Guttman, N. (2007). Bringing the mountain to the public: Dilemmas and contradictions in the procedures of public deliberation initiatives that aim to get “ordinary citizens” to deliberate policy issues. Communication Theory, 17(4), 411-438. Reviewed by Laura.
• Scholars have already outlined a number of normative conditions for making deliberative forums “work.” Drawing on a number of scholars’ previous approaches to this project, Guttman outlines these broad concerns as follows:
1. Fairness: Can all participants get to the meetings (i.e., physical access)? Do all participants receive an “equitable opportunity to influence the decision-making process”? (p. 414).
2. Competence: Do participants understand the issues and their implications? Are they able to assess and understand the “technical information” involved?
3. The discursive process: “Will participants be attentive and respectful of each other” and, instead of just arguing, engage in “mutual learning” (p. 414)? Will sufficient time be allotted for contemplation and discussion?
4. Power: Will participants be able to influence the process or the outcome of the process? Do they have any say in how issues are framed, presented, discussed, etc.? Will they be able to avoid “uncritical adoption of dominant assumptions” (p. 416)?
• To account for the concerns listed above, policymakers must ensure “fairness physical, psychological, cognitive, and cultural access in the discursive process” (p. 416). More specifically:
o Attendance at the meeting (i.e., being able to overcome physical or cultural barriers to get there)
o Materials and information on the topic
o Confidence to express oneself
o Participation in the discussion itself (i.e., “turn-taking”)
• Using the four categories listed above, the author first presents evidence of how the Israeli Health Parliament Initiative (the case study described) strove to meet these considerations (e.g., employing facilitators, providing background materials in a variety of formats and at a variety of literacy levels, employing “consultants” to answer the participants’ questions, etc.). Representative quotations from the deliberation are presented to illustrate the participants’ reactions to these different aspects of the process; most participants seemed fairly happy with it.
• Guttman then presents us with the paradox that makes up the crux of this paper (and his contribution to the literature): “The attempt to make the participative processes more ‘competent’ appears to present a paradox: The more procedures are proffered to enhance competence (i.e., various information resources, simulation activities, consultants), the more occasions there are to frame the issues according to those in power” (p. 426). For example:
o The framing dilemma: If participants begin to discuss the concerns of the many more than their own, personal concerns, does that represent a “stronger conception of the public good” (p. 426) or “co-optation” by the elite?
o The responsibility dilemma: Does the participative process empower (by entrusting citizens with unique responsibility) or does it “absolve” officials from “making unpopular decisions or from seeking alternative solutions” (p. 428)?
o The empathy with the officials dilemma: When participants feel more empathy or trust towards public officials, is this a positive advancement of the democratic process, or “does it reflect a co-optation” (p. 429)?
• Guttman ends by noting that practitioners and theoreticians alike need to be aware of the dilemmas or contradictions that can emerge as a result of trying to meet the stipulations of participative processes. He suggests that practitioners may be able to distinguish between “avoidable” or “unavoidable contradictions” (p. 431).
• He also mentions the idea of calling for “policy literacy” among citizen participants, some sort of amalgamation of literacy and critical theory approaches, according to which, “people’s capacities should be enhanced to critically analyze information that can affect policy decisions and to critically understand institutional processes that affect problem definition and how it may be influenced by the terminology or the language used” (p. 431).
My reaction:
I find Guttman’s three dilemmas compelling, much in the way that I appreciated his earlier work on the ethical dilemmas posed by public health communication campaigns. I’m left to question, however, how it is that we can tell (I suppose, empirically) whether “co-optation” has occurred, as opposed to the other, more positive alternative? Guttman does not appear to address this issue. At the close of the article, when the author posits other theoretical areas that should be in conversation regarding participative deliberation, I think that he ignores the contributions of educational theory, particularly in regard to civic formal and informal efforts. The literature on educating for democracy (e.g., the need to “listen across difference” that Walter Parker talks about) could be very relevant to Guttman’s conception of “policy literacy.”
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Hein: Learning in the Museum
George E. Hein's book is part synthesis, part manifesto. He attempts to synthesize a variety of educational and social science theories developed over the last century, and discusses their implications for understanding museums as places of learning. In particular, he draws upon educational theories and the field of "visitor studies." All of his conclusions from this synthesis ultimately become supporting arguments for a programmatic vision of an ideal museum that he calls The Constructivist Museum. Essentially, his argument is that, if we consider all that we now "know" about learning and museums, this particular vision is the logical result.
Hein schematically summarizes all theories of knowledge as falling along a continuum between realism and constructivism. An extreme realist would say that there exists a reality independent of our consciousness, which can be known empirically. An extreme constructivist would say that nothing can be empirically verified or falsified and that all knowledge is essentially an artifact of our consciousness. (It's worth noting that, in this book, Hein is generally not concerned to define his terms with exhaustive rigor, and he uses "constructivism" a bit loosely; however, he mostly tends to use it in the sense of cognitiveconstructivism rather than what we'd call "social constructivism" in STS.)
(Already it's apparent from the characterizations of each term and theory where Hein's sympathies lie.)
Here are some of his answers:
The postulate that "learning takes place in museums" is Hein's starting point. He also asserts that the educational responsibility of museums in our society has increased, particularly their roles as "interpreters of culture" and ideational venues.
Hein breaks down "educational theory" into three broad components:
- Theories of knowledge (epistemologies)
- Theories of learning
- Theories of teaching (pedagogy, or "andragogy" for adults)
Hein schematically summarizes all theories of knowledge as falling along a continuum between realism and constructivism. An extreme realist would say that there exists a reality independent of our consciousness, which can be known empirically. An extreme constructivist would say that nothing can be empirically verified or falsified and that all knowledge is essentially an artifact of our consciousness. (It's worth noting that, in this book, Hein is generally not concerned to define his terms with exhaustive rigor, and he uses "constructivism" a bit loosely; however, he mostly tends to use it in the sense of cognitiveconstructivism rather than what we'd call "social constructivism" in STS.)
Likewise, Hein describes theories of learning as falling along a similar bipolar axis. At one extreme is the basic assumption that learning is a passive process of receiving static information, which accumulates incrementally in the learner's mind like sediment. At the other extreme is the idea that learning is an (inter-)active process that dynamically restructures the mind.
The interesting move is the synthesis of these two axes onto a single heuristic plane with four quadrants, each corresponding to one extreme on each axis. This becomes the theoretical framework for Hein's typology of educational theories:
- Didactic, expository (realist epistemology + passive learning)
- Discovery (realist epistemology + active learning)
- Stimulus-response (constructivist epistemology + passive learning)
- Constructivism (constructivist epistemology + active learning)
(Already it's apparent from the characterizations of each term and theory where Hein's sympathies lie.)
Hein emphasizes that these theories are not particularly useful without corresponding teaching methodologies. He goes into less detail here, but his description of "the Constructivist Museum" can be seen as a program for constructivist pedagogy.
In the next section of the book Hein reviews the history of the field of visitor studies and its major theoretical and methodological traditions. As he describes it, there have been two main schools of thought. One of these he calls "experimental-design," which takes behavioral psychology as its model and tries to study museum visitors with quantitative rigor. The other tradition, "naturalistic," is more reminiscent of anthropology and uses qualitative methods to draw conclusions. Hein says that, roughly speaking, the former school prioritizes the reliability of data over validity, while the latter does the reverse. (For example, using anecdotes or actual visitor quotes is more likely to accurately represent at least those visitors' experiences than statistical aggregation, but the latter gives more generalizable, repeatable and "scientific" data.)
