Museum Archipelago

While working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the pandemic, Dr. Morgan Rehnberg (https://www.morganrehnberg.com) recognized the institution's limited capacity to develop new digitals exhibits with the proprietary solutions that are common in big museums. This challenge led Rehnberg to start work on Exhibitera (https://exhibitera.org), a free, open-source suite of software tools tailored for museum exhibit control that took advantage of the touch screens and computers that the museum already had. Today, as Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Rehnberg continues to refine and expand Exhibitera, which he previously called Constellation. The software is crafted to enable institutions to independently create, manage, and update their interactive exhibits, even between infrequent retrofits. The overarching goal is to make sure that smaller museum’s aren’t “left in the 20th century” or reliant on costly bespoke interactive software solutions. Exhibitera is used in Fort Worth and Nashville and available to download. In this episode, Rehnberg shares his journey of creating Exhibitera to tackle his own issues, only to discover its broader applicability to numerous museums. Image: Screenshot from a gallery control panel in Exhibitera Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Computer Interactives in Museums 01:00 Dr. Morgan Rehnberg (https://www.morganrehnberg.com) 01:40 Rehnberg on Cassini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini–Huygens) 02:14 The Adventure Science Center in Nashville (https://www.adventuresci.org) 03:30 A Summary of Computers in Museums (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/103) 05:00 Solving Your Own Problems 06:30 Exhibitera (https://github.com/Cosmic-Chatter/Exhibitera) 07:45 “A classroom teacher should be able to create a museum exhibit” 08:30 Built-In Multi-Language Support 09:30 Open Source Exhibit Management (https://github.com/Cosmic-Chatter/Exhibitera) 10:30 Why Open Source? 12:30 Go Try Exhibitera for Your Museum (https://cosmicchatter.org/constellation/tutorials.html) 13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club/) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 105. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. I’ve spent most of my career building interactive exhibits for museums. These are all visitor-facing: touchscreens for pulling up information or playing games based on the science content, projection walls for displaying moving infographics, and digital signage for rotating through ticket prices or special events. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Well I think most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad. And I don't think that's because they were necessarily bad when they were first installed, but major exhibitions can last for 10, 15, 50 years, and it's often quite difficult to go back and retrofit and improve something like technology as time goes on. This is Dr. Morgan Rehnberg, Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville. Rehnberg offers that long-term maintenance is the reason most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad – and that is kindly letting us programmers off the hook for the other reasons why computer interactives can be bad. But I agree with him. When I build an interactive exhibit for a museum, I’m optimizing for opening day, and generally leave it up to the museum to maintain it for years after. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Hello, my name is Dr. Morgan Rehnberg and I'm the Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville. I actually started my journey in science. I did my PhD work in astronomy. And I worked as part of NASA's Cassini mission, which studied Saturn for many years. And it got to a point where we sort of dramatically crashed the spacecraft into Saturn. And I realized at that point that I was going to need to find something else to do. And kind of thinking back,I realized that I had been having more fun when talking about the work that we were doing than actually doing it. So I started to look and see how I could turn that into a career, and I ended up in Texas at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History and spent five lovely years there, including the time during the pandemic. And as the world started coming back,, I felt like it was time for a change of scenery and made the switch to Nashville. And I've been thrilled to be here at the Science Center for just under two years now. Like many science museums, we focus on families with young kids, full of hands-on exhibits, exploring all the areas of STEM. And we serve the public, we do field trips, we run summer camps, all the things that science museums do. But we do it with a team that's maybe a little bit smaller than you would have at some of the big museums, in cities like New York or San Francisco or Chicago. And that team size becomes relevant to the long-term maintenance of computer interactives. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Here in Nashville. We have touch screens that we installed in 2008 that still do everything that they did then, but what the world around them has done since 2008 has changed a lot. And so while the experience is the same as it always was, the expectations of visitors coming in are quite a bit different. On the back end, most of the computers running in museum galleries are general purpose computers, normal PCs running Linux or Windows. Similarly, the interactive exhibit software running on them are often built using game development engines like Adobe Flash or Unity. There are advantages and disadvantages to building on top of these platforms. On the one hand, museums get to benefit from the rapid iteration of consumer technology. On the other hand, these tools that were not designed for the museum environment, so there are all sorts of situations where you end up working at cross-purposes with your tools. A good example: any general purpose computing environment needs to have an easy way, in fact many easy ways, for a user to close an app. However, in a museum's touchscreen setup, you wouldn't want visitors to be able to close the exhibits, so you have to invent ways to prevent that .And every time Windows updates, you might have to do it all over again in a different way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out of a museum server room, satisfied with a job well-done, only to notice that a smart kid on the gallery floor has figured out how to close my interactive software and has pulled up a game of solitaire. And let me tell you – solitaire is the best case scenario. If that computer is connected to the internet, things can get a lot worse. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: I think a lot of us who work in medium or larger museums forget that by number, the vast majority of museums in this country or anywhere in the world have staffs of one or two or three and have budgets measured in, you know, thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars. Those places are never going to be able to afford the sorts of bespoke custom software that you might see at Boston Museum of Science. They're just never going to have that. But they shouldn't be left in the 20th century of all we've learned about the value of interactivity in museums. So while working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the covid pandemic, Rehnberg started looking for a solution. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: As I was looking at sort of this big idea of what could be a piece of software that would solve all my problems.I started looking at that and sort of subdividing those problems. And one category of problem was wanting to have new touch sensitive, visitor facing things. And I didn't have the money during the pandemic to hire a vendor to redo all the things everywhere. The second piece of it was how can I, with greatly reduced exhibit technician staff, manage all of these things with the least amount of effort. Because I know if I have one tech who needs to cover the whole building, they can't spend a bunch of time debugging a thing after a visitor has smashed the screen 50,000 times and frozen the computer. Those two parallel ideas have lent themselves to the structure of Constellation. Constellation is the name of the free and open source exhibit control software that Rehnberg developed. Today, he calls it Exhibitera, but you still might catch him referring to it by its old name. And those two parallel ideas have turned into a suite of tools that a museum can use to build their own inter

The Murney Tower Museum (https://www.murneytower.com) in Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a small museum. Open for only four months of the year and featuring only one full-time staff member, the museum is representative of the many small institutions that make up the majority of museums. With only a fraction of the resources of large institutions, this long tail distribution of small museums offers the full range of museum services: collection management, public programs, and curated exhibits. Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor (https://linktr.ee/simgeerdogan) has dedicated her studies to understanding the unique dynamics and challenges faced by small museums, and is also the Murney Tower Museum’s sole full-time employee. In this episode, Dr. Erdogan-O'Connor describes the operation of The Murney Tower Museum, discusses the economic models of small museums, and muses on what small museums can teach larger ones. Image: Murney Tower Museum Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Understanding the Landscape of Small Museums 02:38 Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor (https://linktr.ee/simgeerdogan) 03:00 Murney Tower Museum (https://www.murneytower.com/) 08:29 Overcoming Challenges with Digital Solutions 09:46 What Big Institutions Can Learn from Small Museums 09:54 The Power of Local Connections in Small Museums 13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 104. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. Let’s say you sorted every museum on earth in order by the number of yearly visitors. At one end, with yearly visitor numbers in the millions, would be large, recognizable institutions – places like the British Museum in London. There’s a cluster of these big institutions, but as you go further along the ordered list of museums, the visitor numbers start to drop. At some point during these declining visitor numbers, you reach small museums. Exactly where in the order you first reach a small museum doesn’t really matter – one definition of small museums from the American Association of State and Local History is simply: “If you think you’re small, you’re small.” You could do the same sort by number of staff members or by operating budget – the effect would be more or less the same. The point is that once you reach the threshold where small museums begin, you still have the vast, vast majority of museums to go. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: You just realize how many small museums are there in the world. Unbelievable numbers, right? They're everywhere and they hold such an important space in local cultural landscapes. Even if I dare to say more than large institutions. The sorting exercise illustrates a long tail effect – each small museum, while attracting fewer visitors individually, collectively hosts an enormous number of visitors. There’s just so many of them. The long tail effect was coined in 2004 to describe economics on the internet: the new ability to serve a large number of niches in relatively small quantities, as opposed to only being able to serve a small number of very popular niches. But unlike the economics of the internet, where distribution costs are minimal, small museums face the challenge of fulfilling nearly all the responsibilities of larger museums without any of the benefits of scale. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: What fascinates me most about small museums is despite being so small, they offer almost everything you can find in a large museum, Ian. So do they have collections and do collection management and care? Yes. Do they curate exhibitions? Yes. Do they offer public programs? Yes. Do they organize special events and do marketing and digital engagements? Yes. They make these things happen. This is Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor, who studies small museums in her academic practice, and works at one. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: Hello, my name is Simge Erdogan-O'Connor. I am a museum scholar and professional, currently working as museum manager at a local history museum called the Murney Tower Museum located in Kingston, Canada. Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a city of about 150,000 people and the Murney Tower Museum is Kingston’s oldest museum. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: It will turn 100 years old next year. The museum itself is based in a 19th century military fortification, which was built by the British government as a response to a territorial dispute between England at the time and the United States. And the building itself is called Murney Tower. So the museum, taking its name from that building, but also being based in this building, is very much about that history. Why this building was constructed, what's its relationship to broader Canadian, British, American relationships in the 19th century, but at the same time, the museum is very much about the local history of Kingston as well so we are very local in our focus. No matter how you define a small museum, Murney Tower is a small museum. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: We hold about 1300 objects in our collection and we are seasonal. We are only open to the public from the end of May through September. And I'm the only full time staff member that the museum has, which can also show, I think, many people what small museums are in terms of operational capacity. And then we almost entirely rely on volunteers, interns, and seasonal staff members that we hire in the summer. Ian Elsner: Right, I was going to make a joke about your, your staff meetings being super quick, but I guess you do have to have meetings nevertheless. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: But sometimes I make a joke about that too Ian, meaning, yes, of course, we have board meetings, I constantly have interns, every semester through universities, and in the summer I have three full time staff members. Regardless, sometimes I'm like, I'm the gatekeeper, I am the security guard, I clean the museum, I run the museum, right? I do all of these cool things, like I write the strategic plan, but then there are times that I'm on call waiting for a maintenance person to come to the museum and I just need to be there to open doors to him. Ian Elsner: I can already see the challenge of having one person do all of those things that you described, but what are some of the other challenges of a small institution or your small institution specifically? Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: Simply because a big part of Ian, my professional, academic, personal life is concerned with this question of challenges, right? Whether understanding those challenges or finding solutions to those challenges. All my colleagues mention in any conversation that are very common to museums worldwide, big or small, and these challenges certainly affect my own institution as well, like the challenges of colonial and elitist legacies of museums, issues of reconciliation, repatriation, or funding limitations, or reliance on government funding, or contemporary challenges like COVID 19. So all of these challenges that are very much common in the museum world. But then when I look at his lens of small museums a little bit further, I identify in two major challenges that are much more specific to small museums. The first one is limited staff resources. I know I already mentioned that, but I still want to explain that a little bit further. While you have 40, 50, or hundreds of people doing these things in a large museum, you have only, like in my case, one or two people carrying out very similar activities in a small museum. This is a huge challenge because, yes, you can maybe carry these out in some form and capacity, with several people. But how can you make these activities really effective and impactful, with only a few people? This is a very important challenge that does not exist in large institutions. And there is a second challenge related to this, is what I refer in my own practice as this incapability mindset. And I found myself in this mindset when I started my work in a small museum four and a half years ago, it took a while for me to get out of this way of thinking. This limitation creates a mindset both in the institution as an institutional mindset but a mindset also in staff members and team members that's very much based on incapability. So you find yourself being almost conditioned, Ian, inherently to think small. Right? And this way of small thinking poses such a huge challenge to actual capacity of these small museums to grow and to make something meaningful. And, for example, you want to create a new website. You ha

Computing work keeps museums running, but it’s largely invisible. That is, unless something goes wrong. For Dr. Paul Marty (https://marty.cci.fsu.edu/), Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University and his colleague Kathy Jones (https://extension.harvard.edu/faculty/katherine-burton-jones/), Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School, shining a light on the behind-the-scenes activities of museum technology workers was one of the main reasons to start the Oral Histories of Museum Computing project (https://ohmc.cci.fsu.edu/). The first museum technology conference (https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/204737/) was hosted in 1968 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This prescient event, titled “Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums” was mostly focused on the cutting edge: better inventory management systems using computers instead of paper methods. However, it also foresaw the transformative impact of computers on museums—from digital artifacts to creating interactive exhibits to expanding audience reach beyond physical boundaries. Most of all, speakers understood that museum technologists would need to “join forces” with each other to learn and experiment better ways to use computers in museum settings. The Oral Histories of Museum Computing project collects the stories of what happened since that first museum technology conference, identifying the key historical themes, trends, and people behind the machines behind the museums. In this episode, Paul Marty and Kathy Jones describe their experience as museum technology professionals, the importance of conferences like the Museum Computer Network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_Computer_Network), and the benefits of compiling and sharing these oral histories. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums (https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/204737/) 00:43 Thomas P. F. Hoving Closing Statements (https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/204737/) 01:41 Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University (https://marty.cci.fsu.edu) 02:11 Kathy Jones, Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School (https://extension.harvard.edu/faculty/katherine-burton-jones/) 02:18 Museum Computing from There to Here 04:08 The First Steps of Museum Computing 04:52 Early Challenges in Museum Databases Like GRIPHOS 07:00 Changing Field, Changing Profession 08:48 The Oral Histories of Museum Computing Project (https://ohmc.cci.fsu.edu) 11:32 Reflecting on the Journey of Museum Technology 14:12 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 103. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript On April 17th, 1968, less than two weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the first computer museum conference was coming to a close at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This conference was hosted by the recently-formed Museum Computer Network, and had a hopeful, descriptive title: A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums. At the closing dinner, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas P. F. Hoving acknowledged that “for some these three days have an unsettling effect” and that “these machines are going to put us on our toes as never before” but summarized, “the whole idea of a computer network is generating momentum, and is forcing upon museums the necessity of joining forces, pooling talents, individual resources, and strengths.” Paul Marty: When I tell students that there is a group that has been meeting annually since 1968 to discuss problems related to the use of computers and museums, they find that hard to believe. That seems like a long time ago, and I guess it is a long time ago. But museums were always on the cutting edge of trying to figure out how to use this technology. Maybe not everybody was on board, but there was always somebody who was pushing that story forward. This is Paul Marty, whose work focuses on the interactions that take place between people, information, and technology in museums. Paul Marty: Hello, I'm Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University. Professor Marty, along with his colleague Kathy Jones, are collecting stories of the people behind the computers behind the museums as part of their Oral Histories of Museum Computing project. A selection of stories from the project will be published as a book. Kathy Jones: Hello, my name is Kathy Jones, and I'm the Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School. The key question that both Jones and Marty want to answer is how did we go from there to here? Paul Marty: How did we go from a world where curators were saying there will never be a computer screen in our galleries, to a world where when you're setting up a new exhibit the first thing you ask is where should we put the iPads? How do we go from a world where we will never share digital images of our collection on the internet to a world where there are hundreds of millions of open access images in the public domain on the internet by museums? To answer that question, Jones and Marty looked to their own experiences going to the many museum computer conferences that came after. But they both underscore how remarkably prescient that first meeting proved to be. Kathy Jones: That first Museum Computer Network meeting I just want to emphasize the importance of meetings, even that early and now of bringing new ideas to the field. everything evolved based on the technologies that we had at hand. And museums weren't the first to adopt something like a scanner or to do multimedia, but as soon as we saw the possibilities, we certainly began to do that. Paul Marty: I actually just pulled up the table of contents for the conference proceedings for the very first Museum Computer Network Conference. And, there were a lot of papers in there sort of predicting what the future of computers in museums were going to be. And of course most of them were focused on inventory control and this. But there were also people talking about computer graphics and what that was like at the time. J. C. R. Licklider who is the the founder of ARPANET, which is , the original backbone of the internet, was there and spoke about the current state of computer graphics technology in the late 1960s, and , he was predicting a world where there would be digital images of museum artifacts, where people could have an interactive art museum where you would use digital computer images of artifacts. And it took a while for us to get there, but it's wonderful that people were thinking that far ahead in the 1960s. Computers first entered museums as a form of inventory management. Edward F. Fry summarizes in his 1970 review of that first conference, “the rapid increase in the size of museum collections in the United States has in fact reached such a point in many instances that a more efficient means of cataloging than that of the standard index card file has become a desperate necessity.” Paul Marty: Remember the final scene at the end of Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? So many of the Smithsonian warehouses look exactly like that and it's really easy to see how things could get lost there for a very long period of time. You have more stuff than you have staff and time to deal with. The early inventory management systems were limited to only a few variables and lots of manual work, as Kathy Jones learned when she started her career at the Florida Department of State. Kathy Jones: I worked on a mainframe computer to be what they called the keeper of the Florida master site file. That was a large database, or is, that keeps track of all of the archaeological sites and historical properties in the state of Florida. Kathy Jones: It was a database called GRIPHOS, and it was used by archaeological groups, the State Historic Preservation Office. There was nothing visual about it, not even images or things like that. It was hardly relational, and every field was just about 80 characters. I mean, this is so long ago, Ian, that we had to use punch cards to do the data entry and then have them read per computer in batch form. Pretty archaic. GRIPHOS stood for General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies – I can’t get enough of the direct naming conventions of this early computer history – and it was actually

