Elissa Frankle is the Social Media
Strategist and Community Manager
at United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum here in Washington DC.
The title of her talk today is
"Making History with the Masses:
Citizen History and Radical Trust in Museums.
So please join me in welcoming Elissa.
(Elissa) Before I start I just wanted
to thank you, the fine people
here at MITH for inviting me in.
As a Social Media Manager
I don't usually spend a lot of time
talking in front of the audiences anymore.
As I am thinking of the community
behind the computer. This is a really
treat for me to actually be able
to come out and talk with my voice about
things that are important to me, one of those
things being citizen history
in a world of our users, and the work
we do, as museums and cultural organizations.
One of the things that is really important
in all of this is just to look at
the words that we use when we're
talking about the way we interact
with our users. So, in a sense
what we're going to talk about today
is really what is citizen history?
Not just "what is citizen history"
as a concept, but what is citizen,
what is history? And what's a museum?
Really big concepts, really interesting
things and I don't promise to have
all the answers today, because
most of these cases, there aren't
real answers. That is the best part.
But we're going to try and get a little bit
of the why to explore some of these questions.
And see where we could get it
unlocking what would be the critical question,
of what is citizen history,
and what can it be in the future.
So Citizen History kind of came into being,
from it's early origins in Citizen Science
and Crowdsourcing. Two other ways that
other fields have looked at using their
public, to get down and dirty with their data.
We'll look at each of these in turn,
first of all, starting with crowdsourcing.
Now, when you go to look at crowdsourcing
on the internet, one of the first sites
you'll run into is crowdsource.com
Not surprisingly. And they promise
500, 000 workers on demand.
And what they promise for those workers
is that your data will be dealt with -- with results.
In a speedy manner. So really using the crowd,
using the number of people you can just get
cranking away on some amount of data,
some amount of rote tasks,
to produce whatever the desired result is.
So the question here with crowdsourcing
isn't so much about big answers
and big interaction, but it's more about
a lot of people doing a lot of little things.
Museums and local organizations apply
this crowdsourcing principle in a lot of
different ways. One of the projects we're
talking about at lunch actually is
New York Public Library
What's On the Menu Project,
and it's companion project
recently released, or about-to-be released,
the Ensemble Project.
But in this case, transcribing menus,
and the other case, in transcribing playbills.
Taking what's on the menu, what is on the playbill,
written it down into it's component parts,
just saying, what do you see here,
what is the food that you see on this menu,
and have someone transcribe that,
by some user. As a result, again, small task,
just transcription where you look at it,
what is it that you see, you write down
whatever it is that you see.
No real depth of thought
going into to it, but again, a lot of
people working on a very small task
for a long time, creating big results.
The other form of crowdsourcing
that we see quite frequently
in cultural heritage organizations
is the idea of, not necessarily putting
lots of small tasks into play,
but working more from a
knowledge base, that the person has --
the user have some kind of knowledge
that is personal to that person,
that they then share with the Cultural
Heritage Organization.
So again, not a lot of deep thought,
deep interaction with content,
but a lot of sharing up, personally.
So rather than citizen history,
the topic of what we're going
to talk about next, we have the history
of citizens, growing on this kind of
crowdsourced environment.
So if you are going to talk about crowdsourcing
we're going to talk about all these things,
with framework in Bloom's Taxonomy,
this is an educational philosophy
framework developed by Benjamin Bloom.
They talk about the different ways that
students can engage with learning.
Everything from just remembering,
kind of that rote level of "I see what it is,
I think about it, I write it back down"
So the regurgitation model of looking
at that knowledge, they're understanding it,
being able to classifying things,
up to application, they are able
to choose to interpret, to draw
some kind of conclusion.
And all the way at the top, to creation.
Starting from scratch, creating a product
all by one's self. Crowdsourcing,
we tend to think it comes down,
about this remembering, understanding,
basic level of proposition.
This is not to say there's not value in it,
but it is just, it is very much on a rote level.
I see what I have in front of me,
I take it, I transcribe it, I translate it,
and I spit it back out in a usable format.
I have the knowledge in my head,
I have some stories that I want to share
that I've been asked to share.
And I take it out of my head,
and I write it down, and then to you.
So crowdsourcing, microtasks,
on a macro scale.
So lots of small things, lots of people together,
sharing their personal knowledge, or basic skills,
really relying on that wisdom of the crowd.
So by having a lot of people working on
something together, eventually something
will be completed, and answers will be given.
Citizen science goes a little bit higher up,
[inaudible]
We're going to look now at two projects
From the Citizen Science Alliance,
or the 'zooniverse' family of
citizen science projects.
Here we see Galaxy Zoo, where
the Citizen Science Alliance
and its partner organizations
have pictures of galaxies.
And they walk through a four step process,
where they ask questions about what
the users see in these galaxies.
Are they round? Are they spiral?
What kinds of bulges do you see?
Just being able to classify what it is they're
looking at by sight. Similarly we have
Planet Hunters, this is a, well,
from their tutorial, where they walk through
premises on how you can identify a transit.
Ways in which these levels that we see here,
dip down, when a planet transit is identified.
So we have again the small idea of looking, classifying,
making a note, but in both these cases
we also have this very exciting thing
that is a "free text box", where someone says
"Do you see anything that is of interest,
is there anything that you want to discuss,
from what you've seen?" So more than just
seeing, repeating, replicating, we have
the ability to discuss, to take things
to a higher level, to really reflect on
what it is that we're seeing.
So crowdsourcing, again, down
at that lower level of Bloom's Taxonomy,
citizen science is the ability to go
a little bit higher. Thinking about applying
the knowledge that you have,
what you gained from doing the project,
thinking about science on a larger scale.
So our basic principles of
Citizen Science say these these are
volunteers, non-specialists,
people who are not trained in science
Governed by and under the leadership
of people who know what they're doing in science,
and have that training, or that title
of scientist, to answer real-world questions.
Because scientists don't want people
to just look at galaxies for their help,
though they are pretty just to look at anyway,
they want people to look at those galaxies
so they can classify them and
know more about what's going on
out there. In one article that I read
about galaxies, they mentioned that
they first know what's successful when
they classify the amount of time,
the amount of results found by these
citizen scientists, and the number of
person hours that would have taken
for the original researcher who was going through
by hand, on his own, looking at all these
galaxies on his own, to go through,
and make these same distinctions.
They can do about fifty thousand a week,
seventy thousand done in the first two days,
so it's a lot of things that you can do.
Again, small tasks, macro scale,
lots of people, find the answers.
So it seems to be a win-win proposition
for everybody. Professionals get data,
volunteers build skills. They learn how to
look at a galaxy, what is it that they are
looking at when they look at a galaxy.
How you identify it, the transit of a planet.
So the real skills that a scientist use to
try and answer some of their questions,
these citizen scientists actually get to use
on their own. So everybody wins, alright.
In 2006, the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum opened an exhibition called
"Give me your children: Voices
from the Lodz Ghetto" This was an exhibition
built around a student diarist,
child diarist, who then lived in the Lodz Ghetto,
after 1940. One of the artifacts that
was part of this exhibition was an album.
An album of 14,000 names, signed by the students
of the Lodz Ghetto, presented to
(Mordechai) Chaim Rumkowski, who was the
administrator, on Rosh Hashanah,
the Jewish newyear, 1941.
So we have this incredible artifact,
this album full of signatures, and
we knew nothing about it.
We knew that these were students
who had signed their names.
We knew that they were about
thirty or so different schools
who had students sign their names.
And we had another document that
gave us some framework as to how old
these students were in each school.