Hein makes more than the usual obligatory reference to Kuhn when discussing the significance of paradigms in the sciences, including the social sciences. He also discusses Stephen Pepper's ideas about competing "world theories" based on fundamentally incommensurate "root metaphors," which prefigured Kuhn's work. Hein pretty much says that all social science theories draw upon one of two "root metaphors:" the ladder (linear, hierarchical) or the network (non-linear, non-hierarchical). While he clearly tends to favor the latter (not the ladder), he acknowledges that when applying social theories we have be pragmatically eclectic. So, while he likes his children to learn by exploring and constructing their own knowledge about their surroundings, he had no compunction about delivering a top-down, one-way message about safety when crossing the street.
Hein also takes care to note that theories, and their applications, "have politics," to use Winner's phrase. They draw upon and have affinities with certain political ideas, and also have real-world political consequences.
The penultimate chapter of Hein's book discusses some of the more recent findings from visitor studies with respect to how visitors actually learn things in museums, and what kinds of museum environments are conducive to learning. For example, it's important to get visitors' attention with landmarks. Visitors learn best when they are comfortable, so this means giving them access to amenities and appropriate spaces in which to contemplate, relax, meet family, etc. Prepping them with some sort of conceptual background prior to entering exhibits enhances their ability to understand and retain information. And so on. Furthermore, Hein notes that it's important to allow for -- and even take advantage of -- the fact that each visitor learns differently depending on a host of factors including age, personal experience, how many times he or she has visited before, etc.
The final chapter is Hein's manifesto for creating "the Constructivist Museum." He says that "the basic questions that need to be addressed are:
- What is done to acknowledge that knowledge is constructed in the mind of the learner?
- How is learning itself made active? What is done to engage the visitor?
- How is the situation designed to make it accessible -- physically, socially, and intellectually -- to the visitor?"
Here are some of his answers:
- "The Constructivist Museum makes a conscious effort to allow visitors to make connections between the known and the new."
- "The Constructivist Museum will provide opportunities for learning using maximum possible modalities both for visitor interactions with exhibitions and for processing information."
- "The Constructivist Museum not only accepts the possibility of socially mediated learning, it makes provision for social interaction and designs spaces, constructs exhibitions, and organizes programs to deliberately capitalize on learning as a social activity."
- "The Constructivist Museum will have policies that dictate its desire to reach a wide range of visitors and will have practices that have been demonstrated to do so."
- "The Constructivist Museum needs to publicly acknowledge its own role in constructing meaning.... It's important that this human decision-making process -- full of compromise, personal views, opinions, prejudices, and well-meaning efforts to provide the best possible material for the public -- be opened up to view."
- "The Constructivist Museum will view itself as a learning institution that constantly improves its ability to serve as an interpreter of culture by critical examination of echibitions and programs. The most rational manner in which to do this is for the staff to become engaged in systematic examination of the visitor experience; in short, to carry out visitor studies."
Some of Hein's prescriptions accord well with some of our other authors. For example, one of the consequences of a constructivist perspective which acknowledges that learning is an interactive partnership between the museum and the visitor is that the museum must therefore focus more of its efforts on understanding its visitors' perspectives. Other things seem to contravene what other authors have said. For example, whether people would really want the full messiness of "this human decision-making process... opened up to view" is debatable. At least one author (was it Durant?) suggests that people want museums to be authoritative purveyors of hard facts. They might not want to know how exhibits, and thus knowledge, are constructed.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Public Understanding of Research: Opportunities and Issues
The readings I did focused on the opportunities and issues in the public understanding of research (PUR) initiatives in museums.
Bruce Lewenstein and Rick Bonney first take a step back to define PUR. There are two main definitions of PUR: communicating cutting edge scientific results, and communicating the process of research itself. Getting these two goals confused or not separating them out clearly when designing or evaluating PUR initiatives will lead to less than successful projects. Both objectives can be difficult to achieve in a museum setting: focus on cutting edge research requires constantly updated exhibits, which are time-consuming and expensive. Focusing on research is difficult because museums are typically oriented more to displaying objects than a process. The debates between these two meanings have been informed by the similar debates on public understanding of science and science literacy. Public understanding of research (PUR) is preferred over public understanding of science (PUS) in regard to the two definitions given above because they are more precise: PUS often has been taken to mean public appreciation of and support for science, or to mean public engagement with science, either critically or for neutral edification. Much of this debate centers around the deficit model of science literacy as a minimum standard of scientific factual knowledge that needs to be pushed down to the masses from elite scientists. Critics argue both that the lay public may have reasons for not knowing or wanting to know scientific facts, and that there is a level of mistrust of scientific elitism among the public and a sense of needing oversight. The critique of science literacy naturally maps onto a critique of PUR as communicating the latest products of scientific research, rather than on the process. Lewenstein and Bonney hope that clarifying these two definitions of PUR, rather than stymying action, will lead to clearer choices about the kinds of PUR activities to pursue.
If PUR is inherently difficult to do in museums, why do it in museums? Albert and Edna Einsiedel respond to this question by answering that museums are today's public agoras, cultural centers where debates on issues are held. They locate the many activities occurring in museums today along an Engagement Continuum, with the passive deficit model on one end, and a fully interactive, science in context and public as inquiring expert model on the other. Lectures and televised programs, observations of scientists at work through a window, lie on the passive end of the spectrum. Expeditions, travel programs, workshops and conferences lie at the more engaged and interactive end, where at one extreme the participants themselves become active researchers. The most significant of these interactive PUR programs is the consensus conference, in which demographically representative members of the public are selected to be on a panel of lay participants, who watch presentations by scientific experts and then pose questions to the experts. The conferences are open to the public, who also are allowed to pose questions. The consensus conference is held up as an example of maximum public engagement with science. Such conferences are hosted at museums because museums are seen as cultural centers and sites of authority by both the public and scientists, are already oriented to public communication of science, usually have the necessary facilities for conferences, and are seen as less elitist and more populist than universities. The challenges of such interactive projects, aside from most museums' traditional orientation towards stable and established knowledge, lies in the potential for controversy, especially in regard to contentious and uncertain knowledge, and the potential to alienate donors and sponsors.
Martin Storksdieck and John Falk address the question of how to evaluate PUR initiatives. They caution that before an evaluation is conducted, two things must be clarified: what are the goals of the exhibit or program, and what are the outcomes of the designed activities on the experiences of visitors?
In looking at these two, Storksdieck and Falk ask us to keep in mind a number of issues.
How do visitors learn from museums? The meanings they make are heavily dependent on what they already know, whom they are with, where they are, and why they are motivated to learn. Thus outcomes are not determined purely by museum exhibit designers, but also by what visitors bring to their experience, most strongly by their agenda for visiting. Thus visitors should be allowed to self-define their outcomes, rather than have them imposed. Evaluation of outcomes should take into account visitors' actual experiences and own accounts of what they gained.
The second issue is the relative exposure of visitors to PUR that the program/exhibit in question provides compared to other sources of information, and how their experience fits into peoples' general framework for addressing PUR issues. Museum experiences are not isolated events, and evaluations that focus only on short term goals, such as factual knowledge gained during the visit, may miss the longer term effect that people may become motivated to be more interested or engaged in science, and studies need to address this.
The third question is what are visitors' background knowledge of and interest in PUR? Much data suggests that a majority of visitors are less interested in learning about the process of scientific research compared to its products. Visitors also come into museums as heterogeneous groups, comprising individuals with differing levels of knowledge and interest.
Thus the final issue for evaluators to keep in mind is what kind of PUR activity they are providing, and what audience are they addressing? Strorksdieck and Falk suggest defining layers of outcomes appropriate for different types of visitors. They themselves define 5 levels, from the lowest, most general and assuming the least amount of knowledge, hands-on lab experiences and simulations, field experiences and citizen science, suitable for children and families and teaching the thrill of collecting and interpreting data, to the highest, most abstract, and with the most specific audience (science and policy attentive audiences) focusing on the role of science in society, history and philosophy of science, STS type questions, with programs conveying the process of how science is done and how knowledge is produced lying in the middle.