On Berlin’s Museum Island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_Island), four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum (https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/pergamonmuseum/home/). Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE in Samʼal (Zincirli) in southern Turkey. And one is a plaster copy made a little over 100 years ago. Pergamon Museum curator Pinar Durgun (https://alexandriaarchive.org/2021/06/24/learning-with-digital-representations/) has heard a range of negative visitor reactions to this copy — from disappointment to feeling tricked — and engages visitors to think more deeply about copies. As an archeologist and art historian, Durgun is fascinated (https://hyperallergic.com/681211/before-3d-prints-there-were-plaster-copies/) by the cultural attitude and history of copies: the stories they tell about their creators’ values, how they can be used to keep original objects in situ, and their role in repatriation or restitution cases. In this episode, Durgun describes the ways that museum visitors’ perception of authenticity has changed over time, how replicas jump-started museum collections in the late 19th-century, and some of the ethical implications of copies in museums. Image: Reconstructed Lion Sculpture Sam'al near modern Zincirli Höyük, Turkey 10th-8th century BCE by Mary Harrsch (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mharrsch/) Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Sam’al/Zincirli Lions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam%27al_lions) 01:09 Pinar Durgun 01:22 Museum Island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_Island) 01:40 Find Divison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partage) 02:28 Gipsformerei (https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2022/04/plaster-reproductions-berlin-state-museum/) 03:12 Replicas Jump-Started Museum Collections 04:35 Trending Away from Copies 05:27 When Visitors Feel Tricked 06:00 When Visitors Are Okay With Copies 07:28 Ancient Cultural Contexts About Copies 08:07 Hokusai’s Great Wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa) 08:35 “Immersive Experiences” Made Up of Digital Copies (https://vangoghexpo.com) 09:08 Digital Copies 12:39 Museum Archipelago 97. Richard Nixon Hoped to Never Say These Words about Apollo 11. In A New Exhibit, He Does. (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/97) 13:32 How Should Museums Present Copies in Their Collections? 14:36 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 102. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. On the Museum Island in Berlin, four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum. Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE. And one is a plaster copy carved a bit over 100 years ago. Pinar Durgun:  When you see these lions, you cannot tell the difference which one is a copy, which one is original. And lately, curator Pinar Durgun has been wondering how visitors feel about that copy. Pinar Durgun: But when I tell visitors, this one is a copy. So how do you feel about that? How do you feel about a copy being here? Do you feel like you've been tricked? Pinar Durgun: And if I ask a question like this, they say yes. They say, I don't like copies. Durgun works at the Pergamon Museum, where those Gate lions from Samʼal are now perched -- well, some of them. Pinar Durgun: My name is Pinar Durgun. I'm an archeologist and art historian, currently working at the Pergamon Museum as a curator. Pinar Durgun: We're on the Museum Island. And it's funny because you always say museums are not islands, but we are literally on the Museum Island, one of the five museums on the museum island, but they're all kind of interconnected, I would say. Ian Elsner: That's terrific. They're in their own little archipelago. Pinar Durgun: Yeah, exactly. The Gate lions from Sam’al, also known as Zincirli in Southern Turkey, were excavated in the early 1890s and came to Berlin through a colonial-era practice called Find Division, which was a system to divide up ownership of excavated artifacts. Pinar Durgun: So during the Ottoman period when excavations were happening, so for instance, Germans or other foreigners were excavating in the Ottoman Empire, there were some agreements between the Sultan and the Kaiser here in Germany. So they were basically dividing objects that they were finding, and half of them would come here and half of them would stay in Istanbul. Of course, the extent to which this division was carefully adhered to depended on the local and international power dynamics, so in many cases it was more than half. But when an original artifact was to remain in the Ottoman Empire, the excavators would use a molding shop to make a copy. Pinar Durgun: The Berlin State Museums has its own plaster workshop called Gipsformerei. And this is a very old institution. I think it's one of the oldest in the world. It's 200 years old and the people who work at the Gipsformerei create these copies that look almost exactly like the originals. Pinar Durgun: And they take pride in creating copies that are skillfully made, skillfully prepared. So it is difficult to distinguish between originals and copies. The late 19th century was a time when the modern museum was taking shape, and institutions all around the world were seeking to fill collections. And copies, particularly paster copies from skilled molding shops like Gipsformerei made that possible. Pinar Durgun: So this interest in having ancient objects in museums or in university collections was growing as an idea based on education basically. So you would acquire a copy for your art school, let's say, and then people who could draw these Roman or Greek statues that they would otherwise never see. Now we can travel and see these statues, but think about a time when you could not do that, where you could not go see the statue of David whenever you wanted to, or you couldn't Google a picture of it. Canonical highlights or quote unquote masterpieces were being distributed around the world in universities, museums, and schools. Pinar Durgun: And this is a time where museums were basically coming to being, right? They were being formed. So a lot of the collections were built through these copies. The Metropolitan Museum, for instance, bought a lot of copies. The idea behind acquiring these copies was to allow museums like the MET to showcase a “survey of art history” for the interested public, more like a textbook. And many museums still follow this model. Pinar Durgun: Science museums, natural history museums we're so used to seeing reconstructions or copies of things or for instance, things that are like blown out of scale. It's a copy. It's not an original, but it communicates information that you cannot otherwise communicate. So people are on board with those things. But during the 20th century, many history museums trended away from showcasing copies. Museums that built up collections based on copies started giving the copies away to smaller collections or smaller universities as the perceived value of a copy waned and the cultural aura around an original increased. As Durgun says, the visitor's attitude of feeling tricked when presented with a copy might have something to do with the shift – but even that is not clear. Pinar Durgun: There was a recent survey, I think it was 2020 that they did in maybe nine German museums to see how visitors react to copies. And it was very mixed. There was no solid conclusion that people don't like copies or people like copies. It's very much context dependent and how you present information. Pinar Durgun: The only thing that they don't like is being tricked, and I think that's also a challenge for us curators. How do you make people feel like they're not being tricked, and how do you signal that this is a copy? But it’s not like the lion is trying to hide the fact that’s it's a copy. The label on the plaster copy clearly indicates that it is a copy. So if a visitor is feeling tricked, that feeling might be based on a visitor's expectations of what they might see when they enter a museum. Of course, museums are responsible for setting those expectations. Pinar Durgun: When I say for instance, think about a copy of an object that is lost during the war. Because this also happened, right? Some of the Berlin museums got destroyed during World War II. Some

Since it opened in 1981 to celebrate the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha has centered the visitor experience. Every detail and sightline of the enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future – a kind of alternate Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration. But after communism fell in 1989, Buzludzha was abandoned. It was exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures, and raided for scrap. Buzludzha has been a ruin far longer than it was a functional building, and in recent years the building has been close to collapse. Preventing this was the initial goal of Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova and the Buzludzha Project, which she founded in 2015. Since then, Ivanova and her team have been working to recruit international conservators, stabilize the building, and fundraise for its preservation. But Ivanova realized that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first step of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures. In this episode, we journey to Buzludzha, where Ivanova gives us hard hats and takes us inside the building for the first time. We retrace the original visitor experience, dive deep into various visions for transforming Buzludzha into an immersive museum, and discuss how the building will be used as a storytelling platform. Image: Dora Ivanova by Nikolay Doychinov Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience. 01:00 “A Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains” 02:40 The Original Visitor Experience (http://www.buzludzha-project.com/news/2021/5/17/konferencia-vdeistvie) 03:02 Dora Ivanova (http://www.buzludzha-project.com) 03:15 Museum Archipelago Episode 47 (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/47) 03:35 Entering the Building 04:25 How to Stabilize the Roof 05:58 New respect for the Buzludzha thieves 06:25 The Inner Mosaics (http://www.buzludzha-project.com/history) 07:26 Narrated Light and Sound Show (http://www.buzludzha-project.com/news/buzludzha-awarded-second-grant) 08:25 Moving from Preservation to Interpretation 09:34 Ivanova’s New Motivation 10:20 Buzludzha as a Storytelling Platform 11:10 How Buzludzha Was Built 12:30 Acting before memory becomes history 13:00 Buzludzha’s fate as a binary 14:05 The Panoramic Corridor (http://www.buzludzha-project.com/news/2018/9/26/european-experts-to-visit-buzludzha) 15:00 The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society 16:02 Some Personal Thoughts about a future Buzludzha Museum 17:20 The preservation as proof of change 18:05 “Buzludzha is about change” 19:15 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 101. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience. Opened in 1981 to celebrate the grandeur of the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha is an imposing building, an enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria. Rising out of the back of the disk is a tower, 70 meters high, and flanked by two red stars. Dora Ivanova: It was built to impress. It was built as part of the political propaganda and education as they called it during this time. Its shape looks like a UFO, actually. This is also on purpose because it had to show how the socialist idea is contemporary, it’s the future. Visiting the site, you can still see the care that went into the sightlines – the approach from a winding mountain road, the drama the first time the building comes into view, the photo opportunities of the still-distant building flanked by smaller sculptures. There’s an eerie similarity to some well-designed corners of Disney theme parks, using scale and space and sightlines to transport the visitor – a Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. But the original visitor experience didn’t end outside the building. In those first years during communism, the building received tour groups by bus every four hours. Visitors entered Buzludzha through the front doors underneath the cantilever of the disk. Once inside, they were led up the stairs and into the belly of the building, which makes up an impressive amphitheater surrounded by colorful mosaics of Marx and Lenin, and a variety of Bulgarian communist leaders. At the center of the domed ceiling is a hammer and sickle mosaic whose tiles spell out the words, “Workers of all nations, unite!” But visitors haven’t been able to officially enter Buzludzha for many years. Those front doors are locked and grated with metal bars – the worn concrete covered and covered again in graffiti, like the words “Enjoy Communism” written in the style of the Coca Cola logo and the all caps motto “forget your past”. I’ve visited Buzludzha many times over the past few years, but I’ve never been inside. Until now. Dora Ivanova: In the beginning it was open to everybody, but we had to register in before. So it was not open to individual tourism. It was open just to groups who had registered before like a school was coming to visit or the local factories coming and seeing the monument. People will come here and then , they'll go first down the staircase to leave their coats and bags, so you cannot go with them up. And then you'll put something on your shoes because you cannot go on the bright, perfect white marble with your dirty shoes from outside. This is Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova, founder of the Buzludzha Project. When I first met her in 2018 – and presented her story on episode 47 of Museum Archipelago – she was working on a proposal to save this monumental building. But since then, the scope of her work has increased significantly. Today, after more than three years of work recruiting international conservators, stabilizing the building, and basically running a fundraising and PR campaign for the monument, Ivanova hands me a hardhat, unlocks the grate, and leads me inside. Dora Ivanova: click “And be very careful with the staircase and that you don't fall somewhere.” Because there’s no perfect bright white marble underneath visitors' feet anymore. After communism collapsed in Bulgaria in 1989, Buzludzha just sat there, exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures. The regime changed, Bulgaria headed towards a democratic form of government, and people started stealing anything they could from Buzludzha – the glass from the windows and from the red stars, the copper roof and marble sculptures which were sold for scrap, and the perfect white marble perhaps used in a bathroom remodel. Ian Elsner: Buzludzha bathroom! Dora Ivanova: Yeah, many people have it, I’m sure. Buzludzha has been a ruin way longer than it was a functional building and that’s why Ivanova and her team's efforts have been focused on stabilization. Dora Ivanova: As I was walking on the roof, I was thinking, it's like a very ill person who can still get better. And can still be saved and it can still function. And I think if we started this whole initiative like five years later or 10 years later, there'll be very little less of the building to protect. Protecting the building is a complex process, which requires a lot of coordination between technicians, and a deep understanding of the structure. Ivanova jokes that she used to think saving Buzludzha would take just a month of hard work. Dora Ivanova: At the beginning I was thinking, okay, this month I didn't manage to save the building, but next month I'll save it! laughs Today, the blue sky is clearly visible through the roof of the amphitheater, sunlight streaming through the scaffolding erected to preserve the hammer and sickle mosaic on the ceiling. It’s only now that we can safely walk around with hard hats. Dora Ivanova: So metal sheets like this will fall down and a big pieces of wood like, like this there and bigger will fall. And this is why, on the first place, this building is not safe for visitors because anytime something can fall down, and that's why our task was to, we're thinking could take down only what is needed, but it turned out that everything is unst