But, the question that we asked
as we brought this album forth
was could you have
today's students, look through
our data for the things that
we would normally be used
as researchers at the museum,
and try to figure out who these students were,
as well as what happened to them.
This was really an experimental project,
the question wasn't just "What happened
to those children?" but would it actually work
to put today's students
at work, trying to figure out who these
students of [yesteryear] were.
Seven years into the project
we still call this an experimental
citizen history project.
We're still very much in beta,
we're still trying to figure out
where all the lessons are.
But we do at least have a platform.
Here I'll show you the URL for this
on the next slide.
This is the Children of the Lodz Ghetto
Memorial Research Project,
we have, at this point, about
8500 names available for research.
We have them up, transcribed
in the database, and our student users
and volunteer users go through,
select a name they want to research,
and then go into our databases and see
if they could figure out who the person was,
who most likely sign their name in the album.
Then figuring that out, figuring out who
their most likely candidate is, going through
outlets even further, to see if they can
figure out what happened to that person,
after the Ghetto. Were they able to
survive the war, did they perish, where,
if so. So we have, as we seen in other
crowdsourcing and citizen science projects
up here, we have a framework
where we ask you to put into our research.
What was the name that you found?
What was the date of birth if there was one?
What street addresses did you find,
associated with this person?
And we also have this all important
free textbox, where we ask, not only,
how was it that you're able to come
across who this person was, but talk
to us about the process.
What was it that made you realize
that this was the right person,
as opposed to some other [inaudible name].
How did you know? What was it
about the document, what can you
determine about the document?
So having done again, the higher order
thinking of "What do we do, when
we look at documents?" and
"What can we know from the document?"
and "What do we simply not know?" We've seen from the document that a lot of students like to jump to conclusions
that "Oh couldn't find anything else
beyond stage 1, this person clearly
must have perished in [inaudible]
there's nothing else to be found."
Quite frankly the answer to that is,
well, no, the only thing that we know
we can't find the document is that,
we don't know yet.
The document just isn't there.
Doesn't tell us anything, just tell us
there are big gaps. I want to talk
about these big gaps momentarily.
They themselves are actually a big part
of citizen history museums.
So, going back to our friendly
framework of Bloom's Taxonomy,
keeping crowdsourcing down here
at the lower level, citizen history tries
to go even higher. Getting people not only
to analyze a text but also to analyze
their thinking, to reflect on what it is that
they are doing. And really recognize
they are building skills. In addition,
they are still going through, helping us
researchers try and answer these
big questions in history.
So we put a lot of our trust in their hands,
put a lot of documents out there,
and then ask them to reflect
on their process, and on the process
of doing history in general.
So, knowing that much, knowing
our framework with this project that
we have, let's return to our title
and talk about some words.
Because we present today only one
possible framework, one possible
working nature of citizen history.
There are a lot of best practices
that we could draw from this,
we all have to go back to the words
that we use. For instance, what is
a citizen? Citizens, we usually talk
about them as citizens of nation,
citizens of a group of people,
who are members of a certain group.
And these citizen have two things.
They have rights and they have responsibilities.
Well, we museums, we're really good at
responsibilities. We're really good at saying
"Please, come in to our museum space,
But here's all the things that you can't do:
don't eat, don't drink, don't smoke,
don't take pictures, don't poke
the priceless raw files."
But, what is it that we can give our
visitors, our users, the people who
come in our space, as far as
the rights go. We're not particular
good at saying "here's what you can do,
with our stuff." So if we actually
set out to create a citizen project,
what we need to be able to do,
is to give people both responsibilities
as well as rights in that space
that we create. Furthermore,
going on to history.
History, in this case, we have to
take within the framework
of history in a museum.
Since history is really messy.
There's a lot of different theories
on what history is, as far as I can tell.
History itself really has
no big answers, no big truth.
History, as it stands right now,
is just based on the documents.
The interpretations that we had
at our disposal in this moment.
So that they change tomorrow,
when a new archive is open,
a new interpretation comes along,
something that makes us rethink
everything that we've ever thought
to be true, about a certain part of the field.
History takes interpretation, and history
is a constant asymptotic approach.
To the truth, without really any expectations
that it will ever achieve the truth itself.
That one big knowledge about
what history is, or may be.
Museums don't really like messy.
We like to be able to put things
up on our walls, put the text up and
leave it there for a long time.
Now whatever the interpretation is,
that we have to take from this original data,
from our understanding of history,
we pick one frame, and that's
what we put up. Hanging on the walls
and say, "Here you go visitors,
this is truth, this is what happened in this
historical period." And because we are really good at
broadcast model, we're not particularly
good at listening back.
And hearing all the questions people
might have, say look at this one interpretation,
that we have put forward, about history.
So when you're talking about the opposite
of the broadcast model, the idea that
history is messy, there are
no answers, we want to be able to have
citizens in our space. Really get down
to questions of trust.
Museums often say that we are
instruments of public trust. The public
places a lot of their trust in us,
to be able to say, this is fact, this is truth.
You're coming to my museum,
to learn something, and you'd expect
that the knowledge being just
passed down to you, given to you
and you'll osmose it, from looking
at our wall text, and seeing our artifacts.
And that what you'll know.
But of course, we now know that
history is messier than that.
And simply heading down one
interpretation, one framework,
is not sufficient. It's just one way
of looking at things.
But if museums were actually
going to open up all these interpretations
of history, all these different frameworks
and ways of going about it,
would that then, hurt their ability
to be instruments of public trust?
By trusting the public, it then help
correct our image as organizations
that can be trusted in society.
We kind of have this Circle of Trust,
that we keep on down low,
and inside our own frameworks,
among our own staff in museums.
And in the Circle of Trust we have
often the really scary things that
we don't really want to talk about.
Like the fact that we don't know
everything. We like to pretend that we do,
but we really don't. And there's a lot
of information or questions in our
collections where there's answers
might be, we just, maybe, haven't
gone through our collections
as deeply as we might like,
because there's a lot of them. There's
a lot of stuff out there, there's
a lot of data. It takes a long time to
get through it. There might be answers
out there that will completely change
the way we present this information.
Whispers [inaudible]
And the fact of the matter is,
that as we answer these questions
we're not going to find any big truth,
any big answers, again, this constant
asymptotic approach to what the truth
might be, we're just going to find
more questions. We're just going to have
an even further path ahead of us.
But we really don't like to talk about that,
so you should know it well enough.
We place ours -- it's kind of hard to
see here,-- but there's a big red brick wall
around this circle of trust, because
we don't like to talk about it, or to share
it with the public. But what if we do?
What if we actually accept that there are
people out there, who wanted to know
that we have questions. Who want
to know what's still out there to be seen
and to be discovered, who realize that
museums maybe don't really know everything.
And they're really curious about what's
sitting inside that Circle of Trust.
What haven't we explored yet.
So, what if the museum said,
"well yeah, there's a lot of really messy
stuff in there, things that we haven't
explore, a lot of questions, that we still
have to go through? And then we
actually take the curiosity of our visitors
into play, they actually say "Well yeah,
we've got questions too.
And we've been trying to ask them,
you just haven't been listening to us."
Well we have to warn them first,
it's kind of messy in there, it's really
kind of scary. And as we help them to enter
the Circle of Trust where we keep
all of our questions and our data,
and our unknown unknowns,
those questions that lead to further questions.
There's places where we have no data,
those things that we're really curious
about, and we wish that this one more archive
would open up, that we'd be able to get to their stuff.
That might have some of those answers.
There's places where there are gaps
in the record.
We wouldn't just sign our visitors
into there, completely unequipped.
We'd give them a tool kit,
we'd give them some binoculars,
so they'd be able to look closer at things.
