Museum Studies Commons^™

Interview With Marylou Rocha, Sabrina Flores

WS3380 Interviews

This is an interview with MaryLou Rocha, the education coordinator at El Paso's Holocaust Museum. This interview was done through zoom and written down for further expression about her activism.

Extended Reality And The Graphic Design Curriculum, Tina Korani, Meghan Saas, Samantha Tan

Frameless

VXR technology has seen significant growth in recent years across all commercial industries and is poised to continue that trend. The graphic design industry is embracing XR as a new medium, and XR skills are in high demand within the field. Institutions of higher education must adopt XR—and particularly AR—into the graphic design curriculum to keep pace with the industry. Several barriers are slowing this curricular adoption but can be overcome. Advances in AR technology have created an opportunity for its use as both a pedagogical tool and a creative medium. Integrating AR with traditional graphic design elements and principles …

What Do I Do With That?, Abby Stambach

Staff publications

“What Do I Do with That” describes a museum once housed in an academic library which became part of the institution's archives, and discusses how this legacy collection impacted the work of today's Archives & Distinctive Collections Department.

The academic archive staff identifies preservation needs such as storage and documentation, as well as how they work with the dedicated campus gallery to provide access to its art collections.

(Witch) Crafting Identity: An Autoethnographic Analysis Of The Dutch National Identity Through Women In Haunted History, Hallie Kamosky

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This autoethnographic study analyzes the presentation of women in haunted history in order to dissect the construction of the Dutch national identity. Through a personal narrative experience, the art, museums, tourist enterprises, and physical locations that constitute the city of Amsterdam are put in conversation with one another in order to draw out the inconsistencies and hypocrisies in the Dutch narratives of progress. Firstly, the Spin Huis and the ghost story connected to it are juxtaposed to the City of Amsterdam’s narrative in order to draw out themes of sexual exceptionalism at the expense of foreign bodies. Next, the Amsterdam …

Lost Art And Lost Lives: Nazi Art Looting And Art Restitution, Sophia Gravenstein

Student Publications

During the Nazi Regime, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seized an estimated one fifth of all art in Europe and more than 5 million cultural objects before 1945. The Nazis established control over the regime and furthered their racist ambitions through stealing art of any cultural or monetary value to them. They stole “degenerate” art in an attempt to annihilate “racially inferior” races, and “racially pure” art for the glorification of the “Aryan” race. Since the end of WWII, the return of Nazi-looted art to its original owners or their heirs has been an important avenue for remembrance of and …

Destruction Is A Must-See: Coastal Heritage Site Erosion And Public Perception Of Climate Change, Haley Borowy

Senior Theses

Archaeological sites in South Carolina are vanishing. As sea level rise, and therefore coastal erosion, worsen, more sites will disappear. The questions of how erosion at these sites is measured and how the public perceives the effects of climate change have been studied separately, but not together. Here, the intersection of these is discussed, alongside how sites are portrayed affects how the public perceives them, and therefore their importance. Studies on measuring coastal erosion, local news reports, government documents, and public perception of coastal management and sea level rise illuminate how people eventually decide what is worth saving.

Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception, And Method, Amber Jamilla Musser

Publications and Research

Maureen Catbagan’s Dark Matter (2020) photography series invites us into sensing brownness. In these images of museum passages and stairwells, silhouettes of museum guards, and evocative shadows, Catbagan presents the landscape of the museum. However, this may not be immediately recognizable because the photographs draw focus to the parts of museums to which we rarely pay attention. In particular, Catbagan’s attention to the presence of guards allows us to perceive dynamics of racialized and gendered labor and laborers who, in an echo of their architectural focus on minor, peripheral spaces and shadows, hover between the underrecognized and oft-neglected, thereby allowing …

Ischool Student Research Journal, Vol.11, Iss.2, Student Reseach Journal

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library And Information Studies Through Critical Race Theory, Sofia Y. Leung And Jorge R. López-Mcknight, Jessica Nombrano Larsen

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Academic Libraries And Writing Centers: Collaborations At Us Public Research Universities, Mary K. Bolin

School of Information Student Research Journal

The websites of 71 US research universities were the source of data on the relationship of academic libraries and campus writing centers, which provide support for developing written communication skills. All 71 institutions have writing centers, generally administered by the academic success operation, the English department, or a college such as arts and sciences. Just under half (n=35) of the institutions have a writing center located in the library. In 16 of those institutions, the library is the only location of the writing center. The general issues of academic success and “library as place,” as well as the space that …

Experience Peer-Review With Srj, Tierra Holmes

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

West Chester: History Of Wcu Buildings Topic Of Live Zoom Lecture Series, Medianews Group

WCU Museum in the News

No abstract provided.