In the early days of this podcast, every time I searched for Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top result would be a small museum in rural Finland called the Archipelago Museum. As my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. Instead, I wondered what they were up to. What were the exhibits about? Did they ever come across my podcast? Were they annoyed by my similar name? And while the museum had a website and a map, there was no way to directly contact them. Years went by as the realization sank in—the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview. So, for this very special 100th episode, I went to Finland and and visited the Rönnäs Archipelago Museum. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Why is Ian in Finland? 00:45 Museum Archipelago's Early Days 01:30 Same Name 03:14 Arriving at the Archipelago Museum 04:05 Naomi Nordstedti 04:30 Life on the Archipelago 06:04 Opening the Museum 06:54 Boats 07:55 The Archipelago During Prohibition 08:28 Thoughts About 100 Episodes 10:40 Thanks For Listening 10:54 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 100. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. This is episode 100 of Museum Archipelago, and I’m in a rental car 80 kilometers outside of Helsinki, Finland looking for a museum. Field Audio - GPS: “In 400 meters, turn left onto the ramp”. Field Audio - Ian: “I think… I can feel we are close to the Gulf of Finland” But not just any museum. I’m deep in rural Finland because of the name of this podcast: Museum Archipelago. Field Audio - Ian: “You know, I hope the museum has a bathroom…” When I was starting this project and choosing a name, I hoped to create an audio lens to look at museums as a medium, and to critically examine museums as a whole. If no museum was an island, I reasoned, why not name the show after another geographic feature – a collection of islands? And I enjoyed the symmetry with Gulag Archipelago – just a slight sinister undertone that this won’t be a fluffy museum podcast. And when I came across the quote by philosopher Édouard Glissant, “I imagine the museum as an archipelago”, the name stuck. Museum Archipelago was snappy and a great name for a podcast – there was just one problem: the Archipelago Museum, located somewhere in Finland. Field Audio - Ian: “Ah, I see a sign for the museum, but I can't pronounce it – ” Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left” For the first 20 or so episodes of the show, every time you searched the words Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top results would be about the Archipelago Museum in Finland, instead of my podcast. It didn’t really bother me – well maybe a little – but no, it didn’t really bother me. Archipelago is a great word, and the museum was all the way in Finland, and it certainly was around for longer. But as my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. I would wonder what they were up to. I wondered if they had heard of my podcast. Maybe they came across it one day? Maybe I was annoying them with my similar name. Every few months, I would think to contact the museum, to highlight the similarity and hopefully make a new friend – only to remember that they didn’t have an email address. An old email address, from an archived version of their website, bounced back with an undeliverable error. The more I thought about it, the more it sank in: the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview. A few years later, with help from those of you who have supported the show through Club Archipelago, visiting the museum finally became possible. I decided to hop on two planes, book a rental car, spend a night in an airport hotel in Helsinki, drive down the coast, and visit the Archipelago Museum in person. Even if there was nobody there willing to talk to me, it would still make for an interesting 100th episode. Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left. Then your destination will be on the right.” Field Audio - Ian: All right. This is the Archipelago Museum. Field Audio - GPS: “Your destination is on the right.” Field Audio - Ian: “ Wow. I think it's open and I see a WC sign! Okay, I'm gonna park where it says parking. The Archipelago Museum is a long, old stone barn on the Gulf of Finland that’s packed full of boats. Field Audio - Ian : *walking over stones” Field Audio - Ian: “How are you?” Field Audio - Naomi: I'm fine, thank you. How are you? Welcome. Field Audio - Ian: “I’m very good, thank you! I would love to visit the museum. One ticket, please.” Field Audio - Naomi: Yes, you are welcome. That’s 5 euros. With card or cash? This is Naomi. Naomi Nordstedt: “Hi, my name is Naomi and I work at the Skärgårdsmuseet Rönnäs [Rönnäs Archipelago Museum]. So as the cashier, guide, whatever.” Naomi told me that the museum usually gets one or two visitors from the US every summer. Naomi Nordstedti: How did you find us? Or like how did you, how did you come to Finland of all places? Field Audio - Ian: “Well, to visit this museum!” Naomi Nordstedti: Oh wow! The Archipelago Museum tells the human story of life on the archipelago off the coast of Finland. The main area of the exhibition underscores the centrality of surviving among the remote islands by fishing, seal hunting, and cattle breeding. The main idea is Naomi Nordstedti: To see how people lived within the archipelago and like how the archipelago has sustained the people, while the people sustain the archipelago. The sea is very important. That's the most important thing. And it, since it's very like the people who live here live very scattered cuz it's a bit remote. We have couple neighbors, but then to one side there's nothing but forest for like kilometers. So you become closer with the people who live close by. Sometimes you have to go a bit further to meet. And that becomes also part of like, you meet up with bigger groups of people a couple times a year because you know, you might not see them that much otherwise. And also just as a side point, most people here have a boat. Most people sail. That's just a thing. You do that here. People have been making this part of the archipelago their home for 500 years, and the reasons always come back to geography. Naomi Nordstedti: We know there's been a medieval village here since the 13th century. Over here, there used to be an inland lake. This is all, there's no water over here now. And so like the water line is over here. Which means that there used to be back in 1414 or 1421, there have been records that people used to live here and this used to be like a bigger, for that time, bigger town, because this made it possible for commerce to happen way more since this led to the sea. The medieval village disappeared and over the centuries, various families lived in the area, surviving, using boats, and building barns. By the mid 1970s, the stone barn we’re in now sat abandoned. Naomi Nordstedti: This building was left and it was like, nobody owns it. Nobody was like, just kind of living in it. It's a beautiful building. So then it was just decided that a lot of people like around here were like, well, what should we do with this building? It's a beautiful building. It's a shame to just let it go to waste. So this is the guy who was like, hey, should we start a museum? Cuz he made boats. And they were like, yeah. There was a lot of, support from the local community and from the other people. 1985 is when we opened. There's a lot of beautiful things there and so much history that isn't really known about.It's only known about like from families and within families, and they tell the stories. So it's nice that other people get to see too. As the museum’s brochure says, “the boat occupies the central position in being the prime tool of the population.” Naomi Nordstedti: There is information about how to build boats, how boats have been built throughout the centuries, and our collection of the working boats that have been used here in the archipelago. Most of the stories that the local community tells about the archipelago are indeed told through boats – school boats, the differences between the boats that year-rounders used compared with the pe

The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games, so it lets them. The artifacts are fully-playable video games, from early arcade classics like PacMac to modern console and PC games, all with original hardware and controllers. By putting video games in a museum space, the Computer Games Museum invites visitors to become players. But, players can become visitors too. Video games have been inviting players into museum spaces for decades. In the mid 1990s, interaction designer Joe Kalicki remembers playing PacMan in another museum – only this one was inside a video game. In Namco Museum, players navigated a 3D museum space to access the games, elevating them to a high-culture setting. Since then, museums and their cultural shorthands have been a part of the video game landscape, implicitly inviting their players-turned-visitors to think critically about museums in the process. In this episode, Kalicki presents mainstream and indie examples of video games with museums inside them: from Animal Crossing’s village museum to Museum of Memories, which provides a virtual place for objects of sentimental value, to Occupy White Walls where players construct a museum, fill it with art – then invite others to come inside. Image: The Computer Games Museum in Berlin by Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0) Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Computerspielemuseum Berlin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computerspielemuseum_Berlin) 01:23 Joe Kalicki (https://panoply.space/) 02:06 Namco Museum (https://youtu.be/y1rvBhJtmkY) 03:42 Digital Museum Spaces Elevating Video Games 04:26 Museum of Memories by Kate Smith (https://katesmith.itch.io/museum-of-memories) 05:25 Occupy White Walls (https://www.oww.io/) 07:18 Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88xjcvPKLJk) 10:11 Animal Crossing 11:29 Video Game Engines In Museums 12:44 Joe Kalicki’s new podcast, Panoply (https://panoply.space/) 13:13 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉 (https://museumarchipelago.com/party) 13:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 99. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games. The central interpretive throughline, called Milestones, presents a timeline of the rapid development of the video game industry through 50 individual games: from Spacewar!, developed in 1962 at MIT to the latest console and PC games. But nearby, tucked into corners and side rooms, visitors are invited to play many of these games on their original hardware with original controllers. The museum even goes so far as to emulate the spaces in which people would have been playing these games their year of their release: games like Asteroids or Space Invaders are presented in a full arcade-like environment, early home computer games like Oregon Trail live inside your parents home office, while the home-console classics like Super Mario Bothers are in a space made to look like a basement in an early 90s suburban home in the U.S. So you can play a Japanese video game in an American home inside a German museum — but what about putting a museum in a video game? Joe Kalicki: I think we're in a very important place right now where we need to assess the value of fully digital educational experiences in the context of the museum. But particularly I also wanna explore the value for educating everyday people on how to appreciate and interact with brick and mortar museums as well. This is interaction designer Joe Kalicki. Joe Kalicki: Hello, my name is Joe Kalicki. I'm an interaction designer, musician, and podcaster. Kalicki remembers the first time he encountered a museum-like space in a video game. Joe Kalicki: In the late nineties, the Namco company published a series of games called Namco Museum, and this was earnestly the first attempt to create mainstream historical documentation for video games and it’s a very pivotal example for me in thinking about digital museum spaces. Namco Museum was a digital version of the Computer Games Museum, but all the video games presented in the collection, like PacMan and Dig Dug, were originally made for Namco arcades. Joe Kalicki: They actually had a fully 3D-rendered museum space. You would walk into the front, into the atrium where a receptionist would greet you. And then you would walk into the main hall and go into the specific wing of the gallery for a particular game. And you would walk around this space and you could do things like view concept art for the game or view documents and artifacts related to the game. Joe Kalicki: And then of course you could go on and you could play the game. There was theming in each of the wings to represent something about the game itself. And as a, I guess I was probably six or seven when I played this, this was mind blowing to me. Not only was this game taking the time to put me into a place and contextualize these games that I was playing, it provided so much more value and actually frankly, kickstarted me really deeply caring about the history of video games and the history of these things that I was interacting with rather than just hopping in and playing a round of Dig Dug, and then turning it off. Playing Namco Museum today, it’s easy to see the match between a museum space and the video game technology of the 1990s. White gallery walls are easy to render, and navigating through sparse 3D rooms and hallways is a prerequisite for any first-person shooter game. And white walls with the occasional object is all it takes to read as “museum” and – as we talk a lot about on this show – “museum” conjures up a whole lot of cultural signifiers about how we should treat the information and objects presented. The fact that Namco Museum decided to present its games in a virtual gallery space was a way to signal that these video games were important – a statement that these games were worth engaging with like historic or artistic object. A 2021 project by game designer and programming instructor Kate Smith called Museum of Memories delibrary employs a gallery space to signal important objects. Joe Kalicki: Kate Smith and a couple other developers created Museum of Memories as a project for a game jam. She had an open invitation to send in an item that people cared about. Send in an audio recording of yourself saying why you care about it. And then she put together a very straightforward museum space: classic pedestals and wall mounts and whatnot. Joe Kalicki: And somebody would send in a reference photo or, so a cookbook, for example, and Kate and her team would create a 3D version of that item, put it on display and you can listen to why these objects are meaningful to the people that submitted them. Then there are experiences that invite the player to create their own museum space – not just contributing objects and stories. Kalicki points to Occupy White Walls, where people construct a museum and fill it with art – then invite other players to come inside. Joe Kalicki: It's a free-to-play game that was released a couple years ago and essentially you are dropped onto a plot of land and you have a building and it's kind of a rinky dink little art gallery, and you can essentially remodel it and take art that either people have uploaded into the game or exists in the public domain. And you can essentially decorate and design your space. And you could totally build a bunch of white walls and throw things up that you like. Joe Kalicki: You can do it as densely or sparsely as you like. You can create sort of fantastical spaces and then present the work that you're placing into the 3D space in a way that pleases you, or maybe you want to create some sort of lack of harmony, and dissonance and you know, freak people out. And the really cool thing about the game is that you can hop into other people's galleries and you can go take a look. Joe Kalicki: And I checked it out last night, for example, and I teleported to somebody's gallery and there were five or six other real people walking around and looking at things and chatting about the art. And the cool thing about it too, is there would be,something that I would've formally a piece of art that I would've associated with a Tumblr or a Deviant Art back in the day next to a Caravaggio or other Renaissance classics and whatnot. In the same way that Roller Coaster Tycoon – a video game fro