Bruce Lewenstein and Rick Bonney first take a step back to define PUR. There are two main definitions of PUR: communicating cutting edge scientific results, and communicating the process of research itself. Getting these two goals confused or not separating them out clearly when designing or evaluating PUR initiatives will lead to less than successful projects. Both objectives can be difficult to achieve in a museum setting: focus on cutting edge research requires constantly updated exhibits, which are time-consuming and expensive. Focusing on research is difficult because museums are typically oriented more to displaying objects than a process. The debates between these two meanings have been informed by the similar debates on public understanding of science and science literacy. Public understanding of research (PUR) is preferred over public understanding of science (PUS) in regard to the two definitions given above because they are more precise: PUS often has been taken to mean public appreciation of and support for science, or to mean public engagement with science, either critically or for neutral edification. Much of this debate centers around the deficit model of science literacy as a minimum standard of scientific factual knowledge that needs to be pushed down to the masses from elite scientists. Critics argue both that the lay public may have reasons for not knowing or wanting to know scientific facts, and that there is a level of mistrust of scientific elitism among the public and a sense of needing oversight. The critique of science literacy naturally maps onto a critique of PUR as communicating the latest products of scientific research, rather than on the process. Lewenstein and Bonney hope that clarifying these two definitions of PUR, rather than stymying action, will lead to clearer choices about the kinds of PUR activities to pursue.
If PUR is inherently difficult to do in museums, why do it in museums? Albert and Edna Einsiedel respond to this question by answering that museums are today's public agoras, cultural centers where debates on issues are held. They locate the many activities occurring in museums today along an Engagement Continuum, with the passive deficit model on one end, and a fully interactive, science in context and public as inquiring expert model on the other. Lectures and televised programs, observations of scientists at work through a window, lie on the passive end of the spectrum. Expeditions, travel programs, workshops and conferences lie at the more engaged and interactive end, where at one extreme the participants themselves become active researchers. The most significant of these interactive PUR programs is the consensus conference, in which demographically representative members of the public are selected to be on a panel of lay participants, who watch presentations by scientific experts and then pose questions to the experts. The conferences are open to the public, who also are allowed to pose questions. The consensus conference is held up as an example of maximum public engagement with science. Such conferences are hosted at museums because museums are seen as cultural centers and sites of authority by both the public and scientists, are already oriented to public communication of science, usually have the necessary facilities for conferences, and are seen as less elitist and more populist than universities. The challenges of such interactive projects, aside from most museums' traditional orientation towards stable and established knowledge, lies in the potential for controversy, especially in regard to contentious and uncertain knowledge, and the potential to alienate donors and sponsors.
Martin Storksdieck and John Falk address the question of how to evaluate PUR initiatives. They caution that before an evaluation is conducted, two things must be clarified: what are the goals of the exhibit or program, and what are the outcomes of the designed activities on the experiences of visitors?
In looking at these two, Storksdieck and Falk ask us to keep in mind a number of issues.
How do visitors learn from museums? The meanings they make are heavily dependent on what they already know, whom they are with, where they are, and why they are motivated to learn. Thus outcomes are not determined purely by museum exhibit designers, but also by what visitors bring to their experience, most strongly by their agenda for visiting. Thus visitors should be allowed to self-define their outcomes, rather than have them imposed. Evaluation of outcomes should take into account visitors' actual experiences and own accounts of what they gained.
The second issue is the relative exposure of visitors to PUR that the program/exhibit in question provides compared to other sources of information, and how their experience fits into peoples' general framework for addressing PUR issues. Museum experiences are not isolated events, and evaluations that focus only on short term goals, such as factual knowledge gained during the visit, may miss the longer term effect that people may become motivated to be more interested or engaged in science, and studies need to address this.
The third question is what are visitors' background knowledge of and interest in PUR? Much data suggests that a majority of visitors are less interested in learning about the process of scientific research compared to its products. Visitors also come into museums as heterogeneous groups, comprising individuals with differing levels of knowledge and interest.
Thus the final issue for evaluators to keep in mind is what kind of PUR activity they are providing, and what audience are they addressing? Strorksdieck and Falk suggest defining layers of outcomes appropriate for different types of visitors. They themselves define 5 levels, from the lowest, most general and assuming the least amount of knowledge, hands-on lab experiences and simulations, field experiences and citizen science, suitable for children and families and teaching the thrill of collecting and interpreting data, to the highest, most abstract, and with the most specific audience (science and policy attentive audiences) focusing on the role of science in society, history and philosophy of science, STS type questions, with programs conveying the process of how science is done and how knowledge is produced lying in the middle.
Section 4: What Museums Can Learn from Media Public Understanding of Research Initiatives
Tim Radford – It’s the way you tell ‘em
Science has to be told as stories in order for the public to take any interest. Media frames are chosen to sell these stories to the guy who is eating his bowl of cereal. Science stories compete for attention with every other story in the popular press. Analysis of the media brings up words like Frankenstein, Pandora’s Box, and Playing God, far more frequently than do the actual scientific words. By selling stories, however, the journalist is able to transmit science to the public. By doing this repetitively, the press can educate.
Cornelia Dean – Covering Science at the New York Times
The NY Times relies on staff writers, about half of which have some advanced degree in science. These individuals scan the science journals and convene each morning to discuss what to cover and how much space to devote to each story.
Dean describes the role of science writers in translating science in the press. She writes, “when our stories do not get the play we think they deserve, it is often because we have done a poor job communicating, clearly and quickly, why they are important. (This is a problem we share with scientists who complain that their work does not get the attention it deserves.)” (p.307)
Dean remarks on the problem of scientific specialization and the ability of staff writers to understand the research. She also describes the effect of commercialization in science. Many scientists have financial interests in companies (sometimes their own) which leads to a blatant conflict of interest.
Dean argues that most scientists do not know how to talk to the press or prepare for a press interview. Scientists, in general, are rewarded by publishing their articles in scientific journals and communicating their findings to their peers. They have little incentive to speak with the press, who will corrupt the meaning of their work. There is also a scientific cultural pressure not to overly promote oneself to the popular press.
Nancy Linde – Nova: The leading edge
In describing how Nova has been so successful as a television program, Linde writes, “There are three critically important elements in creating the perfect Nova: story, story, and story.” While TV programs are linear and do not have the time to focus on detail (unlike museums), creating programs for the public is similar. There are four basic elements when creating an episode of Nova:
2) Characters. They need to be appealing, concise, articulate, and interesting.
3) Dramatic arc. A story needs to build and release tension.
4) Visuals. TV is the medium for visuals and they should move or show a process.
A producer needs to have the courage to reject subjects because there is no story, or to reject important scientists because they cannot communicate their research effectively.
- What’s the story?
- Who is the main character?
- Who are the minor characters?
- What’s the conflict? What are the twists and turns in the story?
- What’s the resolution?
Marc Airhart – Earth and Sky: Some challenges of Communicating Scientific Research on the Radio
Earth and Sky is a 90-second radio show broadcasted on 650 stations. Because of the format, Airhart describes the biggest challenges as:
- Selecting the Topic
- The Interview. Getting scientists to go beyond presenting “the facts” to telling about themselves, their motivations, their challenges, etc.
- Accuracy versus Reality. Focusing on the parts of the story that are interesting means leaving out parts the scientist may feel are important.
Eliene Augenbraun – Crossing the Public and Commercial Broadcasting Barriers: ScienCentral’s Two Public Understanding of Research Projects.
Augenbraun itemizes the issues (financial, cultural, political, and technical) facing the production of science programs.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Gina's Comments on the Falk et al.
For this week, I read the article titled, "Investigating public science interest and understanding: evidence for the importance of free-choice learning," by Falk et al. In general the authors argue that there are many "places and contexts" in which people learn about science, i.e., the workplace, museums, science centers, school, civic organizations, etc. These places known as "leisure science learning" locations are the context in which the public engages in science, but the authors are more concerned with the intrinsic motivations of why, where, how and with whom this type of learning occurs (p456.). They focus on an asset based approach of science learning stating,
"This approach suggests that free choice science learning - the learning that individuals engage in throughout their lives when they have the opportunity to choose what, where, when and with whom, to learn - can and does make a significant contribution to public understanding of science" (p456).
