a very small number of) additional visitors rather than replacing the experience for those who would have come anyway.