When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned about the Panama Canal in school told a narrow story about the engineering feat of the Canal’s construction by the United States. This public history reflected the politics of Panama and control over the Canal. Today, González is executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum, and she’s determined to use the Canal and the struggles over its authority to tell a broader story about the history of Panama – one centered around Panama as a point of connection from pre-Colonial times to the present day. In this episode, González describes the geographic destiny of the Isthmus of Panama, how America’s ownership of the Canal physically divided the country, and how her team is developing galleries covering Panama’s recent history. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Panama Canal's Politically Sensitive History 01:20 Ana Elizabeth González, Executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum (https://www.museodelcanal.com/en/) 01:35 Opening of the Panama Canal Museum in 1997 02:44 Making the Museum About Panama, Not Just The Canal 03:10 Geography is Destiny 03:30 The Isthmus of Panama as a Point of Connection 04:20 A Brief History 04:50 French Attempt at a Canal 05:10 Treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay–Bunau-Varilla_Treaty) 06:30 Construction of the Canal 07:00 "Gold Roll" and "Silver Roll" 08:00 Martyrs' Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyrs%27_Day_(Panama)) 08:50 Work In Progress: Galleries of Panama's Recent History 09:10 Panama's Recent History, Briefly 11:10 The Museum's Future 11:15 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉 (https://museumarchipelago.com/party) 12:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 98. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned in school about the Panama Canal told a narrow story. Ana Elizabeth González: The history of the canal that was told here was told in a way that was very politically sensitive at the time. So it didn't want to ruffle any feathers.. it's mentioned in schools, but not in depth. Up until 1979, the United States fully controlled the Panama Canal and a 5 mile zone on either side, and until 1999, the United States jointly controlled the Canal with Panama. The presence of the United States, and the politics of the Canal, meant that the safest story to tell was one that was mostly focused on the technological feat of building it. Ana Elizabeth González: The history was very carefully constructed so that it praised the engineering feat of the United States, but it completely ignored the fact that Panama was home to people from 97 different countries to build this Canal, which causes such a diversity in our country. Ana Elizabeth González is now Executive director of the Panama Canal Museum in Panama City, Panama. Ana Elizabeth: Hello. My name is Ana Elizabeth González and I'm executive director of the Panama canal museum, El Museo Del Canal. González became director in 2020, but the Panama Canal Museum itself opened in 1997, two years before control of the Canal was returned to Panama. The museum – a non-profit which is not government funded – was created out of a hope that, among all the changes, Pamana’s complex relationship to the Canal would not be forgotten. Ana Elizabeth González: I was in school at the time, but, I remember it was, I think the then President of Panama and the Mayor and a lot of other people that created the board of trustees and I think it was the idea that this history of this struggle to gain our land and to find our sovereignty and the generational struggle that had been going on. There was a fear that it would have gotten lost in memory or forgotten. So I think that the museum back then was created to preserve and study and research everything surrounding the Canal history and promoting the education of what an impact it had. So for González, the Panama Canal Museum is really a museum about Panama. Ana Elizabeth González: I think people come with the preconception that the museum is just going to be about how the Canal works and how the locks open fill with water. And we don't really have that in-depth here. That's why the Canal has a visitor center that explains how it works in terms of technology and engineering. But it's something we just brush over here because we deep dive into the history of Panama as a point of connection. And as this route that changed the world. The first gallery of the museum begins long before the Canal and highlights the unique features of Panama’s geography: a small isthmus that’s both the only way to travel between the North and South American continents by land and also the narrowest land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Ana Elizabeth González: We've been a trade route or over a route of connection. Ever since Panama – well, the territory sort of resurfaced from, from the oceans, because we were always a bridge between north and south America for animal species and then indigenous peoples. So we've always sort of been a point of trade and contact both culturally and commercially. You enter, the first exhibition space, which is the sort of emergence of Panama as a land in this sort of Omni globe that we have, and you see how it connects both landmasses of North and South America. And you go through the exhibition towards the pre-colonial living traditions, and what Panama was like before the Spanish colonization, then the importance of Panama as part of the Spanish crown and monarchy until 1821. After three hundred years as part of the Spanish monarchy, the isthmus’s geography started to look even more useful to outside interests during the 19th century, as global trade started to pick up. Here, goods and passengers could bypass a much longer and much more dangerous journey around the Strait of Magellan on the southern tip of South America. In 1855, a railway was built across the Isthmus, facilitating the movement of people and goods in time for a wave of the California gold rush. Ana Elizabeth González: And then in 1881, if I'm correct, the French after the success of the Suez Canal, the French chose to build a canal through Panama. Unfortunately, due to yellow fever and other diseases and badly managed funds, the enterprise did not succeed, but it was bought from the French by the United States through the treaty of, Hay–Bunau-Varilla, which we signed upon getting our independence as a country. The 1903 treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla granted the United States complete ownership over a 50 mile long slice of land that was to be the Canal. In the gallery, visitors walk through a hallway that’s completely covered in words from that treaty. Powerful words like “perpetuity” and “authority” look down on them. Ana Elizabeth González: The United States had rights for… well for forever it wasn't even a question of whether or not they owned it. They owned the land where it was going to be built and the land where they had to operate and the land where they had to create their offices and their ports. Back then the country was completely divided, through a gap that was considered the canal zone. And that was United States territory and Panimanians were not free to wander into it, and it did separate the country in a massive way. And that treaty, which no Panamanian negotiated or signed, was actually the seed of our struggle with international relations during the whole 20th century until the CanalI was transferred back to Panama in 1999. But first the massive task of actually constructing the Canal through that slice of land. The project required enormous numbers of people, and Canal administrators tried to entice workers from all over the world to take part in the project – yet another way that this isthmus was at the forefront of a more globalized world. Ana Elizabeth González: We had people obviously from the Caribbean, we had people from Europe. We had people from Asia. So there's a big mix and such a big diversity that came with the construction of the Canal.And many of them remained in the country after the Canal was built and they made their life here, but what is also not known is the amount of racism and discrimination that these people faced. Because in order to work in the Panama Canal construction, you were assigned either a gold roll or a silver roll. So the payroll was either you

As the Apollo 11 astronauts hurtled towards the moon on July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the astronauts didn’t make it – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Richard Nixon would have to address the nation. That haunting speech was written but fortunately was never delivered. But you can go to the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City and watch Nixon somberly reciting those words. It looks like real historic footage, but it’s fake. Artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund used the text of the original address and media manipulation techniques like machine learning to create the synthetic Nixon for a film called In Event of Moon Disaster. It anchors an exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen. In this episode, Panetta and Burgund discuss how they created In Event of Moon Disaster as a way to highlight various misinformation techniques, the changing literacy of the general public towards media manipulation, and the effectiveness of misinformation in the museum medium. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 July 18th, 1969 00:40 The Safire Memo (https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events/centennials/nixon/images/exhibit/rn100-6-1-2.pdf) 01:38 Clip From In Event of Moon Disaster (https://moondisaster.org) 02:30 Nixon’s Telephone Call (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_8tawnlwr8) 03:00 What is Deepfake? 03:30 Halsey Burgund (https://halseyburgund.com) 04:06 Francesca Panetta (https://www.francescapanetta.com/about/) 04:30 How They Did It 04:50 Why This Speech? 06:02 Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City (https://movingimage.us/event/deepfake-unstable-evidence-on-screen/) 07:05 Misinformation By Editing 09:53 Misinformation and Medium 10:23 Museums as Trustworthy Institutions (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/71) 11:27 What Would a “Deepfake Museum Gallery” Look Like? 13:43 In Event of Moon Disaster (https://moondisaster.org) 14:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 97. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. On July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the Apollo 11 astronauts who were hurtling towards the moon, on their way to be the first humans to land on its surface, didn’t make it to the moon – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Nixon would have to address the nation. So Nixon’s speech writer, William Safire wrote an address titled “In Event of Moon Disaster.” It’s a short, haunting speech – the first time that billions of people on earth would learn about the failed Apollo 11 mission. Safire notes that before delivering the speech, Nixon “should telephone each of the widows-to-be.” Widows-to-be because Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn’t be dead yet, just stranded on the moon with no hope of recovery. Halsey Burgund: The astronauts are still alive. I mean that – every time I even think of that, I just get these sort of chills. They not only would have been alive when the speech was delivered, but they could have actually heard it. Then, back on earth, Nixon would have soberly walked up to a television camera, adjusted the speech written on his stack of papers, looked right at the camera lens and said. Richard Nixon: “Good evening my fellow Americans. Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there's no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.” But Nixon never said these words. On July 20th, 1969, Apollo 11’s lunar lander successfully touched down, intact on the surface of the moon with enough fuel to get safely back to earth. So instead of addressing the nation in a sobering speech, Nixon called the astronauts directly in a more awkward but definitely preferable phone call. Richard Nixon: “Hello Neil and Buzz, I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House, And there certainly has to be the most historic telephone call I've ever made. I just can't tell you how proud we all are of what you have – every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives.” The reason why it’s so hard to tell these two Nixons apart – the real one and the fake one – is because of a technology known today as deepfake. Halsey Burgund: Deepfake comes from the combination of deep, which is short for deep learning in this case, which is an artificial intelligence technique, and then fake, of course, meaning, you know, something not true. So deepfake is a representation through audio and video of an event, of a person, doing or saying something that never actually happened in reality. And the addendum to that is that it almost always happens without the consent of the individual who is depicted. The first Nixon, the fake one, was created by Halsey Burgund and Francesca Panetta as part of a film they titled In Event of Moon Disaster. In Event of Moon Disaster is the centerpiece of a new exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. Halsey Burgund: Hello. My name is Halsy Burgund. I am an artist and a creative technologist, and one of my most recent projects is called In Event of Moon Disaster, which looks at a deepfake synthetic media technology. And it uses the Apollo 11 moon landing mission as a vehicle to explore this new technology. Francesca Panetta: Hello, my name is Francesca Panetta. I am an immersive director, artist and journalist, and I am the co-director of In Event of Moon Disaster, a film and an installation about misinformation and deep fakes and an alternative history of the moon landing. Panetta and Burgund made In the Event of Moon Disaster by combining footage of Richard Nixon giving an unrelated speech and employing video techniques to replicate the movement of Nixon’s mouth and lips. Combined with the contributions of a voice actor and some deep learning techniques to synthetically make the audio sound more like Nixon, the whole video is quite believable and striking. Halsey Burgund: We've thought a lot about how our project needs to create misinformation to a certain extent, but then it needs to identify what it has done. We need to wrap the whole project in a context, which does the best we can to ensure that people don't leave the experience thinking that two astronauts were stranded on the moon and their bodies are still there and they, and they died. That is the context of our piece. And that is what the speech that Nixon delivers – fake Nixon, synthetic Nixon delivers. The directors choose to use this particular speech by Nixon for the project in part because it relates to moon landings – already a deep well of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and because the speech is non-political. Francesca Panetta: When you are face swapping someone onto a video where they haven't consented. Yeah. It is a deepfake. In terms of putting words into someone's mouth it felt like these were words that he could well have ended up speaking. And so it kind of didn't feel so, so morally problematic. And we weren't trying to deceive the public that the moon landing never happened. Again, these were ethical questions we had around not wanting to see more misinformation about the moon landing of which there is a considerable amount already. In Event of Moon Disaster appears in the middle of the Deepfake Exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image. After visitors have seen historical context about media manipulation, they walk into what appears to be a 1960s living room. Halsey Burgund: There's a vintage television from 1960 something. And on that TV is playing our film and it's an old CRT TV, and there's a couch in front of it that you can sit down on. There’s a carpet, a shaggy carpet. And then you can sit there and watch the whole film as though you have been invited over to a friend's house to view this historic event. It's as though you're sort of stepping back in time to 1969 and watching this for the first time. But of course things go wrong and it doesn't turn out the way that we all know it actually did. And then you come out on the far si

Public historian and writer Tegan Kehoe knows that museum visitors act differently around the same object presented in different contexts—like how the same visitor excited by a bayonet that causes a triangular wound in an exhibit of 18th-century weapons could be disgusted by that same artifact when it’s presented in an exhibit of 18th-century medicine. Kehoe, who specialises in the history of healthcare and medical science, is attuned to how objects can inspire empathy, especially in the healthcare context. Kehoe’s new book, Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures, looks for opportunities for empathy in museum exhibits all around the U.S. Each of the 50 artifacts presented in the book becomes a physical lens through which to examine the complexities of American society’s relationship with health, from a 1889 bottle of “Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters” that claimed to cure a host of ailments to activist Ed Roberts’s power wheelchair that he customized to work with his range of motion. In this episode, Kehoe describes how her work has helped her see tropes in the way museums tend to present medical topics and artifacts, how the aura of medical expertise is often culturally granted, and how living through the current coronavirus pandemic changed her relationship with many of the artifacts. Image: Ed Roberts's Wheelchair, National Museum of American History. Treasures of American History online exhibition. (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1181889) Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Old State House “Weapons of the American Revolution” and “Medicine and the American Revolution” 01:35 Tegan Kehoe (http://www.tegankehoe.com/p/about-me.html) 02:00 Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures (https://bookshop.org/shop/tegankehoe) 02:30 How Museums Tend to Present Medical History 05:40 Who Is “Worthy” of the Most Care? 08:02 Ed Roberts’s Power Wheelchair (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1181889) 10:06 Ambulance Damaged in the 9/11 Attacks 11:28 Lessons from the Latest Pandemic 13:41 Pre-Order Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures (https://bookshop.org/shop/tegankehoe) 14:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago Directly 🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 96. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. Museum curator and historian Daniel Neff used to present tours in the Old Statehouse Museum in Boston, the site of the Boston Massacre in 1770. One tour was called “Weapons of the American Revolution” and went into gory detail of the carnage inflicted by bayonets and musket balls. At the same museum, Neff also presented a tour called “Medicine and the American Revolution,” often featuring the same grizzly battle wounds. As his colleague and today’s guest Tegan Kehoe recalls, Neff started to notice a difference between the way visitors responded to each of the tours. Tegan Kehoe: He remarked a number of times that visitors who seemed otherwise temperamentally the same, sometimes even the same visitors would react very differently to hearing about a particular type of battle wound, depending on whether they were on the weapons tour or the medicine tour. And it seemed that people on the weapons tour were imagining themselves inflicting those injuries. And on the medicine tour, they were imagining being the victim and being the patient. And that's just such a powerful way of thinking about how people are relating to the content and museums and how people are relating to history. Neff’s observation is featured in the introduction of Kehoe’s new book: Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures. Tegan Kehoe: Hello, my name is Tegan Kehoe. I'm a public historian and writer specializing in the history of healthcare and medical science. I work at the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. And my forthcoming book is Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures, which is coming out from AASLH press in January. Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures looks at the fields of medicine and public health through the lens of artifacts in museums and historic sites around the country. Kehoe’s day job at a museum of medical history, where she researches and writes museum exhibits, has helped her see tropes in the way museums tend to present medical topics and artifacts. Tegan Kehoe: Museums, especially generalist museums tackling a medical history topic will often go for the gruesome because that is a hook for people. And I very much understand why exhibits tend to latch onto the gruesome and the macabre in medical history. But it can be a little bit narrow sometimes. And then the other thing that I see in exhibits especially of museums that do focus on healthcare or medicine is this narrative of progress. Of sort of the march of scientific progress always moving forward. And they'll go for sort of emphasizing the way in which medicine before a particular period was particularly primitive. And there isn't necessarily a particular set of imagery or exhibit style choices that goes with that the way there is with the sort of the more gruesome stuff. But I think this idea of “look how great progress is”, which I don't disagree with, but it's another way that it can be a very narrow way of looking at healthcare. Each chapter in the book centers around a different historic artifact, arranged in chronological order to tell the story of American medical history. Chapter one is a wax model of a scrotum showing what was know as children’s chimney sweep cancer at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – typical of the models doctors and medical students used to study a variety of diseases in the eighteenth century. Chapter 24 is a bubonic plague pathology slide at a collection at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, from a cluster of outbreaks that happened along the U.S.’s Gulf Coast in 1920. By grounding the narrative in objects, Kehoe is doing two things – first, copying the presentation style of most museums for artifacts that are scattered across the United States. And second, providing a window to a particular time and place. As Kehoe writes, “Looking at healthcare history through artifacts can help us see the people of the past as people, people who drank beer, waited for the nurse to read their high temperature, or hoped against hope that the new medication they took would prolong their life.” Tegan Kehoe: Not being able to play with placement and just having those sort of static images, gave me a lot of freedom. So in the chapter about an infant incubator, I wasn't able to find any stories about a baby who might have been in that incubator, but I found a lot of information about a baby from a few years off from when that incubator was in use, but from the same county, really closely connected to the story. And I could trust the readers making it clear that this baby wasn't in this incubator, but I can trust them to sort of make that connection. So I was able to kind of go off on this in a way that I could do in a museum exhibit if I had room for it, but in a small object label, you wouldn't necessarily be able to. And so I could use that freedom a little bit to get the fuller story. That fuller story, the story of American healthcare, touches on the societal ideas of who was worthy of a lot of care, and who was worthy of less care. And these societal ideas go both ways – Kehoe maps out varying levels of trust in medicine and medical institutions over time – something that medicine shares with museums. Tegan Kehoe: I think that one of the similarities that's really striking to me is that in both medicine and museums, that expertise is–well, the expertise is real, it's based on study and work and certain methodologies–but that aura of expertise is kind of culturally granted. Tegan Kehoe: And in both medicine and museums, it's culturally granted by the dominant, powerful culture within our society. It's white middle-class and upper-middle-class with certain educational backgrounds are the ones who trust doctors the most and trust museums the most. I don't have stats to back that up, but I know that the people who are most likely to be disregarded by either their doctor or by a museum exhibit are also the ones most likely to say, that's not for me. I'm not welcome there. I don