Further, the author’s state,
"For if we are to communicate and teach about science effectively, we should do so in a language and a form that people are willing to listen to, which means knowing where people tend to learn about science, why they pay attention to the topic in the first place, and how they stay engaged in science throughout their lifetimes" (p457).
The authors present some interesting points and raise some interesting questions, but it's in their methodology and results that I feel uncomfortable with their statements. Their first survey is a self-report survey asking participants to rate their "interest in science and technology" and their "knowledge of science and technology." Their second survey assessed people's use of community resources for learning science. Their results show that people report a “very high interest in science and technology,” and a “moderate to slightly greater than moderate knowledge of science and technology” (p459). The authors contend that,
“While school classes or courses, and thus formal education, played a significant role as sources of science and technology learning, free-choice learning opportunities, in the aggregate, seemed to be a more important resource for lifelong science learning than school” (p461).
The important factor to remember is that these surveys are self-reporting. What does learning mean to you? How do we define having “learned”something? How much interest in S&T do you have? How much knowledge of S&T do you have? The authors state that their approach is an alternative to the science indicator tests, which we have previously discussed in class. Clearly, the science indicators have their limitations, but so too does this approach in this paper. Anyone can self-report learning some science, but how do you know if they actually learned, or took away a general scientific understanding? How many people would openly, and honestly, admit that they have “no knowledge of S&T?”
On the other hand, just as the contextualist approach was an alternative (or addition) to the science indicators, this “assets based” approach is an attempt to understand the public’s view of their own understanding and interest in science rather than the science or researcher top down approach. The author’s write, “We would argue that the key to future success in public science education depends upon achieving a more accurate understanding of the where, when, how, why, and with whom of the public’s science learning, across their lifespan and the myriad settings in which they learn science” (464). Their point emphasizes that it does not matter if they learned something or not by scientific standards, but that the public believes that these particular locations with these specific people, etc, are a conducive environment to learn science. Is it possible that the museum is not the preferred location?
Food for thought! =)
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Nisbett on science in the Pew "State of the News Media" report
Matthew Nisbett points to the dwindling amount of attention paid to science by cable news in his blog, Framing Science:
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Summary for Exhibiting Cultures (Karp & Levine)
This book is a collection of articles about museum exhibition divided into five parts. I will focus here on several of the articles I found particularly interesting/useful.
1. The Museum as a Way of Seeing (Alpers)
The main idea of this article is that by removing artifacts from their environment, by stripping them of their context, we can appreciate the objects themselves. In doing so, we can simultaneously distance ourselves from the artifacts’ creators and find in the objects something that connects us to them and to those that made them.
2. Exhibiting Intentions (Baxandall):
There are three agents inolved: The creator of the artifact, the designer of the exhibit, and the audience. The Exhibition should be a conversation by the maker of the artifact and viewer more than anything. “Exhibitors cannot represent cultures. Exhibitors can be tactful and stimulating impresarios, but exhibition is a social occasion involving at least three active terms. The activity the exhibition exists for is between viewer and maker. If the exhibitor wants to help or influence this activity, it should noe be by discoursing either directly or indirectiy about culture, which is his own construct, but rather by setting up nonmisleading and stimulating conditions between the exhibitor’s own activity (selection and label making) and the maker’s object. The rest is up to the viewer” (p. 41).
3. Resonance and Wonder (Greenblatt):
Greenblatt says there are essentially two models for exhibitions: the resonance model and the wonder model. The resonance model is more of an “intimation of a larger community of voices and skills, an imagined ethnographic thickness” (p. 48), while the wonder model consists of an “intense, indeed enchanted looking” (p. 49). Greenblat believes the best exhibits will incorporate both models and they will work together to create “wonderful resonance and resonant wonder” (45).
4. Locating Authenticity (Crew & Sims)
Current thinking is that artifacts don’t have much meaning on their own, but the exhibition makers help them. Meaning can be created simply by proximity.
“Authenticity is not about factuality or reality. It is about authority. Objects have no authority; people do. It is people on the exhibition team who must make a judgment about how to tell about the past. Authenticity--authority--enforces the social contract between the audience and the museum, a socially agreed-upon reality that exists only as long as confidence in the voice of the exhibition holds” (p. 163).
The rise of social history “history from the bottom up” (p. 163) reshaped not only the work of many historians, but also informed museum exhibition design.
Another way to look at it is to say that the event is primary, and that it is in the “place/time of the event that the audience takes part, becoming cocreators of social meaning. Authenticity is located in the event” (p. 174).
5. Noodling Around with Exhibition Opportunities (Gurian)
Creators of exhibits “impose learning impediments in [their] exhibitions” because they “possess unexamined beliefs about our visitors’ capacity to learn and because we want them to act in a style that reinforces [their] notions of appropriate audience behavior” (p. 186).
She goes on to list some political factors that shape museum exhibition. She says museums fall into one of three political categories:
• Aspiring establishment organizations (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Self-consciously liberal (New Museum of Contemporary Art)
• Counterculture (El Museo del Barrio)
Additionally, she says that the director of the museum often imposes her/his own political views on the museum. For example, The Exploratorium, in San Francisco was created by Oppenheimer, who was very concerned that the audience was be able to make sense of the exhibit themselves without help or interference from designers. This was an indication of his “power to the people” attitude.
She concludes by saying that an exhibit is like theatre: a collaborative endeavor where the collaborators have highly individualized visions and styles, so compromise is needed. An exhibit must have agreed-upon assumptions about the audience or a “coherent view of the audience as articulated by a single prevailing power source” (p189). However the current way in which decisions are made doesn’t allow for explicit discussions of the creator’s view of the audience/viewers.
6. Always True to the Object, in Our Fasion (Vogel)
Vogel believes curators have an “obligation to let the audience know what part of any exhibition is the making of the artists and what part is the curator’s interpretation” (p. 191). She admits this will not be easy, as some of the curator’s understanding rests on “unquestioned and unexamined cultural--and other--assumptions” (p. 191). “The museum must allow the public to know that it is not a broad frame through which the art and culture of the world can be inspected, but a tightly focused lens that shows the visitor a particular point of view. It could hardly be otherwise” (201).
My thoughts:
This book was a very interesting look at museums and the artifacts they display. Most of the articles dealt far more with artistic or cultural artifacts than the types of artifacts that might be found in a science center or science museum.
I noted that many of the articles were written by practitioners, and it is very interesting to see a field that is so openly critical and reflexive of their own work. I thought it was worth mentioning this, as scientists often are not so reflexive…
Something that I thought quite a bit about was that science museums and science centers are often putting ideas on display rather than objects. I am left to wonder how this body of work translates to those ideas. I think there are rich connections to be made. Situating the knowledge curators seek to impart within the context of their own desire to impart it might be a rich area of discussion. I’m thinking this specifically in terms of some of the large-scale, science based exhibitions at AMNH (Darwin, Einstein, and Genome to name a few): They, themselves are torn between representing what Greetblatt calls resonance: that is the history, the cultural surroundings in which a scientists lived or in which he made his revolutionary discoveries on the one hand, and presenting the ideas, which perhaps are meant to invoke wonder.
1. The Museum as a Way of Seeing (Alpers)
The main idea of this article is that by removing artifacts from their environment, by stripping them of their context, we can appreciate the objects themselves. In doing so, we can simultaneously distance ourselves from the artifacts’ creators and find in the objects something that connects us to them and to those that made them.
