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.