We'd give them a wrench,
that they can actually go through
and tweak the data, see what
they are playing with, messing around,
in the stuff that we have,
as well as a hardhat, because, well,
who knows what will fall out
when we actually shake the history
and what's in there.
So this toolkit are the things that allow
citizens, our visitors, our volunteers, our users,
to enter this space, this Circle of Trust,
the things that we're really curious about.
To enter into our questions and into
our data. Working in partnership with us.
To answer these questions.
Some of these when we look at citizen
history, are the questions historians have
for themselves. The ways that historians
do history, history as a process.
So how does historians look at a source?
What's available to us in the source
and what's the context for it.
What questions are we trying
to answer by looking at the source.
What's new? What might we be unlocking
with this source, what are we looking at
that might not have been considered before?
What's in your interpretation, a new
piece of data, it's pointing us
in a new place. In the case of the
Children of the Lodz Ghetto project,
we've been able to identify a couple of
these pointers. Then our citizens
as they go through try to identify these
children, have an easier time in
going through our stuff, because we know that
naming conventions in 1920s and 1930s
were a little different than you might expect
here in the States, because your
average student would have a Polish name,
and an Yiddish name, and probably
an nickname, maybe even a middle
name. All of which could be used in
any number of documents. So then
you'll be able to accept there are
a lot of names for the same person,
helps people to be able to read sources
and jump to fewer conclusions.
Be able to be more open,
to different interpretations and
different names that maybe out there.
In addition, we're working with a mostly
American audience. So being able to tell
our users that in these documents
you'll going to see the day first,
and then the month, helps them better
to unlock what it is they're seeing.
And instead of putting their American lens
onto it, have a better understanding
of what it is they are actually seeing.
So, thus hardhatted, and wrenched,
and binoculared, we send our users
into the Circle of Trust, and while
we're at it we might as well jump into
that Circle of Trust.
We might as well bring the museum
into that Circle of Trust, accept that
we have questions and more data
and unknown unknowns.
And we're all in this together.
And a funny thing happens.
Because rather than being our usual
broadcaster model museums
just going out and say, "Here's truth,
take it in." We actually have conversation.
We have users talking to the museum
and the museum talking back.
We have users talking to one another,
helping each other to grow through
their research, and as these questions
and conversations iterate back and forth,
back and forth, we actually have
more growth than we would've had
when we're just a museum talking
to itself. Or just users speaking to one another.
Because the museum still have
a really important role to play.
We are the scaffolders. In addition
to giving people our questions,
our honest research, our data,
we're the ones who can help our users
to go from just coming in out of curiosity
to actually going out with a skill set.
Things they can use and apply in their
own lives beyond just the Circle of Trust.
So what do we get out of this?
When we open up our users
and the museum itself to accepting
we have questions, data, and unknown unknowns,
the museum gets connections. Connections
among their [inaudible], again,
kind of a crowdsourcing model of lots of people
looking at our stuff, at the same time,
drawing, from the wisdom of the crowd,
some of these answers.
We do get some of these answers to
some of these questions that we have
and we get more questions, of course.
Everytime we try to answer a question
we just end up with more questions
and more directions that we could
take our research in.
And perhaps these are questions
we haven't considered before. Because
we've got people coming in with fresh eyes.
Looking at our stuff in ways we might not
have considered before. And thus
where we would already have more questions,
we have more and more questions.
It's great! So what do our users get out of it?
Now that the museum's gotten all this
good stuff from the people who work
in their data. Well, the user discover.
What we know, truth about history.
That there are no simple answers, that
history is messy. In a lot of cases they
also get a very personal connection
to the history. We've discovered that
from our users at least.
We have students working on research
about students, they get very personally
invested in looking at these individuals,
their lives, their families, and what happened
to them. So having a personal connection
to this one aspect of history often helps them
being a greater personal connection
to the rest of history as well.
And frankly, we don't ask them
to give back their hardhats, their wrenches,
their binoculars when they leave.
We let them keep it.
So they take all of these great skills
they have developed, within
the Circle of Trust, within the museum's
setting, and take them out into the world.
Because really what's at stake here
isn't just citizens being citizens of our sphere
having rights and responsibilities
where we are, but it's about their
citizenship. One of the great things about
the study of history, the process
that we go through as we look at
history, is that a lot of the skills
that we use looking at a document,
making an argument, talking to one another,
are also skills for the public sphere.
And on the internet today, it's kind of
a murky monkey place, where there's
a lot of debate and dialogue going on,
without a lot of people talking to
or listening to one another.
So what if we're actually be able to
go into this digital area where our
citizen history lives, dig people out, you know,
have this skill set of being able to
look critically at a source, think critically
about what they're hearing, and being able
to form a cogent argument,
having send them back out to the murk
of the internet, and see what happens.
See if we could actually improve
civil discourse, by having this new
generation not of trained historians
but of people trying to think historically.
Take their skill set back out into the world.
So let's go back to our words.
Citizen history and radical trust in museums.
What does this mean for best practices
for citizen history? Well, museums,
we have to remember that we're more
than just our four walls. That we are also
the additional space for the people
who come in to our walls.
They need to be able to think beyond
just what we want to present.
In this very closed box. They are
to think about the larger conversations
going on around us, in the world at large.
History is living, breathing, growing --
something that is constantly evolves.
In an early version of this talk
I didn't have history made history,
history is shared. History is noise,
and that was more active than just
the static noun, of history.
Because history should never be static.
So the knowledge that history is constantly
growing and evolving and changing,
and what is true for history today
might not be true tomorrow.
Also means that when we have our projects
going on we need to be able to take
whatever it is that we're learning,
and reiterated back into the project.
To be able to have the assumptions
that we make for our citizen users
grow and change, something learn
more and more from.
Citizens have rights and responsibilities
in your online space, you've gotta be able to
let them in. Because it's not just enough
to say "Come in and look at our stuff
precisely the way that we want you to."
We have to be able to give them the right
to go into our data, muff around and see
what they are curious about within that
framework, and send us their questions
for whatever it is that they've uncovered.
Trust is hugely public, as we just talked
about, it's really the Circle of Trust,
the idea of the public trust, and the fact
that opening our trust to the public
doesn't break down our trust.
It's as if it's becoming a partnership,
the way that we can all grow from working
together. So we have to be able to
welcome our community into our questions,
and be able to, willing, to take our authority
out just enough to be able to say,
"Alright, what answers do you have?
What questions do you have for us,
what can you do to bring in to our sphere,
to help us all grow together."
And frankly the all important word, and.
It's really bridging here, not just citizen history,
and radical trust of museums, or just
citizens, and museums. It's really about
partnership and dialogue.
Whenever we look at this, it's not just about
two things working across purposes,
it's people who think they'll be working
together. In a partnership.
So not only it's this about our citizens,
it's also about what the museum must do
within the space, so we have to be able to
scaffold the skills we want to build,
we have to be able to engage our users.
This community takes a lot of caring
and feeding, a lot of time. To be able to
make sure people are getting the skills,
building the skills, learning the things
that we'll hope they'd take away from this.
And be able to say "We may not have the
historical authority in this space,
we have the understanding. How you go
about, thinking historically, let's help you
grow, let's all move along this continuum
together. So, finally, instead of best practices
I think about from these different ideas about
citizens, history, and museums, you need to
be able to start with a question that
begs answers. Something that is actually
a legit question in history. It's not enough
just to give people busy work
and say "Go." This is gotta be something
that museums are actually curious about.
Furthermore, we'll have to be able to
welcome these fresh eyes into our stuff.
We don't need everyone to be trained
historians right off the bat, but that
there's actually value in having people
not necessarily worked with this data,
with this period of history, or with these
historical skills before, coming in
and looking at our stuff. We need
to be able to iterate and dialogue.