In 1969, noticing that technological progress was changing their fields, heads of Finish industry came together to found a technology museum in Finland. Today, the Museum of Technology in Helsinki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Technology,_Helsinki) is the only general technological museum in the country. But of course, technical progress didn’t stop changing, as service coordinator Maddie Hentunen notes, and that can be challenging for a museum to keep up. In this episode, Hentunen describes the museum’s philosophical stance on technology, how the museum balances industrial development with more open source design practices, and how the museum thinks about its own obsolescence. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 1969 in Technology 00:49 Maddie Hentunen 01:02 The Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland 02:34 The Museum’s Building 03:51 Original Exhibits 04:50 Today’s Exhibits 07:07 The Museum’s Philosophical Stance on Technology 10:29 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 95. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Ian Elsner: Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. Ian Elsner: 1969 was a banner year for technological advancement: for one, it’s the year humans first walked on the moon. It was also -- and this is not unrelated to technological advancement -- right in the middle of the Cold War. Maddie Hentunen: 1969 in Finland was kind of a fraught time politically in a way that it was still the era of the cold war and we're right next to Russia. Maddie Hentunen: So our political relationship with Russia has always been kind of a tightrope. We've always gazed eastwords with care and especially at that time. Ian Elsner: This is Maddie Hentunen, service coordinator at the Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland. Maddie Hentunen: Hello. My name is Maddie Hentunen, and right now I am the service coordinator here in the museum of technology in Helsinki, Finland. Ian Elsnsr: The museum of technology was founded in that banner year of 1969 by heads of Finish industries. The idea was to make a general technology museum in Finland. The point is that it’s not siloed by industrial sector. Maddie Hentunen: I think at that point, the global sort of Zeitgeist, the technology of the time was taking massive leaps forward. So at that time there were these, let's say there was a coalition in a very loose meaning of the word of these gigantic, in Finish scale, gigantic, industry had sort of, let's say, the forest industry, which in Finland has always been massive And then there was the metal industry, which includes the mining industry and, and the chemistry industry thinks like this, who felt the need for some kind of preservation because they started to, in their respective fields, notice that things are changing. And a lot of the old sort of wisdom, a lot of the old ways are gone. Pull it behind us in the past. Maddie Hentunen: I feel that is very unique in a way or very, nice in that sense is that they actually came together and made that decision that we will make this sort of generalized museum of technology instead of making a forestry technical museum or a chemistry museum or stuff like that. It was a cooperative mission, so to speak. So that's actually how first our collection started to build. We've got these big donations from different fields, industrial fields that are still big parts of our collections. Ian Elsner: The newly-founded museum decided it would use Finland’s first water purification plant -- built in 1877 -- as its main exhibit building -- it’s a delightfully squat round building that used to be filled with sand that the water filtered through -- water that would eventually be used for drinking or firefighting. Maddie Hentunen: Helsinki started to grow pretty fast after the 1850s or so. So after that there was a real need for purified water. And, also, because the city was mostly built of wood. So also the fire security was a big question. But yeah, basically this is a giant round building, which was filled with water and sand. This place of course is very much part of the Finish industrial history. So it was like the perfect place, because at that point in the 1960s, when it turned into 1970s and when then this plant was closed down and it and the space was empty. Maddie Hentunen: One of the most common things that people say when they walk in that door, they say, oh, it's bigger on the inside! I was a Doctor Who fan and I sort of got the TARDIS-like feel when I came in. Ian Elsner: In this building, the museum first opened to the public in 1985, and some of these original exhibits were still being displayed until fairly recently. Maddie Hentunen: Back then it was a very different museum. There was still a lot of the old museum thinking sort of like straggling. One of the 1985 exhibitions, the old communication exhibition, was still here, I think, five years ago. So it had a really long sort of shelf life that exhibition. And you could very clearly see that it was from a very different time that it was filled with artifacts. It was filled with stuff. And also the text were like super long, unreadable mostly, only in one language, which was Finnish at that time. Maddie Hentunen: It was not very approachable. It was really cool to just look at things, but it was not super informative. You had to sort of guess what is this? And then there was those wall of texts somewhere, and you thought you had to go and find to be able to connect the artifact with the text. As we know, then the whole museum thinking around exhibitions has changed drastically. Ian Elsner: Today, with the new exhibits, the museum features much shorter informative text in three languages: Finnish, Swedish, and English. As the Finnish industry has changed, so have the exhibits: giant machines used for forestry and mining share the open, circular space with tiny cell phones made by the Finnish firm Nokia and interactive touchscreen exhibits that teach the basics of computer programming. Ian Elsner: Visiting the museum in 2021, the Nokia cell phones look impossibly out of date -- in the way that history tends to compress itself, a phone from 15 years ago looks almost contemporaneous to a TV camera from 50 years ago. But it wasn’t that long ago, before the arrival of the iPhone, that it seemed like Nokia phones -- proudly designed in Finland -- would continue to be ubiquitous. Maddie Hentunen: Maddie Hentunen: Everybody had a Nokia phone at some point and that all the movies were. I remember when The Matrix came out and they had, they had their, their phones and everything that it was like, it was everywhere. And I think we're sort of still in that mind frame, even though Nokia has kind of declined from that. Ian Elsner: But the way the museum approaches the gulf between past, current, and future technology is fascinating -- the museum knows that even the most futuristic technology will one day be history. Maddie Hentunen: The past, the present and the future are all equally important. I think the Museum of Technology is in a special position in that sense, that technology changes so incredibly fast right now and has been doing that for the past 100 years or so, in Finland and everywhere else too. Maddie Hentunen: So we actually really need to be able to preserve the present and also stay one step ahead of the curve, so to speak. So we can guess what's going to happen in the future so we can start the preservation of those things so that we can sort of in the future, have a comprehensive set of material or remains in our exhibitions and in our collections. Maddie Hentunen: And I think that is one thing that we really want also for other people to see in our exhibitions that museums are not all about the past. Museums are not all about, the material remains of the very old age. It's also about what happens now and what's going to happen tomorrow because all of that is going to turn into history at some point. Ian Elsner: The Museum is a museum of technology, not a museum of industry. So how does a museum that was founded by industry heads explore the full range of technological advancement, including, say open source methods that are often developed outside of industrial contexts? Maddie Hentunen: So this is like the innovation part is something that we have really heavily tried to integrate it into our museum thinking here. We have cooperated with a

The deliberate exclusion of Black history and the history of slavery in the American South has been slow to reverse. But Jazz Dottin, creator and host of the Black Gems Unearthed YouTube channel says it can be just as slow in New England. Each video features Dottin somewhere in her home state of Massachusetts, often in front of a plaque or historical marker, presenting what’s missing, excluded, or downplayed. The history discussed on Black Gems Unearthed has been left out by conventional museums, which are among the most trustworthy institutions in modern American life, according to the American Alliance of Museums. This trust may have more to do with power than truth-telling — and today, there are many different ways to build trust with an audience online. Shows like Dottin’s might point to where our new relationship with the authoritative voice is heading. In this episode, Dottin describes how working as tour guide and creating travel itineraries influences her work today, how she came up with the idea for Black Gems Unearthed, and what the future holds. Image: Jazz Dottin in front of Emancipation in Boston, Mass. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 “Always Read The Plaque” 00:45 Jazz Dottin (https://blackgemsunearthed.com) 01:00 Black Gems Unearthed (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgCwmI7piZotRDZ3ZefnFmA) 01:20 Hopkinton, Massachusetts 02:00 Exploring Black lives in MetroWest, MA in the 1700s - Black Gems Unearthed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc31pxJ7pYE) 02:26 Museum Archipelago 42. Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray Are Erecting Historic Markers on the Slave Trade in New Orleans (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/42) 02:55 The Legacy of Slavery in New England 03:50 Working as a Tour Guide 05:35 The Idea for Black Gems Unearthed 08:21 Museums and Trustworthiness 09:36 Where The Name Comes From 10:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) 11:39 What’s It Like Giving A Tour on A Segway? Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 94. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. There’s a saying among history nerds: always read the plaque. Roman Mars: “Always read the plaque.” But of course, the plaques don’t tell the whole story. Maybe a better mantra would be “start by reading the plaque.” Jazz Dottin: If I see plaques, I have to stop and read them. But with Black history, you know, there's not as many plaques, if any at all that are describing events and people and things that have happened in different areas across the country. This is Jazz Dottin, creator and host of a new YouTube channel called Black Gems Unearthed. Jazz Dottin: Hello, my name is Jazz Dottin and I am the host of Black Gems Unearthed, which is a YouTube series where I talk about Black history around the state of Massachusetts. So I am an experienced tour guide. I develop travel programs and itineraries, and now I'm working in the academic world at a university in Massachusetts. Dottin grew up in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. Jazz Dottin: A small town, suburb outside of Boston. 21 miles or however many miles a marathon is where the start of the Boston marathon is. When I was growing up in Huffington, I don't have memories of learning about local Black history. And I was just curious about Hopkinton as I was starting to make these videos and started to do a little bit of digging. An episode of Black Gems Unearthed describes when she figured out that a stone wall next to one of the streets that she drove down as a child was probably built by enslaved Africans. Jazz Dottin (from Black Gems Unearthed): “It came up in the research that Africans likely built the tiers that you can see on the grass behind me, you can kind of see three layers, and they also may have done work on the wall that’s behind me too.” Jazz Dottin: And it just feels eerie to know that there was slavery in this town that is just known for being a nice suburb to live in. That is part of the legacy that people may or may not realize it's like in our DNA. In episode 42 of Museum Archipelago, we spoke with Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray, who in 2018, erected one of the first plaques detailing New Orleans’s slave trading past. The deliberate exclusion of Black history and the history of slavery in the Amerian South has been slow to reverse. But Dottin says it can be just as slow in the North. Jazz Dottin: I just think it's the power of storytelling. We've told the stories for so long that the North was the place where people went to be free and it was valued. And we did everything in our power to end slavery. And the South was bad because they enslaved people, but really hello! We were connected in the institution of slavery. So we really need to address the past and discuss it and look at it because it has shaped our communities and the way that we view ourselves, which may or may not be accurate. The connections to the institution of slavery in the American North come both from a time when slavery was legal in New England, and later when slavery was illegal but pwerful families profited from the slave trade and related buisnesses. Dottin was familiar with some of these connections -- say, a mansion belonging to one of these families -- because she worked as a tour guide for over 10 years. Jazz Dottin: I actually graduated from Temple University from their Tourism and Hospitality program. I did a lot of work as a tour guide in my undergraduate program, like I used to give tours on segways and then I gave culinary tours. So I was the actual guide, but then I also have experience developing itineraries. I worked for Road Scholar, which is an educational travel company for older adults. And there, I actually pieced together itineraries based on a theme, say, people want to learn about the history of women's suffrage. We would put together an itinerary that had lectures and trips to visit museums and local sites that related to getting women the right to vote. One of Dottin’s biggest challenges as a tour guide was trying to present Black history to an audience that wasn’t expecting it. Jazz Dottin: Most of our itineraries were European-centric. So you're seeing allhese sites that are well-known tourist attractions, but where is that black history? And so that might have meant including a lecture about the fact that there were people that were enslaved that work here, or including maybe a music presentation from a group that's from the area that could weave together their story of how they came to live in the area. So it always felt like I was just sprinkling in a couple of fun facts. The itineraries are never specifically about Black history. At least the ones that I was working on. It's just the reality of developing itineraries for a primarily white audience and an older adult audience is just that wasn't necessarily what they were we're looking for. Dottin first came up with the idea for a video-based guided tour focusing on Black history in Massachusetts in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. Jazz Dottin: Yeah, it was a result of George Floyd's murder. I was just very upset. Seeing what happened and just realizing that so many people were shocked by what happened when this is something that happens on a regular... Black people are murdered regularly throughout the United States for, for small issues and for no issues whatsoever. So I was very upset by what happened. And I was upset by the reactions that companies had. Some that did not want to make statements. Some that did make statements that just didn't feel like there was any action behind it. So I decided, you know what, now's the time I'm going to make videos because I have a smartphone. I am going to get Adobe Premier and the software. I need to be able to make this. I had an interest in creating walking tours, but I just realized, you know, we're also in the middle of a pandemic. Why don't we just focus on making videos? And it'll help me learn the information better. And perhaps people will enjoy watching it too. By making and editing the videos, Dottin has complete control over the topics and what is being presented. The format is effective: every video features Dottin looking right at the camera on site somewhere in Massachusetts -- often in front of a plaque or historical marker. Her well-researched narration, supplemented by historical photos and passages from documents, presents what’s missing, excluded,