Persian Velvets Of The 17th Century: Symmetry, Craft, And Technology, Carol Bier

Textile Research Works

Symmetry is the organizing principle that underlies patternmaking in compound woven textiles of 17th century Iran. Persian velvets are particularly noteworthy for their complicated weave structure. What defines compound weaves is the interlacing of more than one set of warps (longitudinal elements held under tension at the loom) with wefts (transverse elements). Velvets introduce an additional set of supplementary warps held under differential tension. The weaving of a compound textile requires both a pattern harness and a structure harness for the interaction of warps and wefts. A weaver on the bench manipulates the structure harness for each passage of the …

The French Conundrum: The Unsettled Relationship Between The Colonial Past, Identity Construction, And Immigration In The Musée National De L’Histoire De L’Immigration, Sierra Ruby Newby-Smith

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This paper focuses on the intersection of identity, the colonial past, and immigration in France through the lens of the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration. The museum, which opened in 2007 and is currently redesigning its permanent exhibition, has struggled to come to terms with France’s colonial past, a defining aspect of the museum as a result of its location and theme. This paper argues that the museum functions as a microcosm of France’s difficulty to address its colonial past while still maintaining its current national identity construction. Thus, this paper explores how the Immigration Museum is and has …

The Pervert’S Guide To The Museum, Seth Ifor Alt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation provides a sustained theoretical articulation of core Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts situated within the standing difficulties in the practice and theory of museums. Drawing upon research gathered from site visits, informational interviews, textual analysis, and an extensive engagement with the seminars of Jacques Lacan, I enumerate here a first attempt at what a Lacanian theoretical formation can contribute to museum studies scholarship. Through this research this dissertation shows psychoanalysis to be especially useful for museum studies owing to how the troubles immediately encountered in the everyday material practices of museological work are structurally analogous to the impossibilities experienced on …

Everything But The Smell: The Ethics Of The “Connective Turn” In Argentinian Memory Activism, Megan L. Corbin

Languages & Cultures Faculty Publications

This chapter interrogates what is lost and what is gained in [the] turn toward cyberspace as a new venue for interacting with a traumatic past. It will first examine the discussions and debates that took place in Argentina as former detention centres were converted into sites of memory, using the debate about the recovery of Escuela Mecánica de la Armada [ESMA] (the Navy School of Mechanics) as an illustrative example. Then, it will compare the features of some of actual memory sites in Buenos Aires with the interactive documentary features on the website, specifically focusing on the narrative logic and …

Selling Transcendence: The Rise Of Experience And The Big Business Of Immersive Art, Emeline Callaway

MA Theses

There has been an explosion of immersive art experiences over the past few years. Even as the pandemic has taken a toll on tourism, immersive art ventures and experimental museums have expanded around the world, drawing significant crowds and offering investors an inside into a new, emerging industry. This thesis ties these new experiential businesses to the history of art through an analysis of immersive artistic exploration over time and connects the current forms of investment to the history of immersive art patronage. Exploring the relationship between major economic shifts and the development of the art market, this thesis explains …

Mineral Displays As Embodiments Of Geologic Thought And Colonial Invisibility, Selby Hearth, Carrie Robbins

Geology Faculty Research and Scholarship

Mineral displays embodied how we think about minerals: as symbols of social status, scholarly tools, theological objects, and instruments of education. Mineral displays are also representations of how we don’t think about minerals: as human products embedded in wider human histories. This paper reviews the historical themes in mineral display, from the cabinets of curiosity of the Renaissance to modern museums, and articulates a major narrative that has been omitted from mineral display traditions: the human processes that bring mineral specimens from the ground to the display case, particularly Western colonialism and labour. Historically, mineral displays have been used to …

Storage Organization And Analysis Of Artifacts, Rebecca Glatz

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

I worked with the Institute for Human Science and Culture at the Drs. Nicholas & Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology and Department of Anthropology at the University of Akron to help create an inventory of the collections that are being stored in the storage of the Cummings Center. After I finished the general inventory, I selected a collection of interest to do further research on an item level. The collection was processed and photographed and this paper is a report of what I learned about the collection and a guide of how to process a collection for …

Past Precedent Reconciling Established Multimedia Principles In 3d Virtual Learning Environments, Kristin Herman, Jim S. Shifflett, Courtney W. Schoolmaster, Charles Thull, Noah Glaser

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This design case documents the inception, development, and installation of a virtual exhibit on ethical use of learning analytics (LA) for the Museum of Instructional Design (MID), hosted in Mozilla Hubs. Tension emerged as the design team attempted to negotiate established principles of multimedia design theory (see Mayer, 2014; Mayer & Fiorella, 2021; Richardson, 2014) within an emerging learning environment. A rapid prototyping model, combined with elements of critical museology and dialectics, allowed for ongoing formative evaluation of design fidelity. Exhibit artifacts consisted of scenarios illustrating the ethical ambiguities of LA; a data justice timeline pairing recent peer-reviewed articles on …