Again, keeping in mind that this is
never static, this should never stay
in one place for very long, that our
projects need to constantly be
evaluated and reevaluated, taking
knowledge that we've learned,
putting it back into the project,
and remembering it's always about
the dialogue between the museum
and it's users. Between users and users.
The conversation that goes on in that space
is just as important what we find out
from it. We need to make sure that
there is that space, for debate and discussion.
We've got some place for these people to go,
to be able to talk comfortably
to one another. We have to be able to
create opportunities for growth,
as people find that they are getting
more and more into these skills,
learning more and more about
what they are doing. We need to
make sure that there's some place
for them to go, beyond just the basic
level of citizen history. In the Lodz Project,
for instance, we have a level called
expert reviewer, when users have gotten
really good at doing the basic research
that we ask them to do, we can then elevate
them to the expert reviewer, and then
as a result, they are then asked
to go through and review the research
that their colleagues, their peers have done.
We elevate peers to a higher level,
they then go talk to their peers
as greater authority figures,
thus giving them a little bit more
empowerment and also give them
their peers an opportunity to realize
that there's opportunity for growth.
(Student) And what's after that?
(Elissa) What's after that?
That's a great question. Once we've worked
out the expert reviewer a little bit more,
I'm hoping we'll find out.
That's part of our next iteration
as we learn more. And finally this
community need a lot of caring
and feeding. You gotta make sure
you've got a community manager
that is really, willing to be boots
on the ground, constantly working
with your people, with your users,
with your citizens. And being there
to answer their questions, to help them
get through the murk of the unknown
unknowns, you know, there's still
value in there. Citizen history has
truly been one of the great lapse
of my professional life, and the more
that I talk to users, learn from users,
understanding this that we do,
the more I like our users, the more that
I love having them in our space,
to be able to learn from them.
And because you today are my citizens here,
love to hear if you have any questions?
Clapping
(Host) Sure I got lots. Thank you for giving us
an idea of what you do, and [inaudible]
you are at it for seven years. You talked about
museums as if there is this, sort of,
global museum - of course there are different museums -
but even within the Holocaust museum,
could you talk about how, what kind of
responses, support, and sponsorship
you've gotten from curators, staff, directors,
boards of trustees, sponsors, members, donors?
(Elissa) Well this is little bit of where that
radical part comes in, those words in the title
that we didn't talk about. I kinda dispense
the word radical pretty early on
in the preparation process because this is
really what museums are all about.
(Audience Member) It's hardly radical anymore.
(Elissa) Right, but within the framework
of the Holocaust museum it kind of is.
We're still very much nervous about
having anybody who isn't us working
on our data, one of the reason why it's been
in beta for seven years, because we're
worried about saying "The museum
is doing this project where we're putting
our data our there, come be part of us,
and look at whatever you want."
Because some elements in the museum
are worried that they are going to ask
for more data to be out there,
Things that we aren't necessarily ready
to have, out there there aren't very -- yea.
We often got a lot of support from
the educational community.
Because the project again has been
on the DL [down low] again, for seven years.
Then when do the people find out
about it, it's been a lot of fun
in the last two and half years after
we've mentioned it, the more people seemed
to like it and really appreciate the fact that
we give people empowerment within our space.
We see a lot of opportunities for it, within
educational, formal educational setting.
As far as donors go we haven't really pushed
to them that much. And now that I sit in
the marketing department, there's definitely
more opportunities for us to do that.
About a year ago we went through
and completely revamped the site,
the screenshots that I showed earlier
are from the new version.
And the plan was always going to be
that once we got it to that point,
we're going to release it out of beta,
and that it would go live, marketing
would do this big push around it
and we will get lots and lots of users,
that would be wonderful, and we
just never got there.
Part of the reasons is an accident
of timing. This is our 20th anniversary year
and probably 90% of my time has been
spent on working on the 20th, working
our outreach around that.
My other kind of [inaudible] been
for that. So maybe if we done this
the year before, we'd actually be able to
run it through the marketing cycle
and see what happened.
(Audience Member) Here's some few more numbers --
(Elissa) Sure
(Audience Member) How many people have contributed
to that Lodz project?
(Elissa) So we have about 1500 people
working on the project, in some capacity
or another.
(Audience Member) Is that number increasing or decreasing?
(Elissa) That number is increasing.
We've been doing a lot of work, again,
with classes. We tell teachers about the project,
they work with their students.
I do a webinar showing them how to use
the project, and the teacher does the support.
in the classroom then I give support at the
back end as they turn research in.
So that number is going to increase. Again,
next week when I got another forty students
from GW on this site. We do have the occasional
user who comes across it and then
goes hogwild on it. That, as people find this
on their own, they would usually spend a lot more
time on it.
(Audience Member) And how many followers do you have
on your Twitter feed?
(Elissa) You mean personally or the museum?
(Audience Member) Well @museums365 is that it?
(Elissa) That's - I forgot - about 1400.
The museum itself has 150,700 something.
(Audience Member) So you do have an audience
that you can reach by that twitter feed.
So you use it to advertise events,
do you promote these citizen history projects?
(Elissa) We do, and particularly now, the way
that our social media team is set up,
I came over last October, and then
by a month behind me, we have analyst
person come over from collections.
I've been in education for -- and so the two of us
I ran the Lodz Ghetto project,
he ran Remember Me, which is
a crowdsourcing project in the vein
of the American History Project
where we had people sharing their
personal knowledge, where the memories
of, children in displaced children's camps.
We have photographs that we show, these children,
and ask "Does anybody remember this person?
Do you know who this person is?"
And people do and they share their story.
It's really been remarkable to see how successful
that's been. So we have two people working
within this crowdsourcing field, now sitting in
the social media. And I'm very excited to see
what we can actually do with that,
once we get out of the 20th muck.
(Audience Member) I have many more questions but I should
let others, pursue.
(Fraistat) So, um, looking at the Children
of the Lodz Ghetto site, and right at the top
there's project status, so, twenty students
known to have survived, so is this what's been known
or verified through people working on this site?
(Elissa) That's right, yeah.
This is one of the additions that we put in
with the new iteration of the site.
We had done a bit evaluation with some
of our users, and a little bit work from
the Center for New Media and History, and they
gave us some of their feedback.
Among that was, people want to see the scope
of what they are doing. How far along
we're actually getting with this project.
(Fraistat) I think that's really important,
even including the number of
citizen historians who have contributed
to the project. I think that's a good thing
to show too. They do this at NYPL, show
the number of people, number of records
that have been curated or transcribed.
(Elissa) It's one of the things that they mentioned
in that same article about galaxy zoo,
was that, here at the three in the morning
with my galaxies, you know, there are
a couple thousand other people also
up at three in the morning with their galaxies.
So when their best [ribow] in the end,
where we're so often on our own,
we're actually very much with other people
at the same time.
I am an educator, I love questions,
and I love wait time, so I'm willing to wait as long as it takes.
(Audience) Yeah I didn't mention that I went
to the museum last week, and now that you're saying
saying about this, I don't remember that
there was anything, lets say, in the area
that talks about it. And I thought that, you know,
that might be a good thing,
to have something, where they're from
or something, where they go to talk about
this project, because, you know,
looking around there are maybe,
I think, you know, elderly people who have
person of interest as they go to that museum.
That might open up more --
(Host) So it's like how does
the brick and mortar interact more tightly
with the virtual here.
(Elissa) And what we've been more willing
to do in the brick-and-mortar space is then to say
connect with us online. We've also been
missing a lot of our community museums
around the the symposium near some of our mall.