2. Exhibiting Intentions (Baxandall):
There are three agents inolved: The creator of the artifact, the designer of the exhibit, and the audience. The Exhibition should be a conversation by the maker of the artifact and viewer more than anything. “Exhibitors cannot represent cultures. Exhibitors can be tactful and stimulating impresarios, but exhibition is a social occasion involving at least three active terms. The activity the exhibition exists for is between viewer and maker. If the exhibitor wants to help or influence this activity, it should noe be by discoursing either directly or indirectiy about culture, which is his own construct, but rather by setting up nonmisleading and stimulating conditions between the exhibitor’s own activity (selection and label making) and the maker’s object. The rest is up to the viewer” (p. 41).
3. Resonance and Wonder (Greenblatt):
Greenblatt says there are essentially two models for exhibitions: the resonance model and the wonder model. The resonance model is more of an “intimation of a larger community of voices and skills, an imagined ethnographic thickness” (p. 48), while the wonder model consists of an “intense, indeed enchanted looking” (p. 49). Greenblat believes the best exhibits will incorporate both models and they will work together to create “wonderful resonance and resonant wonder” (45).
4. Locating Authenticity (Crew & Sims)
Current thinking is that artifacts don’t have much meaning on their own, but the exhibition makers help them. Meaning can be created simply by proximity.
“Authenticity is not about factuality or reality. It is about authority. Objects have no authority; people do. It is people on the exhibition team who must make a judgment about how to tell about the past. Authenticity--authority--enforces the social contract between the audience and the museum, a socially agreed-upon reality that exists only as long as confidence in the voice of the exhibition holds” (p. 163).
The rise of social history “history from the bottom up” (p. 163) reshaped not only the work of many historians, but also informed museum exhibition design.
Another way to look at it is to say that the event is primary, and that it is in the “place/time of the event that the audience takes part, becoming cocreators of social meaning. Authenticity is located in the event” (p. 174).
5. Noodling Around with Exhibition Opportunities (Gurian)
Creators of exhibits “impose learning impediments in [their] exhibitions” because they “possess unexamined beliefs about our visitors’ capacity to learn and because we want them to act in a style that reinforces [their] notions of appropriate audience behavior” (p. 186).
She goes on to list some political factors that shape museum exhibition. She says museums fall into one of three political categories:
• Aspiring establishment organizations (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Self-consciously liberal (New Museum of Contemporary Art)
• Counterculture (El Museo del Barrio)
Additionally, she says that the director of the museum often imposes her/his own political views on the museum. For example, The Exploratorium, in San Francisco was created by Oppenheimer, who was very concerned that the audience was be able to make sense of the exhibit themselves without help or interference from designers. This was an indication of his “power to the people” attitude.
She concludes by saying that an exhibit is like theatre: a collaborative endeavor where the collaborators have highly individualized visions and styles, so compromise is needed. An exhibit must have agreed-upon assumptions about the audience or a “coherent view of the audience as articulated by a single prevailing power source” (p189). However the current way in which decisions are made doesn’t allow for explicit discussions of the creator’s view of the audience/viewers.
6. Always True to the Object, in Our Fasion (Vogel)
Vogel believes curators have an “obligation to let the audience know what part of any exhibition is the making of the artists and what part is the curator’s interpretation” (p. 191). She admits this will not be easy, as some of the curator’s understanding rests on “unquestioned and unexamined cultural--and other--assumptions” (p. 191). “The museum must allow the public to know that it is not a broad frame through which the art and culture of the world can be inspected, but a tightly focused lens that shows the visitor a particular point of view. It could hardly be otherwise” (201).
My thoughts:
This book was a very interesting look at museums and the artifacts they display. Most of the articles dealt far more with artistic or cultural artifacts than the types of artifacts that might be found in a science center or science museum.
I noted that many of the articles were written by practitioners, and it is very interesting to see a field that is so openly critical and reflexive of their own work. I thought it was worth mentioning this, as scientists often are not so reflexive…
Something that I thought quite a bit about was that science museums and science centers are often putting ideas on display rather than objects. I am left to wonder how this body of work translates to those ideas. I think there are rich connections to be made. Situating the knowledge curators seek to impart within the context of their own desire to impart it might be a rich area of discussion. I’m thinking this specifically in terms of some of the large-scale, science based exhibitions at AMNH (Darwin, Einstein, and Genome to name a few): They, themselves are torn between representing what Greetblatt calls resonance: that is the history, the cultural surroundings in which a scientists lived or in which he made his revolutionary discoveries on the one hand, and presenting the ideas, which perhaps are meant to invoke wonder.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Interpreting Objects and Collections
Susan M. Pearce, Interpreting Objects and Collections
Pearce’s book is an anthology of papers on the role of objects and collections in museums. The book is split into two sections on the two aspects. The study of objects (or specimens or artifacts) is part of the study of material culture in anthropology and archeology, while the study of collections is only a recent academic development. In part I, Hodder’s short piece divides analytical categories of objects into functionalist (materialist or utilitarian), symbolic (structural or coded), and historical meanings. A crucial idea is that objects in museums are removed from a context in which they have use value, to one divorced or alienated from their original use value. Does “display” count as a use, and what does that mean for the transformation of the object’s relationship to a person? What happens when objects or whole collections are removed from view for preservation?
Pearce herself, as well as Christopher Tilley, focus on the symbolic aspect, drawing on the semiotic theory of Saussure. Saussure divides language into langue, the “system of codes, rules and norms structuring any particular language” and parole, “the situated act of utilization of this system by an individual speaker.” (Saussure 1960). The building block of langue is the diacritical sign, composed of signifier, the utterance or acoustic image, and the signified, the concept referred to. Signs themselves are arbitrary and therefore only have meaning in a system of relations to other signs. With post-structuralism, meanings break down even further because signifiers and signified do not have a one-to-one relationship, meaning coming about from chains of meaning to related signifiers and signs, and meaning derived differently in different contexts, different interpreters, different reasons for interpreting–any specific meaning of a sign at any time is derived from the act of interpretation itself.
Semiotics when applied to objects means that objects become material ways of narrating the past. with multiple meanings for multiple interpreters, and can be both signifiers and signified. Pearce traces the different stages in a jacket from Waterloo, what the jacket meant for its original owner who kept it, to its meaning for the viewer in a modern museum. The jacket has both a metanymic meaning and metaphorical meaning. It has come to stand in for the Battle of Waterloo itself, but even then, had different meanings for victorious British upperclass as well as working class who sympathized with French Republican ideals.
Pearce begins Part II with some definitions on what is a collection. Durost defines a collection to be a set of objects whose value is not use value but derived from their relation to other objects or an idea of being one in a series. Aristide considers collection “obsession organized” and the drive for completion which separates collection from mere possession. Baudrillard suggests the difference between collection and accumulation lies in the motive of classification of the objects in a collection, but Pearce notes that the line is often blurred. Pearce summarizes by saying a collection comprises the ideas of “non-utilitarian gathering, an internal or intrinsic relationship between things gathered, subjective view of the owner, and the notion that the collection is more than the sum of its parts.” Danet and Katriel look at collecting as play, as an aesthetic experience, and as a striving for closure, completion, or perfection. Collections are not always actively pursued, a gradual accumulation of clothes in the closet may suddenly be discovered one day by the owner as a collection–a collection isn’t one until one thinks of it as one. Pearce notes three aspects of collecting–collections as souvenirs, involving a romantic connection to one’s past through the materiality of objects, collections as fetishes, collecting the objects for their own sake but without any systematic reasoning, and systematic collections, involving some abstract order such as classification or arrangement in evolutionary trajectory. Both souvenir and fetish collections are attempts to create a private world, through removal of objects from their social relationships in order to freeze time but in opposite ways, with souvenirs objects are alienated from a romantic self, while with fetishes, self is divorced from romanticized objets. Systematic collections lie in between these two poles, but with also the crucial difference that their purpose is public, not private, seeking to engage and instruct viewers in the abstract idea or system they are trying to convey by their arrangement in space. Bringing back in semiotics, collections of objects become languages, means of communication. Historical accounts of collecting by Eva Schultz and Susan Stewart (quoted in James Clifford) note that collection for museums in part arose out of a desire to represent the universe through collections of exemplary or representative objects whereby through metonymy the whole of the universe would be gathered under one roof–in natural history especially, this impulse was related to the impulse to compile encyclopedias, and was part of the Western desire to acquire knowledge of the entire universe through appropriation. James Clifford’s look at art collections focuses on the art-culture divide–masterpieces collected for their artistic, aesthetic, formal value (Zone 1), and artifacts collected for scientific anthropological study of cultures (Zone 2). In addition, both categories have splits between authentic and inauthentic (Zone 3 is inauthentic masterpieces and Zone 4 is inauthentic artifacts). Clifford traces how pieces can move between Zone 1 and 2, Zones 1 and 3 or 2 and 4, or 3 and 4, and the associated changes in meaning which occur in such shifts.