In 1916, concerned that the remote Rhodope mountains would be hard to defend against foreign invaders, a young Bulgarian Kingdom decided to build a narrow gauge railway to connect villages and towns to the rest of the country. The Bulgarian King himself, Tsar Boris III, drove the first locomotive to the town of Belitsa to celebrate its opening. But the Septemvri - Dobrinishte Narrow Gauge Railway would far outlast the King and the Kingdom, the communist era that followed, and the rocky post-communst period. Today, the railway is still a fixture of life in the region as a vital link to remote villages with no road access. But decades of neglect have left many stations crumbling. Train enthusiast Ivan Pulevski, a member of the organization “For The Narrow Gauge Railway,” helped found the House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway in one of these abandoned stations. A sign on the building says the museum was built “for people, by people.” In this episode, Pulevski describes the decision to build the museum using only volunteers, how to interpret multiple eras of Bulgarian history through the lens of a railway, and why they have had no plans to seek official museum accreditation in Bulgaria. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Winding Through History (https://tesnolineikata.wixsite.com/home/history) 00:50 Septemvri–Dobrinishte narrow-gauge line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemvri–Dobrinishte_narrow-gauge_line) 01:10 Ivan Pulevski 01:33 Stoyan Mitov and the Engineering of the Railway 03:20 Tsar Boris III (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_III_of_Bulgaria) 03:50 The House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway 04:40 No Electricity and No Water Supply 05:30 After The Collapse of the Communist Era 05:55 Organization "For The Narrow Gauge Railway" 06:32 Restoring the Building / Making the Museum 08:30 Bulgarian Museum Regulations 10:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 93. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. The waiting room of Tsepina Station, south of the Bulgarian city of Septemvri in the Rhodope mountains, sits under the watchful eye of portraits of Vladimir Lenin and Georgi Dimitrov -- the revolutionary communitst leaders of Russia and Bulgaria respectively. But the communist period is only one of the eras of Bulgarian history the narrow gauge railway winds its way through. Construction on the railway, and the station, began in 1920, when a young Bulgarian Kingdom was concerned that the remote Rhodope mountains would be hard to defend against foreign invaders. Today, the railway is still a fixture of life in the region. Each day, 10 times a day, a diesel train passes by the station. Ivan Pulevski: Many people rely on this railway because it's their only transport, their only way of transport, because there are many villages which has no road. This is Ivan Pulevski, a train enthusiast who is also one of the founders of the House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway, which sits inside Tsepina station. Ivan Pulevski: Okay, my name is Ivan, Ivan Pulevski and I'm from Plovdiv. I'm currently a student in the Technical University of Sofia and I study transport technology and management. Creating the railway through such mountainous terrain was a transport technology and management problem for 1920. The first two engineers who were invited by the government to plan the railway quit because of the technical difficulty of building it. Instead, the honor fell to a young engineer called Stoyan Mitov. Mitov’s innovation was to build the railway in such a way that if you looked at it from above, the track would form numbers -- eights and sixes as the tracks pass over and under themselves to change elevation in such a tight space, The design also called for numerous tunnels. Ivan Pulevski: This is actually a map of how it crosses. And it looks like eight. And these are two forms, which are more like six. So it was really, really complicated project: so all these tunnels. The railway actually has 35 tunnels. In order to do that, the rail needed to be narrow gauge, which could handle the tight turning radiuses. The gauge refers to the distance between the two tracks of the railway: in this case, 760 mm. Every other working railway in Bulgaria today is standard gauge, with a distance between the tracks almost double that at 1,435 mm. The painstaking construction continued for over two decades. Slowly, more and more villages and towns were connected to the rest of Bulgaria. Ivan Pulevski: It was pretty primitive actually, because they didn't have multiple techniques and all the works were done by hand. Finally, in 1939, the railway reached the Bulgarian town of Belitsa. To celebrate a more interconnected Bulgaria, none other than the Bulgarian King, Tsar Boris III drove the first locomotive to the city. Ivan Pulevski: He was the only monarch in Europe who had a legal driving license for a train, for a steam engine. And the elderly people who still remember this moment say that they saw two miracles of their time: the train and the king. The majority of the House Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway concerns the daily functioning of the station after Tsar Boris III, and the beginning of the communist era in 1944. By 1945, the railway was complete in its current form, stretching from Septemvri to Dobrinishte. Ivan Pulevski: It was actually probably the period in the timeline that the railway was at its peak. And in 1966 it had 71 trains per day. The station’s waiting room is preserved with pictures and information about the different types of carriages and locomotives from the era. There’s a ticket counter window looking into the main control office of this station -- all using technology that was not regularly updated. Ivan Pulevski: This station had no electricity and no water supply. So they used lanterns with gasoline and these phones, which are only connected to the Telegraph wire. And we still have no electricity. As a result, the artifacts in the control office have an old-school charm -- you can see the hand-written diary of each train that came through, you can handle the heavy metal keys for the track switches, and you can even “validate” your ticket with the official heavy-duty ticket validation machine. The station manager lived at the station, in rooms right above the control office and waiting room. Managers would get buckets of food and water delivered by train. After the communist era collapsed in 1989, things got worse for the narrow gauge railway, and with no station manager, this station building fell into disrepair. Ivan Pulevski: After the collapse of the communist era, many factories closed and actually the railway was not really maintained and the total abdication of the government made things so complicated that in 2003, all the freight trains were cut. Pulevski’s organization, called “For the Narrow Gauge Railway” fought against cutting passenger services too. Ivan Pulevski: Seven years ago they decided to cut some of the passenger friends as well. These people had no option to go home from work. Well, they have the train to go to work, but they did not have a train to go back. So fortunately, because a friend of mine who is actually part of our organization, decided to take some actions and the Bulgarian state-wide ways decided to put on track these trains as soon as possible. As part of the cuts, stations like the one we’re standing at got removed from the schedules. In 2015, the organization “For The Narrow Gauge Railway” decided to do something with the abandoned building. Ivan Pulevski: At first we decided not to make it a museum, but to just -- it was in really bad condition, so, decided to just fix some things. And then we had to think of a purpose. Why? Why we do this and decided to make it a museum, because it was the best solution. We don't have a museum for this railway. The museum was created by Pulevski and other volunteers over the course of two years. The Bulgarian National Railway company repaired the station’s roof, and people donated money, time, and artifacts to be displayed in the museum. Ivan Pulevski: In 2017, we opened the museum. It was a big opening actually. We had more than 100 guests at the time and it was really interesting, but unfortunately it's in the middle of

The Pleven Panorama transports visitors through time, but not space. The huge, hand-painted panorama features the decisive battles of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78, fought at this exact spot, which led to Bulgaria’s Liberation. The landscape of Pleven, Bulgaria depicted is exactly what you see outside the building, making it seem like you’re witnessing the battle on an observation point. Bogomil Stoev is a historian at the Pleven Panorama, which opened in 1977. The opening was timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Ottoman Empire’s surrender following the battles and the siege of Pleven. The building itself is etched with the story of the siege and the battles, and because the landscape is filled with the remains of the combattants, this was the only structure allowed to be built on the spot. In this episode, Stoev describes how the creators of the Pleven Panorama learned from previous panoramas, how the museum contextualizes the history of Bulgaria’s Liberation, and how this museum has become a symbol of the city of Pleven. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Skobelev Park and the Remains of the Dead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skobelev_Park) 01:06 Bogomil Stoev, Historian at the Pleven Panorama 01:36 Our Story Begins in the 14th Century 01:58 April Uprising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Uprising_of_1876) 02:40 The Start of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Turkish_War_(1877–1878)) 03:10 The Pleven Panorama (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleven_Panorama) 05:16 General Skobelev (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Skobelev) 06:00 General Totleben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Totleben) 06:10 The Siege of Pleven (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Plevna) 07:00 December 10th, 1977 07:40 Episodes 47 and 54 of Museum Archipelago (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/tags/buzludzha) 08:07 Building the Museum 08:46 A Brief History of Panoramas 10:15 Pleven’s Enduring Symbol 11:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 92. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Skobelev Park just South of the Bulgarian city of Pleven looks like a typical Bulgarian park. A pleasant place to sit on a bench, walk around with friends, and enjoy the day. Which it is. But to the people of Pleven, the area has another name. It's known as the Valley of Death, the site of the decisive battle of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, which ultimately led to Bulgaria's liberation from the Ottoman Empire after 500 years. Bogomil Stoev: Around 70, 80 thousand people, they died here and their remainings, they are here. They were not buried in the cemetery. They were using the trenches and they would put the bodies and just put mud on them. So here we cannot dig. You cannot do anything, any kind constructions and this is why when they built the museum in 1977, we are the only structure here. This is Bogomil Stoev, a historian at the Pleven Panorama museum — the only structure in Skobelev Park. Bogomil Stoev: Hello, my name is Bogomil Stoev. I'm a historian and I work in the museum Panorama Pleven and this is actually my job to work with visitors, to show the fights and the history of our city, city of Pleven. This was the main place of the fights that actually liberated Bulgaria and Bulgaria exists at this day because of this war and this fight. Story of this war and this fight actually begins in the late 14th century when the Ottoman Empire conquered the land controlled by the Second Bulgarian Empire, leading to the long period of Ottoman rule. Bogomil Stoev: [For] 500 years we didn't exist like a country. We were not existing as a country, only as a nation. And after this war, Bulgaria was again on the map of Europe after 500 years. By the 19th century, Bulgarian nationalism started to take hold, culminating in the April Uprising in 1876. Bulgrians rebelled in towns and cities across the territory against the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire's response to the insurrection — a violent suppression by massacring civilians — led to an outpouring of public support for the Bulgarian cause. Bogomil Stoev: Koprivshtitsa and Panagyurishte, those are the main places for the uprising. This is actually the punishment for the Bulgarian people because they made the uprising. 30,000 innocent people were killed this was a big news around the world. The coverage of the Ottoman's suppression was one of the factors that led the Russian Empire to declare war on the Ottoman Empire. Bogomil Stoev: And one year after the rebellion on 24th of April in 1877, Alexander II, the Russian emperor, he declared the war. And this is the beginning of maybe [the] 10th, 12th war between the Russian and Ottoman Empire, but in our history, in Bulgarian history, it stayed as a war for liberation. All of this context is briefly presented in the first gallery of the Pleven Panorama — as visitors walk up the stairs to the main attraction: the Panorama itself. Bogomil Stoev: And this is the main part of the museum actually. Wow. Bogomil Stoev: So this part of the museum, it's actually the unique part. The name of the museum is because of this part here: Panorama. The name starts in Greek. It means, looking around yourself and the idea is that when you go in a museum like this, you can see actually the real place. The Panorama is huge: one unbroken cylinder of painted canvas wrapping all the way around the room. Bogomil Stoev: It was hand- made. This is on canvas. It's one big piece. It's 115 meters long and it's 15 meters high. 15 meters here in Bulgaria are like four floors of a building. 13 painters did everything here in four months. Everything in the room — the lights, the atmosphere creates the illusion that you're standing at this location in the afternoon of September 11th, 1877. It's as if the canvas is a window — the mountains in the distance, the rolling hills in the foreground are all exactly what you would see if there were actual windows in the building. Bogomil Stoev: And the idea of this part here, or the museum is actually to show you the fight for the place that you're sitting right now. We will go on the roof of the museum: this is the view. This is not a place somewhere around the city. This is exactly the place we are right now. The focus on the exact location mirrors Pleven's geographic destiny — this was the only place for Russian troops and their Romainain allies to enter the territory because their access to the Black Sea was blocked due to the Crimean War. The trade routes and the paths over the mountains were such that whoever controlled Pleven could control access to southern Bulgaria and Istanbul. So this is where the Ottoman Empire tried to stall the invaders' progress. And it almost worked. September 11th, 1877 was the third attack on the Ottoman defensive positions. On the canvas, Russian troops — under the command of General Skobelev— stream towards you in two main divisions, with guns and bayonets. A third division of Romaian troops capture a nearby position. Bogomil Stoev: The whole park here is by the name of the person that you can see over there on the white horse. So this is General Skobelev, he was in charge of the soldiers here. And from here he wanted help to go and liberate the city. We, the museum visitors, are put in the position of the defenders, the Ottoman soldiers, surrendered by two battlefields. Bogomil Stoev: The only successful fight at this day is the fight here for the place of the museum. And this is why we are here. So 13,000 soldiers came from the green hills that you can see over there that were crossing the Valley. They separated on two and they attacked at the same time. Looking north, you can see the city of Pleven as it would have looked in 1877, one of the largest cities in Bulgaria at the time. The battle resulted in so many casualties that the attackers switched tactics, and brought in General Totleben. Totleben decided to conduct a siege of the city of Pleven, still under Ottoman control. Bogomil Stoev: The idea of Totleben was very different. So he didn't rely on soldiers to fight for the place. As you can see here. His idea is actually to use the place. You can see that the city is in the Valley. It's very easy to surround the place so that nothing goes in and nothing goes out. For 45 days, no food, no water, the water mills that were in the city, they were not working. The soldiers, they started to die from hunger, from diseases.

Museums can be a shorthand for truth, or for history, or for what a culture values. Disney theme parks all around the world use fake museums as a tool to immerse visitors in the themed environment. This detailed world-building can make the imaginary universe more real—or provide a setup to subvert a narrative. But these fake museums aren’t the only ways the Disney theme parks present history to visitors. Public experience advocate Shaelyn Amaio describes how the parks “traffic in the past.” By removing references to the present or a future with consequences, parks like Disneyland free the visitor from responsibility for what happened in history. Since the opening of Disneyland in 1955, there have been several iterations of Disney theme parks, each reflecting the way we think about knowledge and history in the times they were built. In this episode, Amaio describes examples of fake museums in Disney theme parks, details how corporate-sponsored edutainment can reflect the public's anxiety, and explains why EPCOT has the most museum-like spaces at Disney theme parks. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Yeti Museum (https://threadreaderapp.com/convos/1364956121258225670) 01:30 Shaelyn Amaio (https://twitter.com/heyshaelyn) 02:03 Amaio’s First Visit to Disney World 03:30 Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy: History and Innocence in the Magic Kingdom 05:50 EPCOT and World’s Fairs 08:01 17. Entertainment and History at Disney’s America (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/17) 09:12 Dinosaur at Disney’s Animal Kingdom 10:20 Layering in Theme Park Design 11:00 Overlap Between Museums and Theme Parks 11:55 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ (https://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 91. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript There's a museum just outside Orlando, Florida at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park. It's called the Yeti Museum, and it's dedicated to the scientific, historic and cultural studies of the legendary humanoid primate said to inhabit the Himalayan Mountains. The curator of the museum is convinced that the Yeti is real and dangerous. Shaelyn Amaio: It includes local, indigenous cultures and references to their beliefs about the Yeti. And it's all of this evidence, quote unquote--I'm doing air quotes, but you can't see it--that the Yeti is real and it's something that you should be scared of. The museum is actually the queue to a roller coaster called Expedition Everest, which is themed to look like a train taking visitors on a journey through the Himalayas. At points in the ride, visitors encounter an audio-animatronic Yeti. Shaelyn Amaio: So by the time you get on the train, you're primed. You know you're going to see the Yeti, even if you haven't been on the ride before. And so then when you encounter it, it does make it a little bit more real because you've already seen all of this evidence of the existence of Yetis. And so you're not just like, Oh, this is just a robot covered in fake fur with a strobe light on it. And it kind of like switches that on in your brain. For public experience advocate Shaelyn Amaio, this is a great example of how museums--and museum iconography--are used as shorthand for reliability, truth, and prestige in theme parks. Shaelyn Amaio: Hi, my name is Shaelyn Amaio and I am somebody who works in museums, mostly in history museums, but I like to think of myself as a public experience advocate. So my interests lie both in museums and in other leisure activities. Amaio grew up in Connecticut, and first visited Walt Disney World in Florida as a five-year-old. Shaelyn Amaio: I just remember the feeling of being on Main Street U.S.A. in the Magic Kingdom and being completely overwhelmed. Right? Because when you're five, you don't know the history, you don't know what it's referencing, but you still know that it's like this nostalgic feeling, even if you don't have the words or the experiences. To, to relate that. And I think at that age, a lot of what you're feeding off of are the reactions of the adults around you. When people talk about going to Disney, they tend to center children and, like, what the kids will think of it. But I think something that's left out of that conversation is how adults react to the theme parks and why the kid's experience is kind of a mirror of adult experience in theme parks. Back in Connecticut, Amaio also spent her childhood visiting museums. Shaelyn Amaio: I was really lucky to get exposed to museums from an early age. And then as I got older, I will admit that I did not see a career in museums for myself. And then I went to undergrad and I was studying anthropology and I got to the end of my undergrad and was like, oh no, I don't actually want to be out in the field all the time. What am I going to do? Shaelyn Amaio: And so I ended up in a museum education program. And when I went on to get my MA I actually wrote my thesis on the presentation of history in Disney theme parks. So it all, it all came together. The 2011 thesis, which was titled “Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy: History and Innocence in the Magic Kingdom”, dives into how the so-called Castle parks at Disney resorts around the world, like Disneyland in Anaheim, California, Disneyland Paris in Paris, France and the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida--which all feature an iconic castle in their center and differened themed lands surrounding it like Adventureland and Frontierland--remove the present from the visitors’ experiences. Shaelyn Amaio: So the Disney theme parks actually like traffic in the past, that is their main currency you have in the Magic Kingdom most of the areas of the park are themed to different historic moments, right? The one main exception being Tomorrowland, which is kind of set in this retro-futuristic never. And so when you look back and say, okay, I as a visitor am now the main character, the important thing to understand is that they remove the present. Shaelyn Amaio: And so if you are only looking at the past and this future that will never be then the past doesn't have any impact, right? There's no responsibility for what happened in the past. And so as a visitor, I can just kind of be like, wow, the past was bad, but look, we've made so much progress. Things are getting better every day and not really have to grapple with all of the history and, and its continuing legacies today. I think another important thing is that it's intended to feel neutral to mostly to white Americans, which I think we can't talk about Disney parks without talking about that. Each of these images of the past, weathered rocks etched in the landscape of Frontierland or the oil-lantern illuminated shops of Main Street, U.S.A, help us relate to history. One of the main principles of experience design is that even the smallest out-of-place detail ruins the illusion. Castle parks that follow this same formula continue to open into the 21st century in Hong Kong and Shanghai. But even by the 1980s, Disney had developed a different model of park in the form of EPCOT. EPCOT was a theme park which sought to create a permanent World’s Fair. Disney had experience with the 1964/1965 World's Fair in New York, where no fewer than four corporate sponsors hired the company to develop attractions for them. Shaelyn Amaio: It is really interesting to think about how these different parks and the periods in which they were built reflect the way that we think about knowledge in these different times. If you look at EPCOT, which opened in 1982. Here you have a different relationship to history and a different relationship to progress for Americans. So you're coming off of the 1970s, which were really tumultuous, right? You have an entire pavilion in EPCOT that is the Universe of Energy Pavilion, which was sponsored by Exxon Mobil. And we had just come off of the gas crisis. Americans were not really feeling secure in the future of fossil fuels. And so you have this entire ride that talks about how great everything is, how technology is advancing, how we're going to solve all of the problems of humanity. Universe of Energy Narration: In our ever-changing world, the road to tomorrow’s energy is indeed long, complex, and challenging. It demands the development and wise use of today’s energy resources. It calls for practical and affordable new sources for tomorrow. But at this point they have to kind of also be like, we know sometimes things are bad. Like they have to acknowledge the reality of the situation, but at the end of the day, they'