Where we'd get to the end of the exhibition
and say "What did you think? Tell us on twitter at
Am-History Museum." So we are more willing
to let people tell us, share their thoughts
in the social space. So putting things
in our Facebook wall, talking to them
on Twitter, putting videos on Youtube,
pinning stuff on Pinterest boards.
But as far as interaction with our
digital space, the things that are connected to us
in visual and outside of social,
we definitely have less of a push,
to those into the museum itself.
There is a space on the second floor
of the museum, where our third
crowdsourcing project, we have three
going on right now, to a very much end.
The World Memory Project,
we're in partnership with Ancestry.com
we have a bunch of names list, that we're
trying to get transcribed, and we open
those up to the Ancestry community to help
us key in some of those names and dates
and things from these giant databases.
And there are two stations that are set up
there. Where you are getting to help
key in -- but again we don't talk about
it very much. And I often do wonder
if there is some kind of force separation
between our brick-and-mortar self,
and our digital space self.
Because the brick and mortar, we can
control, pretty much. We can control
what conversations going in that space,
we have information comes down from
the museum at large. And the digital space
was a little bit scarier. Right? We're not
be able to control the conversations there
as much. We are worried that people
would just take our stuff and run away with it.
And if we are not ready for that many people
to look at our data and actually poke our stuff,
poke our precious raw files, then having
information leading to those things in
the brick and mortar space can be
a little bit scary sometimes.
(Fraistat) And it's like on the other side of your ticket
it could say "Work with us online."
(Elissa) Totally.
I would love that.
(Fraistat) So the museum's greatest fear
might be something like success where
people demanded more and more.
What's your biggest fear about citizen
historian projects in the Holocaust museum?
(Elissa) I think my fear is that it'll fail.
And I believe in failing big and failing best.
But I am worried that when we build it
nobody will come, where we build it,
people come, and then we can't share
that with our internal community.
We say "Look at all these great success
we had." And they say "So what.
What's the point?" That discrete
experiment we were running
where we have the trust of our users,
we have a wonderful community
that well iterates and talks to each other
and learn skills, and goes out into the world
that nobody on our side will listen enough.
And that if this experiment fails,
then how are we every going to
convince them again?
(Fraistat) It makes me think of -- there's
all this talk about blended online education,
and moves and the counter-discourse
from people in pedagogy is about, well,
we need learning outcomes that
can be assessed. How do you measure
the education that you are giving?
But it seems to me that's the other
part of the circuit that we don't have
closed here yet. It's -- how do we document
that we have taught citizens
how to do history in a way that meets
our own sense of what it means
to do history. When we show how
many people -- we could show
how many people might have transcribed
something, how do we document
what they learned, and, make the
the counter-argument to people
who say "So what? So you've got some people
who type some stuff in, big deal."
(Elissa) It's really hard, it's where I think
having the notes field so prominent
really comes in. That we've given
people the space, we ask them
to share with us what their reflections are.
And anecdotally I can tell you that
people as they spend more and more time
on the project get better and better
at filling their skill, and they'd able to
reflect more critically what is it
that they are thinking. But in terms
of being able to measure, to give it
a name, I don't know if we can.
I don't have to figure that out yet.
We also have a lot of supporting
teachers, who haven't quite grasp
the idea either, I have one teacher
who wanted to use the project such
that the students would go on
and research one student, and they
would present the powerpoint
of that student's life, in class.
Then I had to tell him that
you can't do that, because you are
going to have kids who would go and
look for a student, and find nothing there.
That's the nature of the project,
that's the nature of doing research.
We don't know what we don't have.
And in finding that out, that's part of
the goal for us is to figure out
we don't have what those gaps are.
And so trying to put up a critical
narrative on it, you can't always do that.
The expectations just aren't the same.
(Fraistat) Now thinking about you using
the Bloom's model, you were saying that
as we think through what we want
to give people who interact with us,
we want to climb up the scale.
So, a kind of outcomes assessment
would be to somehow to map back
to that. And say, "We've brought people
from here to here to here.
But how you make that assessment is
I mean, I'm thinking of it strictly
from our own projects that are
trying to do this, so, I'm self-interested
in an answer to this problem it seems.
Really hard stuff.
(Elissa) I imagine you have, like an
another crowdsourced group of people
who would then go through those
free text responses and code those.
So you would have something like a
separate project going on at the same time
where they'll be able to have certain words
or outcomes we'd be looking for.
In those notes.
(Audience) I know that there's been
some discussion about this in the archives
field in particular the question of instruction
and how much when you bring in a group
of students into the archives and you
teach them how to do research,
teaching them actually handling the skills,
and what they've been doing
is a pre- and post-test. And trying
to compare the results to see
what they've actually learned.
But there's a whole new set of research
that is going into this because no one
is really quite sure that actually works.
But, I think this is a critical issue
for a lot of disciplines right now,
is trying to figure out what it is
you are trying to evaluate
and how you going to do that evaluation.
(Host) I'm wondering off, also it gets
to the top of the Bloom's pyramid ,
when you get to that true creative level,
but when you start seeing your users
able to take the skills that they acquired
in the course of the interaction with
the institution and create truly new
and different things, and the institution
has to be willing to accept that,
as almost like, well here's one of our
user's exhibit. You might even call it
an exhibit on this topic. It's their
interpretation, we don't necessarily
endorse it, but maybe when we give them
the space, the digital space in order
to demonstrate that creativity.
So they kind of move up from being
worker bees to, you know,
making something.
(Elissa) Should they take it even further
trusting now apart, to be able to --
(Host) Right, you know, way out there
interpretations, or people do stuff
with your data that you don't even like.
(Audience) And with the Holocaust Museum
you could imagine how that could go.
(Audience) One of the best ways to,
at least to being to get a sense of what
people are getting out of this
is simply to ask them "What did
you get out of it?"
And if they are able to express that
in a way that is convincing, then you know
that it worked.
(Elissa) That's a good point. We have
one teacher, so that the teacher that's
going to be working with us starting
next week, again, who's been our
biggest fan for most of the time
the project's been up.
Who assigns students at the end of class
due two reflection papers.
One just the real basics of what did you find
on this day, how much time did you spend
on that project, what did you write,
what did the museum write back.
And reflect on that encounter.
And then a new page on just,
their experience of the site.
What it is that they, were thinking
about getting out of it,
what we could do better,
what they could do better.
Next topic. And I think,
in aggregate, that is the best we've been
able to do so far, being able to see what it is
that people are taking away from the project.
I think that if there is some way
to make that more of the part of the project,
to ask people as they leave this thing,
share something. Answers, questions
someone open with it, with us.
That we're kind of unsure.
(Fraistat) I don't know that much about
the -- really, a merging discipline
of learning outcome assessment,
knowing we have our own specialist
scattered through campus, but it's a lot
more complex than just asking people
what they think they've gotten out of it.
That's a part of it. And I really think
that we need to know and we need to
figure out ways to know what we are doing.
Because how can we know if, you know,
we're doing a good job of teaching
the things we want to teach through
these sites and through these participation.
How can we know how to change?
To better realize our goals.
Those are really complex issues
and I am actually thinking out of,
trying to reach out to some learning
outcome assessment people just,
to help think through that part of the equation.
(Audience) So I want to return to encourage you
to go much further with this, you know,
Neil's idea of printing it on the tickets
or making visible in the museum,
and lots of other ways if you have
150,000 Twitter followers, you should
be generating a lot more than 1500
participants. I mean, we work here
at the Smithsonian's Encyclopedia of Life project,
to make a webpage for every species,
and they have some of the same concerns
that you have, but I think you have a grand
opportunity to go to your wards and
your sponsors and ramp this up
as the central way. This is the future
of this museum. It's a matter of creating
out. That's one thing about educating
the users but, creating outreach and
engagement in getting people to
participate remotely, that may generate
more traffic with people who
come and visit, there's just a lot of ways
this should grow bigger, and I'm,
you know, you should be shy of
that growing this much larger.