Pearce’s book is an anthology of papers on the role of objects and collections in museums. The book is split into two sections on the two aspects. The study of objects (or specimens or artifacts) is part of the study of material culture in anthropology and archeology, while the study of collections is only a recent academic development. In part I, Hodder’s short piece divides analytical categories of objects into functionalist (materialist or utilitarian), symbolic (structural or coded), and historical meanings. A crucial idea is that objects in museums are removed from a context in which they have use value, to one divorced or alienated from their original use value. Does “display” count as a use, and what does that mean for the transformation of the object’s relationship to a person? What happens when objects or whole collections are removed from view for preservation?
Pearce herself, as well as Christopher Tilley, focus on the symbolic aspect, drawing on the semiotic theory of Saussure. Saussure divides language into langue, the “system of codes, rules and norms structuring any particular language” and parole, “the situated act of utilization of this system by an individual speaker.” (Saussure 1960). The building block of langue is the diacritical sign, composed of signifier, the utterance or acoustic image, and the signified, the concept referred to. Signs themselves are arbitrary and therefore only have meaning in a system of relations to other signs. With post-structuralism, meanings break down even further because signifiers and signified do not have a one-to-one relationship, meaning coming about from chains of meaning to related signifiers and signs, and meaning derived differently in different contexts, different interpreters, different reasons for interpreting–any specific meaning of a sign at any time is derived from the act of interpretation itself.
Semiotics when applied to objects means that objects become material ways of narrating the past. with multiple meanings for multiple interpreters, and can be both signifiers and signified. Pearce traces the different stages in a jacket from Waterloo, what the jacket meant for its original owner who kept it, to its meaning for the viewer in a modern museum. The jacket has both a metanymic meaning and metaphorical meaning. It has come to stand in for the Battle of Waterloo itself, but even then, had different meanings for victorious British upperclass as well as working class who sympathized with French Republican ideals.
Pearce begins Part II with some definitions on what is a collection. Durost defines a collection to be a set of objects whose value is not use value but derived from their relation to other objects or an idea of being one in a series. Aristide considers collection “obsession organized” and the drive for completion which separates collection from mere possession. Baudrillard suggests the difference between collection and accumulation lies in the motive of classification of the objects in a collection, but Pearce notes that the line is often blurred. Pearce summarizes by saying a collection comprises the ideas of “non-utilitarian gathering, an internal or intrinsic relationship between things gathered, subjective view of the owner, and the notion that the collection is more than the sum of its parts.” Danet and Katriel look at collecting as play, as an aesthetic experience, and as a striving for closure, completion, or perfection. Collections are not always actively pursued, a gradual accumulation of clothes in the closet may suddenly be discovered one day by the owner as a collection–a collection isn’t one until one thinks of it as one. Pearce notes three aspects of collecting–collections as souvenirs, involving a romantic connection to one’s past through the materiality of objects, collections as fetishes, collecting the objects for their own sake but without any systematic reasoning, and systematic collections, involving some abstract order such as classification or arrangement in evolutionary trajectory. Both souvenir and fetish collections are attempts to create a private world, through removal of objects from their social relationships in order to freeze time but in opposite ways, with souvenirs objects are alienated from a romantic self, while with fetishes, self is divorced from romanticized objets. Systematic collections lie in between these two poles, but with also the crucial difference that their purpose is public, not private, seeking to engage and instruct viewers in the abstract idea or system they are trying to convey by their arrangement in space. Bringing back in semiotics, collections of objects become languages, means of communication. Historical accounts of collecting by Eva Schultz and Susan Stewart (quoted in James Clifford) note that collection for museums in part arose out of a desire to represent the universe through collections of exemplary or representative objects whereby through metonymy the whole of the universe would be gathered under one roof–in natural history especially, this impulse was related to the impulse to compile encyclopedias, and was part of the Western desire to acquire knowledge of the entire universe through appropriation. James Clifford’s look at art collections focuses on the art-culture divide–masterpieces collected for their artistic, aesthetic, formal value (Zone 1), and artifacts collected for scientific anthropological study of cultures (Zone 2). In addition, both categories have splits between authentic and inauthentic (Zone 3 is inauthentic masterpieces and Zone 4 is inauthentic artifacts). Clifford traces how pieces can move between Zone 1 and 2, Zones 1 and 3 or 2 and 4, or 3 and 4, and the associated changes in meaning which occur in such shifts.
Karp & Lavine (1993) Communities and Museums: Partners in Crisis
This article is a partial synopsis of the book, Museums and Communities by the same authors. It looks at the evolving perspective of museum curators and staff toward their audiences and vice versa. It discusses paens made in the post-recession 1990s to the need for demonstrable value and accountability in public institutions (think "Contract with America"), and what that meant for the future of museums. What value do museums have to society? Why should they continue to be funded by communities or governments?
Karp and Lavine hold that museums—those that continue to take a one-way, top-down approach to the communication of vetted culture, at any rate—are likely to have a hard time answering this question adequately.
As the authors point out, in a struggle to survive in the face of scant patronage, many museums had already begun to "consider their audience" by installing entertainment-heavy blockbuster exhibits intended to appeal to the lowest common denominator (think "Bodyworlds").
Critics suggest that something has been lost in this transition to massive, lavishly produced exhibits—that museums have made this leap at the expense of reputations as repositories of high culture and spaces for quiet reflection. The authors spend some time picking apart one such critique by New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik.
Gopnik may have a point, they say, but his criticism is not sensitive to the economic pressure felt by museums to draw bigger crowds, and even to compete with amusement parks, which increasingly include education in their mission statements.
None of this is to say that Karp and Lavine believe the blockbuster exhibit is the solution to museums' need to be relevant. On the contrary, they suggest that attendance figures are a poor surrogate for the cultural value of museums. Mere crowd size does not speak to the value of the quality of the experience of attending a given exhibit, which is their preferred metric.
To increase their cultural value, museums should not focus myopically on entertainment—value, which they've tended to do in a very top-down fashion, but should instead begin to view the mounting of exhibits as a two-way communication process. Museums shouldn't just market to more visitors or more diverse visitors. They should engage in dialogue with these audiences, and let them inform the forms that the museum's exhibits and outreach programs take.
The authors close by giving examples of museums that have engaged with their audiences in more or less successful fashions, and by pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of these experiments. Suffice to say that successful engagement must avoid several pitfalls, which the examples elucidate—either through their limitations or their success.
One is the building of exhibits that explore multicultural points of view, but in a way that appeal primarily to the same educated, white crowd to whom the museum has always catered. The second is for a museum to be so responsive to the demands of its audience that it loses sight of the aim of objectivity.
The authors close the article by reiterating their main points, calling for museums to be spaces for experimentation, and pointing out that if museums are to truly take on new forms, they may have to buck their traditional forms of institutional organization.
