Museum Studies Commons^™

The Spider: Anaylsis Of An Automaton, Susannah N. Munson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

[Editors' note: This paper is the 2017 winner of the Student Paper Award in Document(ation) Studies, http://documentacademy.org/award. Susannah Munson wrote the paper as a Kent State University, School of Information, Museum Studies student.]

The physical objects that surround us document vast amounts of information about themselves, their histories, and their roles in broader social and cultural contexts. To reveal this sometimes hidden information, we examine these objects through analytical frameworks that go beyond descriptive accounts to explore how an object existed and was culturally understood throughout its history. Document phenomenology (Gorichanaz and Latham, 2016), conceived in two Acts, …