The fears are prevalent everywhere
and maybe the Holocaust museum
deservedly, as I said, I worked for them
on their early design-- their fears are prevalent
about Holocaust deniers taking over these,
or polluting results. Even one small error
in the data set will then trigger a national
news story that undermines the validity of it all,
so you do have more concerns than usual,
but all of the more reasons to go at it,
in a substantive way, and deal with
the credibility of, you know, ensuring
the credibility so, it's good that you've got
the, sort of, senior reviewer status,
but various forms of badges and recognition
having annual conference for those
who participating, bringing them in,
bringing them together, raising their stature,
making them leaders of the project,
giving them decision making power
and supervision to control any problems.
There's lots of ways you can go much further
and demanding more of your users
will actually causing them to engage more.
So don't be afraid about that.
I have one particular question about
the 1500. You have some distribution
of the demographics, I mean there's
two theories. One says that, well,
the museum patrons and interests
are of an older demographic, and
the other says, well, it's the kids who
are doing online citizen science,
so help me with that one.
(Elissa) Well it's a little bit skewed,
but there's again, a lot of our outreach's
been through teachers, so, most
users here are school-aged,
so my best users have been in middle school.
Which is for our middle-school educators
has been incredibly gratifying.
But as far as our power users,
people who find us not through a school,
just on their own, and then, crank out
at the data, they for the most part
been in college or just out of college.
(Audience) I mean you could do a lot more,
I am a supporter, I am a contributor
and a member at -- I have no idea
about the Lodz Ghetto project.
It's just not advertised, doesn't reach
me, in either the email traffic I get from
USAHMM or the printed materials,
or the annual reports or anything
that I get, so I mean I think there's a way
that you should be less shy, you should be
more bold in making these projects
are more visible. That will raise the issue
of credibility but also the value
to the museum and you need the
buy-in of the people upstairs.
Your directors and your boards.
To be able to be into this.
I mean, a memorable day was --
I was working and writing plan
for computers in this museum
where the 70 members of the Holocaust
memorial board, many spoke up against it
saying things like, "If the Nazis had computers,
you know, etc." So it was [Shanky Wineburg]
who was, sort of, the lead designer
of this, who said, I mean, settled it all
with a very sharp quote, he said
"Computers are the best way for
the next generation to learn about the Holocaust."
And it was over. You know, making that
forcible statement, that this is important, and
I'm glad to help you, if that would be useful.
I'm writing you an email, so
you'd be on with that, you know,
I think there's a lot that you can
and should be doing and revving up
internally as well as externally,
absolutely the way to go.
(Fraistat) I think what's interesting
is that if you trust your users enough,
say Holocaust deniers did get a hold of
some material, I mean, how do you
teach people to do history well?
History is all about refuting arguments
that don't hold up and learning
how to do that, and understanding
that those arguments will inevitably
crop up all the time, and as you raise
your profile you will get more of that.
So be prepared, but go there.
(Audience) Maybe the analogy to look at
with the cranks and so forth is,
is open source software community.
They're, by opening up the software,
you have a better chance of creating
something that is robust, and
it's going to be protected then if you
try to keep it to yourself, control it.
(Audience) I was thinking, while we're
planning follow-up projects where you
Laughter
(Muñoz) You mentioned that the audience
for this is still predominantly American.
Partly imagine that's because of working
with classes, but I wonder whether
there isn't a kind of pen-pal-esque kind of
angle to this, right - the internet,
is everywhere and you know,
the descendants of many of the people,
or people who might know about this,
or have other sources of information
are obviously probably still in, might still
be in Europe, or in Israel or wherever.
And I wonder about, sort of, a global
outreach, sort of, piece, and how that
fits in with the museum's position,
vis a vis the other Holocaust and remembrance
institutions.
(Elissa) My interns actually are working on
German language arts program,
she's coming to us from Berlin this year.
She was totally jazzed about the Lodz
Ghetto project, and probably are
our heaviest moderator at the moment.
And I should send my boss a review,
as a German language outreach program,
to German schools, based on the things
in their curriculum, and be able to --
We had a group of teachers
from Poland who came in last year.
And I was asked to come and present
the project to them. And there's actually
a lot of hesitancy about it, that
they didn't like the concept or the framework.
Except one woman who actually was
from Lodz, and she said it was a brilliant
idea and that her students would love
to work on it. Part of the problem is
that our resources are in English,
and all the data is in German.
So we have to go through and say that
yes, 'name' means name and 'vorname' is
first name. And do that explication
for our English speaking audience, so there's
a German language cheatsheet.
And for our German speakers they've already
got the data at their disposal
and a lot of them are taught English
in schools. I'm not as familiar with how other --
I guess we could view it as just English
class project, for schools. But I think
it's an excellent idea that we've paired
this with our global outreach since part
of this project still sits in a division
called the global classroom
where we do talk about outreach
to the world.
(Audience) I'm curious about the Polish
teachers' hesitancy.
(Elissa) Um, it was bad. Yeah, they didn't
like the way we were posing our questions.
The fact that we just open these students
up for anybody to come and look at them.
And I think there's also some hesitancy about
the way that we are reading history.
Again the idea that history is, being
something that is open. They weren't
as comfortable with just having that be our framework,
that there could be new questions
coming out of them. And I'm not sure if that was,
I'm sure it's not just
the polish teacher mindset
that it was a particular group
with particular questions they were posing.
And I definitely imagine that
when we are working with different
group of teachers and have different outcome.
(Fraistat) If there are no other questions
or comments, let's have a round of applause
for a really great presentation.
Applause
Does not count as genuine.
The allographic work, by contrast,
such as a musical score or poem
has no one acceptable instance.
Or as Goodman puts it, all correct
performances or renditions of the work
are equally genuine instances o f it.
Allographic art, therefore we may
thereby define as a rule-bound.
Pondering the question, Goodman asks,
"Could institution of a notational system
transform painting or acting from
an autographic, into an allographic art."
Well Goodman answers the question
in the negative. "The development of
time-based media suggest that
we reconsider the issue. Past the work
of art in the digital era, become akin
to a symphony or a publication."
Does the aim of curators, conservators,
technical specialist and artists to sort out
the implications of such questions going forward.
As we consider the ramifications of time-based
art, which can be reproduced and decimated
outside the realm of traditional museum
environments, what is the significance.
of showing such work in museums,
in a laminar institutions to become repositories
for such work. When might it be appropriate
to recognize that a work of art is essentially
ephemeral. And when and why might we want
to take steps to preserve it and perhaps
to transform it in order to preserve it.
To do so, ultimately, is to privilege
the idea over matter, recognizing that
we must inevitably allow the medium
in which the work was originally executed
to evolve, in the service of its presentation.
The opportunity to collect exhibit and
preserve time-based art, thus provides
an exceptional opportunity to consider
the philosophical locations of new media
for understanding our world and our selves.
As well as to explore the technical
and intellectual challenges of preserving
these works for future audiences,
and for providing access to them,
for audiences now and tomorrow.
The new technological environment
produced by digital media further
privileges the value of interdisciplinary
and interinstitutional collaboration,
as we explore the tools and strategies
necessarily to share time-based and
digital works with future generations.
And on that note, I thank you so much
for your attention. And I very much looking
forward to hearing your thoughts, observations
and questions. Thank you.