Politics of science funding
Just thought this was an interesting article from the perspective of "selling science." It's got it all: institutions and experts throwing their authoritative weight around, political scare tactics, the use of the media to impact public opinion and sway policy, high financial stakes, invocations of the uber-narratives of progress and international competition and human rights, appeals to patriotism, threats to the physical health and well-being of Joe American Patient, etc. Interestingly, at the bottom of the article the source is listed as "Brokenpipeline.org," which sounds like an advocacy group formed by the institutions that put together this report, itself titled A Broken Pipeline: Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Museums and the Appropriation of Culture (Edited by Susan Pearce) – OR, Bruno Latour visits the museum
The main theme of the book is that traditional Western museums are essentially halls of cultural artifacts, stolen from other civilizations in the name of science and learning. This systematic pillaging of other’s culture is essentially the product of colonialism.
The presentation and display of these collections of “stolen booty” convey control and power, e.g. DO NOT TOUCH. In the article “Please don’t touch the ceiling,” Beard and Henderson play with the notions of the museum to make the patron realize these cultural norms. For example, they add life-size cutouts of people’s heads among the plaster casts to give the patron feel that the observer is being observed. They ask people to look outside the windows, question what the curators forgot to include in the displays, add plastic sculptures to the collection, put price tags on objects and create joke displays. A “do not touch” sign is placed on an impossibly high Victorian ceiling. Above the visitor’s book are hung mirrors so that patrons become aware that they are indeed part of the exhibit. In sum, by playing with (or is that mocking?) many of the traditional ways museums create use objects and space, they make us aware of the narrow social norms we traditionally apply to museums.
Pearce, S. M. (1998) Collecting in Contemporary Practice.
Pearce, S. M. (1998). Collecting in Contemporary Practice. London: Sage. Summarized by Laura Rickard
• This book explores: how “culture is collected”; what “collections are like as culture” in their own right.
• Justification for this study, or, a “hypothesis” posed by the author: “…Collecting practice is significant in contemporary British society because it can tell us more about the nature of that society and of the individuals which comprise it; that since collecting practice is essentially an individual enterprise, understanding of it must start with the collectors themselves; and that collecting is embedded in the individual collector’s emotional, economic, and inter-personal life…” (p. 17).
• This book is based on the 1993 Contemporary Collecting in Britain Survey. This mail survey, including both multiple choice and free-response questions, was distributed to 1500 randomly selected adults in GB. This survey aimed to:
o Look at narratives of the collectors to try to determine “collecting rhetoric”
o Focus not so much on the collectors themselves, or their collections, but more on offering explanations of the process of collecting (p. 8); this is seen as a “paradigmatic shift” to the field known as “collecting studies.”
Main questions posed by the book (roughly corresponding to chapters):
1. What things are collected, and by people from what background and social context?
• “Collectors, therefore, are not a different or in any meaningful sense a particular personally characterized group either within the survey respondents, or within the population as a whole; on the contrary, they are drawn proportionately from the general population” (p. 26).
• 42% male, 58% female described as having “normal” or “traditional” lifestyles, thus contradicting the popular image of the collector as a loner or outcast.
• Peak of collecting appears to be in early adulthood (18-30ish), second peak in late 50s and early 60s, sharp decline after age 65.
• Very small % of ethnic minorities were represented in the survey, a smaller percentage than in British population at large, but author argues that their collecting patterns are the same as non-minorities.
• Large differences between what men and women collect (e.g., machinery and musical instruments collected by men; most of the jewelry and tourist goods held by women)
• Discussion of kitsch and the “axes of value in objects and collections” (p. 41); one idea here is that people collect kitsch and tourist items both sincerely and in jest (ironically) and there is a spectrum of “quality and rubbish” as well as “masterpiece and artefact” within which you can “locate” any collectible.
• The particular category of the object that people collect does not seem to be related to class. This seems to run against the “popular wisdom” of certain classes collecting certain objects.
2. How do collectors integrate ideas about work and leisure/play into their habits and relationship with the outside world?
• A small percentage of respondents belonged to “collector’s clubs”; however, younger professionals are more likely to see demarcation between work and play as “fluid”: “their work and their collecting interlace, with the one feeding from the other” (p. 71)
• According to the survey, the notion of the collection as “set aside” and “sacred was most often expressed by more blue-collar workers, whereas younger, technologically-based professionals were more likely to express a less clear boundary between work and collecting.
3. What is the relationship between the collector and the marketplace (i.e., role of consumption)?
• About a third of the respondents gathered material “actively” (i.e., sought out particular things) whereas the rest “wait[ed] for it to appear” (p. 77). Nearly all were in some way involved in the commercial marketplace and purchased things for themselves.
• “…people’s own fierce collecting passions can and do influence perceptions of value and hence have impact upon systems” (p. 94)—in other words, people don’t necessarily fall victim to the “manipulative corporation,” despite its power.
• I wonder if the discussion of purchasing (i.e., how collectors get their material to begin with) would be wildly different now, given the tremendous success of eBay and other online brokers.
4. How does collecting operate within the family and home?
• “Family” in the study denoted “a man and a woman living together on what is intended to be a permanent basis, whether in marriage or partnership, together with any children of either of them who are living with them” (97).
• Gift giving played a critical role in the development of many collections.
• Collecting does not necessarily strengthen relationships, e.g., marriages, but can give a spouse a sense of “personal individuality” (p. 124).
• Differences between male and female patterns of collecting were touched upon. More specifically, women expect that men will live with material passed down from women’s grandmother, mother, etc., but women wouldn’t expect that they would have to live with heirlooms from men’s fathers, grandfathers, etc.
5. How does collecting inform/is informed by gender?
• Author suggests that collecting takes on a “gendered” or “sexual” meaning, and has come to be associated with discussions of sexuality.
• There are gendered associations of certain collected items; people tend to collect within widely accepted gender stereotypes.
• The particular uses of collections vary across genders— serving a memorial role (e.g., of a dead relative), intrinsic role (e.g., “to look good”), etc.
• Women are more likely to use collecting as a way to showcase family relics throughout the home; men’s collecting is more private, geared more toward control and domination. Women’s collections can actually promote family stability and the “warmth” of the household.
6. What is the collector’s inner life, of thought and feeling?
• People understand their collections in many varied ways
• The “body” is understood both as a collector’s physical body (e.g., there is a discussion of piercing and tattooing) and the “body of the world” (p.154)
• Collecting can be understood as a way of turning the physical world into an “aggregation of signs” (p. 170).
7. What would be an “integrated view” of collecting in contemporary Britain?
• The final chapter of the book again highlights some of the results presented in the previous chapters, and tries to draw out broad themes.
• Contemporary collecting is described as “postmodern”: “Collecting is therefore an emblematic activity which ransacks the past to create a present idiosyncrasy of style” (p. 14).
• Also: “Postmodernism is seen as developing an aesthetic of the body which exalts the surface of things instead of their content, to prefer appearance to meaning” (p. 177). In this way, collecting can also “deny” society’s foundational meta-narratives: “…collections are organized according to individual whim, seen as an authentic record of particular experience, rather than an affirmation of received values” (p. 177).
• Part of the postmodern “task” for the collector is making sense of himself and his experience: “…helps in the construction of a personal narrative of selfhood and recognizable, individual identity” (p. 174). Yet, at the same time, the author warns: “The role of collecting in the effort to make meaning within collectors’ lives must not be over-estimated….the obsessed collector is the anomaly, and most collectors take a relaxed, low-key, unemphatic approach, even while taking their collection seriously as a focus of their lives” (p. 184).