The Grove Museum inside the historic Call/Collins House is one of Tallahassee’s newest museums, and it’s changing how the city interprets its own history. Instead of focusing on the mansion house’s famous owners, including Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, Executive Director John Grandage oriented the museum around civil rights. Cleverly tracing how Collins’s thinking on race relations evolved, the museum uses the house and the land it sits on to tell the story of the forced removal of indigenous people from the area, the enslaved craftspeople who built the house, and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott. Grandage says the museum’s interpretive plan and focus on civil rights wouldn't have been possible without the work of Black Tallahassee institutions like John G. Riley House Museum created by Althemese Barnes or the Southeastern Regional Black Archives built from FAMU Professor James Eaton’s collection. In this episode recorded at the museum, Grandage describes how historic preservation has always been about what the dominant culture finds worth persevering, the museum’s genealogical role, and the white backlash to Collins’s moderate positions on civil rights. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Ian at the 1992 Springtime Tallahassee Parade (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qiq5hou4dow64fa/627511115.586189.jpeg?dl=0) 00:55 White Supremacy in Tallahassee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tallahassee,_Florida#Black_history) 01:20 Smokey Hollow (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/85) 01:40 John Grandage 02:35 The Grove Museum (https://thegrovemuseum.com) 03:05 Developing the Interpretive Plan with a Focus on Slavery and Civil Rights 03:30 Governorship of LeRoy Collins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeRoy_Collins) 04:36 Tallahassee Bus Boycott (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallahassee_bus_boycott) 06:08 Presenting the Narrative through Collins 06:50 White Backlash to Collins’s Moderate Position on Civil Rights 08:15 The Construction of the House by Enslaved Craftspeople (https://thegrovemuseum.com/learn/history/) 09:45 The Genealogical Role of the Museum 10:50 Forced Removal of Indigenous People in Tallahassee 12:25 How Tallahassee Interprets Its History 13:00 The John G. Riley House (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/85) 13:10 The Meek-Eaton Black Archives (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/86) 14:08 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ (https://jointhemuseum.club) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 90. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript I found an old picture of me, taken about a block away from what is now the Grove Museum in Tallahassee, FL. The picture was taken in March 1992: I'm facing the camera as the Springtime Tallahassee parade -- Tallahassee's biggest annual celebration -- goes by behind me. Positioned in the frame is a confederate flag, proudly carried by two people parading down the middle of the street. My three-year-old self is blocking whatever group came after the flag -- maybe a club, maybe a mascot, maybe a group of Civil War reenactors? The fact that the confederate flag in a parade happened to be in the background of this candid shot hints at the white supremacy that undergirds Tallahassee, a city that had a majority Black population during Reconstruction. In 1907, the city refused Andrew Carnegie's offer to build a library, because the conditions of the donation stated that the library would have to serve Black patrons. In the 1970s, Apalachee Parkway was built right over the Black Smokey Hollow neighborhood -- a pattern of development which repeats to this day. And the local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat, waited until 2006 to apologize for it's pro-segregationists coverage of the 1956 Tallahassee Bus Boycott. And of course, that white supremacy extends to the local museums. John Grandage: So the whole idea of historical preservation in the United States, so in our country, has been what is worth preserving. And here we are, interrogating the source material to reach back in the past and bring stories that have been dormant or deliberately excluded, silenced, now into a place where they can be told. I think what's interesting is how museums have a role to play in that. John Grandage: Exactly. Right. Because, in some ways museums have been, maybe the nicest way to say it is complicit in that storyline. John Grandage: Right. They're part of that dominant narrative. And that's why this historic house, the Grove Museum, which opened in 2017 is so interesting in the context of how Tallahassee interprets its history. This is John Grandage, executive director of the Grove Museum. John Grandage: My name is John Grandage, and I'm the executive director at the Grove Museum in Tallahassee, Florida. And we are at the Call-Collins house at the Grove Museum. At first glance, the Grove Museum doesn't look like a museum that might change how Tallahassee interprets its history. It's a stately mansion house in the center of town -- less than a block from the parade route -- and it was built from 1835 to 1839 by Richard Keith Call. After that, it was owned by a series of wealthy Floridians, most recently by former Florida Governor LeRoy Collins and his wife, Mary Call Collins, who left the house to the state to preserve as a museum. John Grandage: So I've been here since 2014 and like there wasn't really a clear interpretive plan. So coming up with the, let's tell the whole story, let's talk not just about politics, but let's dig deeper and try to look at this as sort of like a witness to all this history. And then coming up with the let's emphasize on civil rights. The museum uses the governorship of LeRoy Collins as a narrative arc to tell that ‘whole story.’ It traces how his own thinking on race evolved from his early years as a staunch segregationist, as an opening to tell the story of civil rights in Florida. Collins was elected in 1954 -- the same year that the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregation is unconstitutional in public schools and other places of public accommodation. John Grandage: When he ran for office, he didn't initially come out in support of that. So it's thinking about how does the country respond to civil rights? Collins feared also, to be very frank about it, the economic ramifications of Florida having kind of, you know, people being firehosed in the street or people standing in front of a doorway of a school and like shouting and calling out the troops to prevent integration. Like that to him was, would have been very damaging to the image Florida. Collins became one of the most prominent white Southern politicians to speak in favor of racial integration and the growing Civil Rights movement. He was governor from 1955 through 1961, which means that he was in charge during the 1956 Tallahassee Bus boycott. John Grandage: The bus boy caught here with the two students at FAMU that that really started it: Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson are their names. John Grandage: And then the community organized behind them, then you see the local churches, people like C K Steele, leaders in the community, sort of bring some broader community organization, which of course the boycott put all this economic pressure on the city and the bus company, which ultimately led to them repealing segregated seating ordinances and at the same time, the bus boycott in Montgomery, which started earlier, but runs somewhat parallel. And that's an important part of our interpretation of Collins is that he undeniably has a very specific moral view of the world. And as the state, or as the local government in Florida started to react very extremely to Civil Rights activism like jailing the sit-in demonstrators. What we can trace is here's a person who began to question these beliefs that he had grown up with. He says, it's like a two class society. Right. And he's on the privileged side. And then seeing the response and thinking about the potential for all kinds of ramifications in society. That's really what drove him to do a lot of the things that he did. And so he began to adapt his thinking. So in that way, we can actually take Collins and position the decisions he made, you know, not as something that came solely from him. So it gives a little bit of power to the activists and it helps to position the people really who were putting it on the line. So alongside the Collins story, we're able to tell that story of the local activists, and so it's important that Collins didn't act in a vacuum. Even more critical to the story -- in

Dr. Tehmina Goskar, director of the Curatorial Research Centre, co-founded MuseumHour with Sophie Ballinger in October 2014. The weekly peer-to-peer chat on Twitter “holds space for debate” for museum people all around the world. This month, Goskar officially steps back from her role at MuseumHour. This episode serves as both an “exit interview” for Goskar’s MusuemHour work and a chance to highlight other projects that she has founded based on her curatorial philosophy. In this episode, Goskar discusses founding the Curatorial Research Centre, democratizing culture through her Citizen Curators program (in association with the Cornwall Museums Partnership), and how over six years of MuseumHour conversations have shaped her work. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 MuseumHour at 6.5 Years Old (https://twitter.com/museumhour?lang=en) 00:50 Tehmina Goskar (https://www.curatorialresearch.com/people/) 01:20 MuseumHour's Founding 03:00 Mediums and Platforms 04:35 Museum Conferences 05:30 What is Curation? 07:15 "To Care For" 07:30 The Curatorial Research Centre (https://www.curatorialresearch.com/) 09:20 Citizen Curators (https://www.cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk/citizen-curators/) 12:38 Archipelago at the Movies: How to Steal A Million (1966) (https://www.patreon.com/posts/archipelago-at-47449904) 14:05 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 89. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript For the past 6 and a half years, more or less weekly, museum people gather on Twitter for something called MuseumHour. Together, these people form a peer to peer community, supporting discussion and debate between those who work in, enjoy, and challenge museums in society. Tehmina Goskar: That's the beauty of MuseumHour. It is entirely independent. It is not an organization. It is just about holding a space so other people can talk with each other. This is Dr. Tehmina Goskar, who co-founded MuseumHour back in October 2014. Goskar also founded the Curatorial Research Centre. Tehmina Goskar: Hello, my name is Tehmina Goskar and I am the director and curator of the Curatorial Research Centre. And that's an organization I started back in 2018, very much to support fellow curators from around the world and also to make progress in modernizing curatorial practice. This month, Goskar officially steps back from her role in MusuemHour. I wanted this to serve as both an exit interview and a chance to highlight other projects that she has founded based on her curatorial philosophies. Tehmina Goskar: Museum Hour started back in October, 2014. Sophie Ballinger, who was the co-founder with me, got together over Twitter. We've never met in real life. Goodness knows whether we ever will. Sophie was based up in the North of England. I'm based in the far West of Cornwall. But we both decided we'd give the idea of these discussion-based hours that were kind of finding their feet on Twitter at that time. So we decided to give it a go and it's grown and grown and grown and changed a lot since then. Of course Twitter's also changed hugely in terms of who participates, who feels confident about speaking up, who lurks in the background. There is a lot of polarization on the platform now. And so we've changed and adapted MuseumHour to all of those trends that we've seen happen, including its growing politicization as well. If I'm being honest, I kind of treated the whole thing even six and a half years on as an ongoing experiment in trying to understand how it is people like to communicate with each other and how it is that you can provide some kind of support for this peer to peer contact is what we're really after. On Museum Archipelago, we look at museums as a medium. And Twitter is also a medium -- one that has changed since MuseumHour started six and a half years ago. Since then, Twitter has shifted from a simple subscriber model, one where you see all the tweets from the people you follow in the order that they tweeted, to a system that uses algorithms that optimize for other factors, such as engagement with the tweets. This can make a global conversation about museums difficult. Tehmina Goskar: With the change in how Twitter is managed and how the concept of driving engagement and algorithms are dictating what we see on our timelines, there has absolutely been an impact on MuseumHour because of that. We've got to work much harder to try and get ideas for topics, for example, or people's ideas out to as broad and interested audience or participation group that we can. And that, that has proven very difficult, in fact, particularly of late, because people's timelines are so manipulated by Twitter's algorithms and because there's so much more noise on Twitter now than there was. So I'm kind of glad that MuseumHour has managed to hold its own so it retains a light structure. It does support those intimate conversations, as well as supporting bigger thoughts and opinions and even ones that people disagree about in one space. I’ve participated in and even hosted a few MuseumHours, and the thing it reminds me of the most is a museum conference, or the conversations you might have at a museum conference, which is yet another medium. But, interestingly, Goskar says that MuseumHour has never been about recreating that experience. Tehmina Goskar: That certainly isn't the kind of experience you usually get, unless you are fortunate enough to be able to afford to go to very expensive, large international museum conferences, for example, like the Museums Association Conferences in the UK or any of ICOM conferences. But we've never really perceived of MuseumHour to fill that kind of gap. We're still kind of exploring what it is that we think we're doing. And that's just by way of being very honest about not having an agenda and letting sort of the emergent process of MuseumHour happen. MuseumHour is just one of the volunteer projects Goskar works on. She is first and foremost a curator -- I term I still ask for the definition of after almost 90 episodes of this show. Tehmina Goskar: Curating doesn't just exist in the museum world. And I think far too many people in museums think that being a curator is somehow a special feature of museums, but no other field, but that is just not true. The way I described curation is very, very simple. For me. a good curator is part knowledge creator, and part communicator. So the philosophy of the Curatorial Research Centre is very much to promote this 50% model as we call it, idea of a curator. That you should be as interested in communicating knowledge stories, ideas about people, about material culture, and of course the connections between them as you are in the research, in the generating of knowledge, and also to recognize that not all knowledge and not all research comes from a Western idea of academic research. That's very important to me in my practice, but I would certainly also recognize expertise coming from lived experiences, coming from curatorial cultures, as I would recognize them in other parts of the world and certainly from other cultures past as well. So for me, it's very simple: I boil it down to a curator is 50% knowledge generator or knowledge creator and 50% communicator and wrapped ‘round that kind of equation is the very heart of the word to curate, which means to care for. So there must be some elements of intention and meaning and caring for what you're curating in order to authentically curate whatever it is you feel you want to curate. Goskar founded the Curatorial Research Centre in 2018, and a few months later brought archaeologist and audiovisual specialist Tom Goskar aboard -- who also happens to be her husband. The Centre aims to work in partnership with museums, not just in a transactional manner. Research is the core of the Centre’s work. At every opportunity research answers the questions: why are things done like this, what should we be doing instead? Tehmina Goskar: So why Curatorial Research? What on earth is Curatorial Research? It is critically engaging with the act of curation, wherever that may happen. The study of the phenomenon a bit like museology is the study specifically of museums. Curatorial Research is I would say taking a much more proactive stance towards constantly critically engaging with what curation and being a curator is all about and what it might be all about. So from my standpoint, I am an action researcher. I am a pretty vocal thinker and I'm interested in