Applause
(Anne) Yes
(Audience) First of all, I have a critical
question to ask, first of all let me give a --
thanking you for that extraordinary
presentation. I don't get to introduce myself
as I was away. I'm sorry about that,
but I'm coming to mid presentations
for years now as a fellow here.
This is one of the most remarkable
that I've seen. There's a lot of deeper
respect behind these questions.
My question is this: on the note of
[Benjamin] and he's sort of,
who was a figure that I distrust,
as someone was, as far as this type
goes as well, and he's mentoring
notions of the subject rendering
management of flux. I wanted to
get you to reflect on the fact --
there's a brave fascination in your idea
of the time series, and the various
flooring that go on with it.
You can get the point about how
conventional ways of formulating
subjectivity are under attack.
But it strikes me as paradoxical
that the portrait library would be
this place where this radical project
would be going on, and before I want
to do that, would rather -- first of all
it seems to me that a lot of these
radical experiment that you put forward
are actually predicated just as much
as [Benjamin]'s essays of [inaudible]
I have a really nostalgic impulse to recover
the subject in the first place.
When I see those three late night
talk show hosts, I was shocked by the news.
This is I think what the lips are supposed
to feel, that the identity of it all,
the fact that there were, makes me
long for a world that is better than that.
It's a reflection of my alienating world
that I want to see the individual,
so there's the nostalgia there.
But I think the problem is even greater
than that in my mind, that I constant
to engage in this radical project while
presuming that the subject is going
to be a portrait, is to presume the very
thing that was the problem in the
first place, you know what I mean?
Like, if I can put it, it's like the idea
of presuming the individual subjects
so that to attack that idea, is stacking --
is not a radical project in the first place.
When I put Lebron James all by himself
in a cube and evacuate the entire cube
of everything in the world except
images of himself and then conduct
a radical decentering from that,
I pre-supposed in the first place
in totally artificial terms, one, I'm presuming
that radically to attack.
There's something about this project
going on in the space of the portrait gallery
that seems to presume the erratic enemy
in the first place, I just wanted put --
(Anne) I think it's a fabulous -- I think
It's a really really fabulous set of observations
that you put forward and I thank you
so much for that, and I have to say
one of the things that I love so much about
[Benjamin] and it's like any great author,
something that keeps me coming back
over and over is there are so many facets
obviously to all of his essays. I have to
admit the work of art in the age of mechanical
reproduction is this magnet for me.
And I'm just -- I put it obvious, I think you're
right, that he seems to be in many instances
sort of battling with his own sense of nostalgia.
And I will also say that I think I really do
consider his work extraordinarily artful.
It's obviously very self conscious in it's
construction, as is the case with the artworks
I shared with you today. And so I guess
first and foremost I would say
I don't think there's any one way to read
any of these, and that ultimately
is the fascination. There are lots of
different context in which these can
function. I do think that the work of art
in the age of mechanical reproduction
itself in terms of observations about
subjectivity is really really interesting,
particularly [Lee] in this essay, when he's
grappling with this question of Victorial
cliffs for example, and really dealing with
the fragmentation of the body,
and new ways in which we could get to
literally see and understand the body of result,
and freeze-frames it and photographic interventions
on, but that's a little bit of an aside.
And you bring up the really important question
of, alright, if I'm working at the portrait
gallery, how can I -- I notices it's not directed
personally, but how can one who is attached
to this notion of a portrait gallery in the
first place presume to undermine this notion
of an individual hand-on one of the things
that is important to understand about
the notion of the portrait gallery itself.
I don't mean just ours, but this larger
intellectual framework, as of course,
it too has, a history that relates to
a specific set of political developments,
and specific set of intellectual developments.
It is a product of mid nineteen century,
it seems to be a very British concept,
which is interesting, [Norship Pointing]
for example, has made the point that
portrait galleries tend to exist in the
English speaking world, which I actually
have come to think is attached to ways
of thinking about the political significance
of the individual unit in society
that is kind of interesting, especially
with respect to democratic ideals
so I have to say actually, I think there's
something really interesting about the
perhaps hidden political assumptions
that go along with the portrait itself.
But specifically with respect to trying
to undermine and retask this initial
portrait gallery, that has a lot to do
with the fact that that's where I happen
to find myself as a young curator.
I ended up at the portrait gallery
somewhat unexpectedly shortly after
finishing graduate school. And I --
one other things that really intrigued
me about it, and this is going back
twelve years, is that the museum
underwent a very self-conscious
reinvention between 2001 and 2006
when it was actually under physical renovation.
And there was a desire to re-examine
the very principles of portraiture, which
I think has tended to be a form of art making
that has not gotten a significant amount
of credit, I think in the recent past,
it's been seen as a somewhat tired genre,
in fact, in the sixties lots of artists refuse
to use that term, we think of Chuck Close
for example, who does these giant faces.
But during the sixties he called them heads.
He would not acknowledge until relatively
recently that they are a form of portraiture.
And so one of my pleasures, pleasures
perhaps as a curator has been to ask
audience to reconsider what they think
they know about portraiture by thinking
of it -- and this is a thorny term, I'm using
that word, but I wanted to do is to undo
the notion of portraiture and to recast it
a little bit as a way of thinking about
identity and breaking down personal identity.
But I think you are right to bring up
the question about whether or not
there are in fact some, you know, some
types of paradoxes or some assumptions
that are invented in there that are,
you know, in some sense, going against
the grain of the deeper thinking here.
It is really interesting to me to talk with
contemporary artists and, actually,
a project I'm working on right now
is about portrait extraction, who really
do very actively seem to be rediscovering
or re-examining a notion which certainly
goes back to the Renaissance and this is
the notion that somehow in depicting
anybody else, or anything else,
an artist is obviously reflecting something
of who he or she is, but I think the idea
that that entity can somehow be seen
as an envelope, that is impervious to
outside influence is really completely
disintegrated. And yet side by side with that
we know that we live in this incredible
culture of celebrity, and of course
[Worhose] was critiquing , so there
definitely I think it's a very very very intersting
push-pull and I think you are right
to raise these questions on --
So I'm not sure that's a very satisfying
response.
(Audience) I just wanted to underscore that
all these paradoxes that that you unintendedly
fly by underscore the interest of these lines.
Because it seems to me to speak to the
contradiction of the world that we live in.
So thank you very much.
(Anne) Oh, thank you. Thank for your
wonderful question.
(Audience) Hi, um, thank you for having us,
your talk was interesting.
I was wondering if the distinction of [inaudible]
autographic and allographic artwork
can really be helpful for preservation,
to artworks, because I think
the distinction is not that evident or --
there's more of a learning space between
the two, and I think they really applies to
all the media that is - all the work so far,
they are not necessarily time-based.
For example, sculpture by Turner,
and the way that it has to be reorganized
in the gallery according to certain
instructions because it travels in pieces,
but it has to be organized. You see,
that, in a way of performance, all the work,
because if something goes wrong,
you don't know where the things are,
you could argue that you are creating
a new work if you do that. So that means
if the first time that that was done
by the artist himself, that was the autograph
and is lost or maybe preserved through
photography. So that work is un-autographic
but it also has autographic instances.
And then it becomes untruthful work
so that if I show you a music as well,
in a sense you can have performances
in terms of someone performing the work
for, someone creating a new addition,
but there will always be someone
that goes in before, the autographic
instances are very in, manuscript, for example.
And if we think [inaudible]
they exist in time-based media,
because you will look for it in each of the page,
you will look for proof of the first instance
of these sequence of art manifestations
that will be steadily generated by the artists.
So, where's about that option
[inaudible] for preservation.
(Anne) That's a really interesting point.