My critique: Having limited knowledge of this subject area, I found it hard to relate this text to some of the larger themes of our class. I appreciated Pearce’s continual discussion on the “postmodern” project of collecting, and wonder how other scholars have characterized historical collecting. Though I understand Pearce’s argument for declaring the collection of kitschy tourist memorabilia “postmodern,” would some of the same “sense making” be occurring with other collectors in earlier times? And, if so, would that still be “postmodern”? I would like to know more about the transition from individual collections to museums, as I can imagine that the process of moving from personal to “public” might have required collectors to be more deliberate and forthright about their aims. If someone were collecting medical paraphernalia just because he/she found it “interesting,” would that be enough justification to create a public viewing place? When a collection becomes public, how much (if any) interpretation is needed/expected/required? (For instance, I may have a collection of rare insects that I don’t label specifically because the information is known tacitly. If I make my collection public, how much information must I share with the public, beyond the “obvious” genus, species, etc.?)
• This book explores: how “culture is collected”; what “collections are like as culture” in their own right.
• Justification for this study, or, a “hypothesis” posed by the author: “…Collecting practice is significant in contemporary British society because it can tell us more about the nature of that society and of the individuals which comprise it; that since collecting practice is essentially an individual enterprise, understanding of it must start with the collectors themselves; and that collecting is embedded in the individual collector’s emotional, economic, and inter-personal life…” (p. 17).
• This book is based on the 1993 Contemporary Collecting in Britain Survey. This mail survey, including both multiple choice and free-response questions, was distributed to 1500 randomly selected adults in GB. This survey aimed to:
o Look at narratives of the collectors to try to determine “collecting rhetoric”
o Focus not so much on the collectors themselves, or their collections, but more on offering explanations of the process of collecting (p. 8); this is seen as a “paradigmatic shift” to the field known as “collecting studies.”
Main questions posed by the book (roughly corresponding to chapters):
1. What things are collected, and by people from what background and social context?
• “Collectors, therefore, are not a different or in any meaningful sense a particular personally characterized group either within the survey respondents, or within the population as a whole; on the contrary, they are drawn proportionately from the general population” (p. 26).
• 42% male, 58% female described as having “normal” or “traditional” lifestyles, thus contradicting the popular image of the collector as a loner or outcast.
• Peak of collecting appears to be in early adulthood (18-30ish), second peak in late 50s and early 60s, sharp decline after age 65.
• Very small % of ethnic minorities were represented in the survey, a smaller percentage than in British population at large, but author argues that their collecting patterns are the same as non-minorities.
• Large differences between what men and women collect (e.g., machinery and musical instruments collected by men; most of the jewelry and tourist goods held by women)
• Discussion of kitsch and the “axes of value in objects and collections” (p. 41); one idea here is that people collect kitsch and tourist items both sincerely and in jest (ironically) and there is a spectrum of “quality and rubbish” as well as “masterpiece and artefact” within which you can “locate” any collectible.
• The particular category of the object that people collect does not seem to be related to class. This seems to run against the “popular wisdom” of certain classes collecting certain objects.
2. How do collectors integrate ideas about work and leisure/play into their habits and relationship with the outside world?
• A small percentage of respondents belonged to “collector’s clubs”; however, younger professionals are more likely to see demarcation between work and play as “fluid”: “their work and their collecting interlace, with the one feeding from the other” (p. 71)
• According to the survey, the notion of the collection as “set aside” and “sacred was most often expressed by more blue-collar workers, whereas younger, technologically-based professionals were more likely to express a less clear boundary between work and collecting.
3. What is the relationship between the collector and the marketplace (i.e., role of consumption)?
• About a third of the respondents gathered material “actively” (i.e., sought out particular things) whereas the rest “wait[ed] for it to appear” (p. 77). Nearly all were in some way involved in the commercial marketplace and purchased things for themselves.
• “…people’s own fierce collecting passions can and do influence perceptions of value and hence have impact upon systems” (p. 94)—in other words, people don’t necessarily fall victim to the “manipulative corporation,” despite its power.
• I wonder if the discussion of purchasing (i.e., how collectors get their material to begin with) would be wildly different now, given the tremendous success of eBay and other online brokers.
4. How does collecting operate within the family and home?
• “Family” in the study denoted “a man and a woman living together on what is intended to be a permanent basis, whether in marriage or partnership, together with any children of either of them who are living with them” (97).
• Gift giving played a critical role in the development of many collections.
• Collecting does not necessarily strengthen relationships, e.g., marriages, but can give a spouse a sense of “personal individuality” (p. 124).
• Differences between male and female patterns of collecting were touched upon. More specifically, women expect that men will live with material passed down from women’s grandmother, mother, etc., but women wouldn’t expect that they would have to live with heirlooms from men’s fathers, grandfathers, etc.
5. How does collecting inform/is informed by gender?
• Author suggests that collecting takes on a “gendered” or “sexual” meaning, and has come to be associated with discussions of sexuality.
• There are gendered associations of certain collected items; people tend to collect within widely accepted gender stereotypes.
• The particular uses of collections vary across genders— serving a memorial role (e.g., of a dead relative), intrinsic role (e.g., “to look good”), etc.
• Women are more likely to use collecting as a way to showcase family relics throughout the home; men’s collecting is more private, geared more toward control and domination. Women’s collections can actually promote family stability and the “warmth” of the household.
6. What is the collector’s inner life, of thought and feeling?
• People understand their collections in many varied ways
• The “body” is understood both as a collector’s physical body (e.g., there is a discussion of piercing and tattooing) and the “body of the world” (p.154)
• Collecting can be understood as a way of turning the physical world into an “aggregation of signs” (p. 170).
7. What would be an “integrated view” of collecting in contemporary Britain?
• The final chapter of the book again highlights some of the results presented in the previous chapters, and tries to draw out broad themes.
• Contemporary collecting is described as “postmodern”: “Collecting is therefore an emblematic activity which ransacks the past to create a present idiosyncrasy of style” (p. 14).
• Also: “Postmodernism is seen as developing an aesthetic of the body which exalts the surface of things instead of their content, to prefer appearance to meaning” (p. 177). In this way, collecting can also “deny” society’s foundational meta-narratives: “…collections are organized according to individual whim, seen as an authentic record of particular experience, rather than an affirmation of received values” (p. 177).
• Part of the postmodern “task” for the collector is making sense of himself and his experience: “…helps in the construction of a personal narrative of selfhood and recognizable, individual identity” (p. 174). Yet, at the same time, the author warns: “The role of collecting in the effort to make meaning within collectors’ lives must not be over-estimated….the obsessed collector is the anomaly, and most collectors take a relaxed, low-key, unemphatic approach, even while taking their collection seriously as a focus of their lives” (p. 184).
My critique: Having limited knowledge of this subject area, I found it hard to relate this text to some of the larger themes of our class. I appreciated Pearce’s continual discussion on the “postmodern” project of collecting, and wonder how other scholars have characterized historical collecting. Though I understand Pearce’s argument for declaring the collection of kitschy tourist memorabilia “postmodern,” would some of the same “sense making” be occurring with other collectors in earlier times? And, if so, would that still be “postmodern”? I would like to know more about the transition from individual collections to museums, as I can imagine that the process of moving from personal to “public” might have required collectors to be more deliberate and forthright about their aims. If someone were collecting medical paraphernalia just because he/she found it “interesting,” would that be enough justification to create a public viewing place? When a collection becomes public, how much (if any) interpretation is needed/expected/required? (For instance, I may have a collection of rare insects that I don’t label specifically because the information is known tacitly. If I make my collection public, how much information must I share with the public, beyond the “obvious” genus, species, etc.?)
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Links of interest
- Vatican jumps on Galileo bandwagon
- Moshe Safdie at TED: includes a link to a video of his presentation, in which he discusses several projects, starting with a science museum in Kansas
- Roy Gould and Curtis Wong demonstrate the Worldwide Telescope at TED: this is a project of Microsoft Research, in which they are trying to bring together observations from telescopes and satellites all over the world to allow people to "tour the universe."
- Michael Shermer at TED: another TED talk -- this one is the "professional skeptic" Michael Shermer on "Why People Believe Strange Things." He presents a particular perspective on scientific literacy.
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