I guess the assumption that you make
that there will always a desire to go
back to the original form of the
time-based piece, I think it's not
necessarily something that you should in fact
be taking for granted. It's actually
something, of course I have really
great colleagues, but it is a discussion
that I had with members of our staff.
Why do we need to hold on to this
original form, and again, this is where
I think the paradigm of being about
being a historian is so important.
That my colleagues in exhibitions
department were more focused on
the here and the now, and getting it up
on the wall, for them, it's sort of,
excess baggage to worry about
the sixteen iterations that perceive it
it's not meaningful in the same way
in that context as it is to me.
I think they understand the value of
preserving it, and ultimately I think that
that's where the framework of the museum
maybe have something special to
contribute to this dialogue, but this
distinction between allographic
and autographic I agree, is not a perfect one.
And in fact I think there are ways in which
intentions that we observe in the world of
time-based and digital media
are in fact really simply shedding light
on old problems that have always
been there. Our conservation, has always
been about intervention into, you know,
so-called erratic original, and
the conservator has to make choices
about how to best represent the intent
of the original artist or at least what
is understood as being the original intent.
And what I really wanted to do with that
distinction was to, I guess, disengage from
the idea that there is some inherent,
well, of, but I as a historian I do think
there are things to be learned from
the original that may not even be
interesting to the artist, however,
that aside, I wanted to make a point that
if we begin to re-conceptualize visual art,
which is traditionally been seen as something
which is the product of an erratic genius.
You know, [Benjamin] is obviously trying
to disengage that, but it's sort of,
[fidelization] that continues, that we can
begin to see these works of art as things
that can migrate and retain some resemblance
of authenticity, no matter what medium
they are executed in, as long as they visually
represent or conceptually represent
what the artist wanted that piece to be,
but I do think it's an imperfect metaphor.
Things are going to change, things are
going to deteriorate and something ultimately
maybe a representation of itself.
And that becomes, I think it's almost
sort of interesting philosophical conundrum,
and I'll just say one more thing.
Which is simply to observe that this notion
of authenticity also functions
slightly differently for people who are
interested in preserving data,
and making sure that the data itself
doesn't get corrupted. So in fact,
I think that lots of interesting layers
get added in here, that are worth
thinking about, but it's a great question.
Thank you.
(Audience) I wanted to point out that
the idea of the essential self which
would be captured in the portrait is rather
a naive notion or is at fault with the public
presentation of a person. Everybody knows
these people have private lives.
Everybody knows they did all sorts of things,
they were complex beings. And if you take
something like -- well, it doesn't take
new media to bring out the complications
in the first place. You know, the diaries
them-self are worth one avenue,
but the other thing is, photographic,
presentation as in for instance,
David Duncan spoke on Picasso
the private Picasso, he has this big
photographic record of Picasso
in the fifties, the forties and fifties,
and you get this much complication.
In fact, you get a whole lot more complications
there than you can get in your average
presentation, well, you know, the one
of [Gitzburg], for instance. You get
as much from David Duncan as you do
from the new media presentation.
And digitization doesn't actually change
anything so it's not quite that our notion
of a person's identity is modified by
the exposure of new media. The exposure
of new media is interesting if it's own right.
But it doesn't change the basic concepts
that we have of who we are,
what persons are, what vulnerabilities
and complications we have.
(Anne) I think that's such a great
observation and would be so much fun
to dig into that question with you,
I would submit, I would like for the sake
of argument maybe put forward the idea
that I really do think there are ways
in which we are developing new insights
in the present day about self on which
perhaps are giving us new tools
to go back and look at the past.
For example, the querying of the history
of art, for example. Not necessarily,
which is not to say that things were not
present previously that complicates
the picture, I think you are absolutely
right that there's always been
complexity with the human self.
But it is interesting to go back
and look at the language that
the artists use at least, in describing
their projects. Even somebody like
Alfred Stieglitz who was such
a perceptive and sophisticated photographer,
really looked for the essential moment
to capture somebody. And it's a language
but there's somehow I think, embedded
in that presumption of a privileged way
of understanding somebody. And yet of course
he did lots of different portraits of O'keeffe,
you can look at that series of portrait
presentations.
(Audience) I would not trust what an artist
says about his own project. It just isn't reliable.
It is self-promotional and --
(Anne) There's a narrative-reflective
paradigm but I loved -- I think your point
is an excellent one. I think you are
pervasing it.
(Host) We have time for two more,
and there's a few people who have been waiting.
So one there and then at the back.
(Audience) Dealing with authenticity,
how, whenever you are deciding
to migrate or provide forms for
current exhibition, how do you deal
with deterioration versus intent.
For example, in [Globagrew]
the artist manipulated the signal
to get different colors and distortion.
How do you know what's genuine
and how do you know what's real?
Especially with film, if it's a color film
and there's red shift, was that intended?
(Anne) Yeah, you know, the weird thing
is that you don't always know, actually.
There's a great piece at the [Hershorn]
by John -- no not John Jordan, um,
oh goodness, actually the artist's name
has just slipped my mind. But I'll get it
for you. There's this great film piece
by a very interesting artist who was
working in the seventies which is a film piece,
and there is sound that goes with it.
But there's a little bit of a hypothesis,
about how we think the artist wanted
that particular piece to be installed.
And the problem is there's an absence
of documentation. So actually,
one of the things that's really interesting
and this goes to, really actually, any
period of artwork that we really have to
rely very heavily upon an interpretive
framework. And so one other thing
we've been doing in terms of looking
at this question about some practices
is to think about what it means to
document the intention of the artist,
at the outside. And so for example
what we try to document now,
recognizing that this information can
very very quickly disappear, is, you know,
how does the artist want the piece to look
what it -- look when it's installed.
What is it supposed to sound like,
and of course inevitably even when
one tried to document these things
meticulously, we have to recognize that
there's inevitably going to be some slippage.
Even when you think you are being very
meticulous, things like processing
times, for computers can change.
And so I have to say that we do our best
to develop data that gives us as many
points of reference as possible,
but I think ultimately we have to recognize
that it is to a certain degree,
an imperfect science. We also something
called a Checksum value to try to
determine that the data moving forward
is kept in tack, but I think it's very
interesting that historically the --
in order to be sure that there are it,
problems for example, with the migration
of video into digital format, except
there's been curators, I mean,
[conservators], or probably curators too,
and certainly conservators who sit and look
intently at something to be sure that
there are no disruptions. We can't do that
with a generative work, so we've moved
beyond the point at which human perception
can really answer these questions for us.
And so I think on a certain level we have to
accept a certain degree of slippage,
and a certain degree of imperfection,
inability to completely nail something down,
and again, that is kind of a mind shift.
We've become comfortable with the fact
that we know everything will always be
something of an observation.
So I don't know if that --
(Audience) Those helped. Thank you.
(Host) So I'm afraid that we are out of time,
I'm sure Anne will be happy to stick around
if there are a couple of more questions,
but let's thank her for a really interesting clip.
Applause
(Anne) I can definitely stick around.
(Audience) What is a generative?
(Anne) Oh right, we started with this term of --
yeah, it's a relatively new term and it refers
to artwork that has no -- that doesn't loop.
That is continuously changing, so there is
code behind the image that leads to
ever-changing permutations of the way
in which the digital data is combined
and output. So there is no one instance
of the work. It's constantly changing.
One can describe the generative is --
(Audience) So a network piece,
is generative enough? It can
run on for a hundred years?
(Anne) Forever. And you'll see
ever-changing combinations.
(Audience) Yeah, maybe not very
interestingly different, but none the less.
(Anne) Yeah that's right, exactly.
You could just -- you did a pretty good job
describing it. Especially after fifty
or so minutes. Yeah.