During World War II, a Nazi collbatoring regime governed the south of France, and the city of Toulouse was a Resistance hub. The Vichy Government promoted anti-Semitism and collaborated with the Nazis, most specifically by deporting Jews to concentration and extermination camps. Fragmented Resistance fighters organized to form escape networks and build logistics chains to sabotage and disrupt the regime. In 1977, former Resistance members created a community museum in Toulouse about their experience. Today, that museum is called the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France, and is run by the regional government. Museum director Jérôme Blachon is reimagining how the museum tells the story of the French Resistance as the people who experienced firsthand pass away. In this episode, Blachon describes the challenge of presenting the fragmented nature of the resistance to a modern audience, the 2020 renovation of the museum, and his focus on transmitting precious memories. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Memorials in Toulouse (http://www.enseigner-histoire-shoah.org/visites-pedagogiques/les-lieux-a-visiter-en-france/le-memorial-de-la-shoah-toulouse/le-memorial-de-la-shoah-toulouse.html) 01:00 Toulouse During World War II 01:32 Jérôme Blachon, Director of the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France (https://fr.linkedin.com/in/jérôme-blachon-5a10314a) 02:20 "Engage, Collect, Transmit" 02:50 France During Nazi Germany's Administration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_military_administration_in_occupied_France_during_World_War_II) 03:38 Museum Archipelago Ep. 51 (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/51) 04:08 Presenting the Difference Forms of Resistance in the Museum 05:25 2020 Renovation (https://www.toulouse-visit.com/musee-departemental-de-la-resistance-et-de-la-deportation/toulouse/pcumid031fs0005f) 05:35 The Disappearance of the Last Witnesses 06:26 The Museum as Transmission 06:45 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 88. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Toulouse, France has many memorials, covering hundreds of years of history. There’s a statue of Joan of Arc, there's monuments to the soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War, and there’s memorials to the dead of World War I. But look closer, and you’ll also find sites covering a very specific slice of history: the years between 1940 and 1944, the period of Nazi Germany’s military administation of France. There’s the building where the Gestapo secret police made their local headquarters, there’s a monument to the Glory of the Resistance, and there’s the Shoah Memorial, the Hebrew word for the Holocoust, that honors the Jews who were deported and killed during this period. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Toulouse, during World War II, was a Resistance hub in the South of France. A lot of Resistance fighters came to Toulouse to form a Resistance unit and many then left for the rest of France or Spain. A number of escape networks began in Toulouse and took English airmen, for example, or Resistance fighters across the Pyrenees to London or the United States. This is Jerome Blachon, speaking French. Blachon is head of the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France, which is right down the street from many of these memorials in Toulouse. This museum brings together these sites, as well as artifacts, stories, and witnesses from across the region and all over France. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Hello, my name is Jerome Blachon. I am in charge of the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France. The museum actually opened in 1977. It was first a community museum. The museum was initially a community museum set up by former members of the French Resistance, and in 1994, it became departmental--which is to say it is now funded by the regional government. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): The three themes of the museum are: engage, collect, transmit. We collect to store and transmit this memory of our ancestors from our elders to future generations. Memorials that defend the memory of the Resistance gives us access to people who have objects in their homes and documents and some of them intrust them to us. The focus on Toulouse and the surrounding region in the museum is in not just because it’s under the authority of the regional government--it also reflects the the uneven and ever-changing military administation of France under Nazi Germany. Until November 1942, the Nazis only had direct occupation of part of the country: mostly the north of France, including Paris, and the western coast. The south of France was under the jurisdiction of the Vichy regime--an independent ally of Nazi Germany, which promoted anti-Semitism and practiced collaboration with the Nazis, most specifically by deporting Jews to concentration and extermination camps. So when it comes to the people fighting this regime--the Resistance--It’s tempting to present history like a story, with clear-cut intentions and a simple narrative. But the history of the French Resistance was anything but simple. It’s not like there was one single unified resistance with one single outcome in mind. In episode 51 of this program, we examine another collaborationist regime: Bulgaria in the early 1940s, by visiting the Sofia Jewish Museum of History. Today, one of the galleries is named The Holocaust and the Rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria, which even the museum staff say is an overly simplisic title. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Many visitors are in fact unaware of this fragmented structure of the Resistance, with the Gaullists on one side and the Communists on the other. So, in the Museum, we do indeed present the different forms of Resistance. To present the complexity, the Museum of Resistance and Deportation focuses on presenting objects gathered from witnesses. These include Resistance newspapers of various groups, and photos and testimonies of those who were fighting -- whether in acts of sabotage, providing shelter to those who needed it, or even building the logistictics of feeding fighters in other parts of France. There’s also catalogues: names and photographs of people deported and accounts of reprisal attacks against Resistance Fighters and Collaborators alike, as control of territory ebbed and flowed. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): The period of World War II is quite complex to explain to the younger generations, who often have a rather Manichean view, that is to say in black and white. You are either a Resistance fighter or a collaborator, pro-Vichy, Nazi, that's it. You are either a good guy or a bad guy. The museum was closed for an 18-month renovation from 2018 until 2020. The renovation modernized the museum, and also reflects our moment in time. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Today, this type of museum has a new dimension with the disappearance of the last witnesses, since they can no longer testify in front of students, scholars and the general public. So it is our mission to transmit this memory. To do so, we have collected and we continue to collect objects, and especially testimonies. The renovated museum features two floors of permanent galleries and space for temporary exhibitions. Special programs are available to school kids, who are encouraged to question the sustainability of the spirit of resistance, the current struggles for the preservation and extension of rights and freedoms, and the fight against inequalities. Today, it’s no longer a museum run by former members of the resistance, but instead it focused on being the transmission to new generations. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): The witnesses are now 90 or 95 years old, and we continue to collect their testimonies and to project, broadcast, and record these testimonies in order to gather their precious memories and transmit them to the new generations. This has been Museum Archipelago.

Vitosha Mountain, the southern border of Sofia, Bulgaria, is home to about 15 brown bears and one bear museum. According to Dr. Nikola Doykin, fauna expert at the Vitosha Nature Park Directorate, the bear population is stable—if humans stay away and protect their habitat. To Doykin and his team, teaching children about the bears is the best way forward, and the Vitosha Bear Museum does just that. Founded in 2002 by repurposing an abandoned mountain shelter for the Vitosha mountain rangers, the Vitosha Bear Museum provides “useful tips on how to meet a bear.” It’s also sparse: the entire gallery is a single room, and the gallery lighting is powered by a car battery. In this episode recorded at the museum, Dr. Nikola Doykin describes why the location is so useful for eco education, how groups of schoolchildren react to exhibits, and what the museum plans to do when it installs solar panels. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Vitosha mountain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitosha) 00:50 The Viosha Bear Museum (http://park-vitosha.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/spisanie-ENG_July-2012.pdf) 01:05 Dr. Nikola Doykin (https://www.nature-experience-bulgaria.com/nature-tour-guides/nikola-doykin-vitosha-nature-park-tour-guide/) 02:10 The Location of the Museum (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Музей+на+мечката/@42.636078,23.2115471,14z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0xa27af03db6067ea9!8m2!3d42.636078!4d23.2251191) 04:00 "Useful Tips On How To Meet A Bear" (https://www.novinite.com/articles/204909/Vitosha+Nature+Park%3A+The+Bear+Museum+and+The+Museum+of+Owls+Open+for+Visitors) 04:35 Bear Markings in the Museum 06:40 Ep. 6 Muzeiko (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/6) 06:50 Ep. 46 Vessela Gercheva Directs Playful Exhibits at Bulgaria’s First Children’s Museum (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/46) 08:30 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 87. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Towering over the Bulgarian capital of Sofia is Vitosha mountain. Connected to the city by several public buses, residents like me love hiking the numerous mountain trails to get away from the hustle and bustle. [Hiking Sounds] And it was on one of these solitary hikes that I first came across The Vitosha Bear Museum. At first I didn’t quite know what I was looking at: a cute little hut halfway up the mountain with a locked door and boarded up windows. But the sign said Bear Museum in Bulgarian, and also that the museum was closed because it was “hibernating” for the winter. So I sent some emails and that’s how, a few days later, I met Dr. Nikola Doykin at the museum. добър ден! (Good day!) Dr. Nikola Doykin: добър ден! (Good day!) Dr. Nikola Doykin is a Fauna expert at the Vitosha Nature Park Directorate, the organization that runs the museum. And he also had a key to open the museum door, which he wasn’t sure would work because it had been a month since he last used it. [Key Unlocking Sounds] Dr. Nikola Doykin: “And as you see, our museum is how to say, very simple.” The museum is as small on the inside as it looks on the outside. There’s no electric connection at the museum -- the LED lights that illuminate the gallery are powered by a car battery that Doykin switched on when we entered. The rustic appearance is a carryover from the building’s first purpose: a mountain shelter for the Vitosha mountain rangers. Dr. Nikola Doykin: And this was the place that they are staying during the night. And after that, it was abandoned, totally. And one guy had the idea to make this a place where we can show the bears, and where they can live, and the whole idea of the bears in the forest. The abandoned shelter was turned into the Vitosha Bear Museum in 2002. For Doykin, this is the perfect setting for the museum -- because what’s outside is just as important as what’s inside. Dr. Nikola Doykin: it will be easy for us if this kind of a museum was in a city. But we cut the line if we are in the city, but not in the forest because after that we can go out in the forest and show something else to the children. And mostly we have a little bit of a different education with the children and we start from here after that, we go out in the field and they can feel everything. Dr. Nikola Doykin: the idea is to put especially the children, the new generation, to put them in a real feelings to smell the forest, to feel the wind. The whole idea of the eco education, forestry education to take out the children from the cities and to show them real nature and how they can walk around and even to have fun in the forest, not only in the cities. The forests and mountains of Bulgaria represent a part of the national ethos, and so do the brown bears that live there. As the number of bears in the country declined, so too has the cultural pervasiveness of bears as fearsome carnivorous predators. Today, there’s an increased focus on conservation and even a sense of pride about Bulgaria’s remaining bears. Dr. Nikola Doykin: We can say something about 10 to 15 bears that are left in Vitosha mountain, but mostly on the south part of the mountain. According to Doykin, DNA testing has indicated that there’s enough genetic diversity in this population of bears to reproduce and ensure their continued survival on Vitosha mountain -- that is if humans stay away and protect their habitat. To Doykin and his team, teaching children about the bears is the best way forward. As a local news article about the museum put it, “useful tips on how to meet a bear are given at the Vitosha Bear Museum”. Dr. Nikola Doykin: And mostly what to do, not to meet the bear. And if we meet it, find it somehow, what to do. In the corner of the room, there’s a tree taken from the forest which has markings from a bear. Dr. Nikola Doykin: What they do to mark their territory, the different types of markings. And also, one tree that is for real marked, from a bear, here with his teeth and here with his claws.We can show to the children what, what to look for. The tree in the sparse interior makes it easy to connect visitors to what’s going on outside the four walls. Dr. Nikola Doykin: After we show them how the bears mark their territory, to start to look around, to see if some of the trees are marked, And then we present to the children that same information. Where it can live, where we can find it, to take care of the animals, not to kill them, we make some programs and speak to the childrens. On interpretive panels, visitors will also find information about the evolution and geographic distribution of different types of bears. These cover not just the brown bear -- the only type of bear found in Europe in Bulgaria, but also black bears in the Americas and in Asia, and polar bears. A glass case displays skulls from all of these bears. There’s even a bit of space in the basement where visitors can go inside a fake bear cave and see statues of a brown bear and her cub. Dr. Nikola Doykin: In here, the main idea was to be dark, because in a cave, there is no lights. We had no real bears, but only those. And the small bear in the cave, that's his mom take care of him. The cave is the perfect example of the museum working with what it has -- in this case a dark, low-ceilinged basement that doesn’t require electricity, and choosing the interpretive materials carefully -- in this case a simple statue is quite effective. In many ways, the museum stands apart from the Muzeiko Children’s museum in Sofia, which we’ve featured in episodes 6 and and 46 of this show. That museum: the first children’s museum in the Balkans, features a huge number of computerized interactives centered around the concept of playful learning, which was not encouraged -- to say the least -- when Bulgaria was a Communist country. But The Vitosha Bear Museum also breaks the mold of rote memorization and statistics overload that used to define Bulgaria’s education system and is still present at many of Bulgaria’s museums. But instead of computerized interactives, the museum finds playful learning in the feeling of a sparse ranger’s hut. And next season, the museum will add electricity with a solar panel system. Dr. Nikola Doykin: Next year, already we got contract with company to make a solar system with solar panels. We will have electricity and then we will have more things to do. With electricity installed, Doykin and his team hope to increase the number and interactivity of the exhibits. Dr. Nikola Doy

History professor Dr. James Eaton taught his students with the mantra: “African American History is the History of America.” As chair of the history department at FAMU, a historically Black University in Tallahassee, Florida, he was used to teaching students how to use interlibrary loan systems and how to access rare book collections for their research. But in the early 1970s, as his students' research questions got more in depth and dove deeper into Black history, he realized that there simply weren't enough documents. So he started collecting himself, driving a bus around South Georgia, South Alabama, and North Florida to gather artifacts. That collection grew to become the Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum on FAMU’s campus. Today, museum director Dr. Nashid Madyun presides over one of the largest repositories of African American history and culture in the Southeast. In this episode, Madyun describes how the structure of the gallery fights the compression of Black history, how the archive handles dehumanizing records and artifacts, and how a smaller museum can tell a major story. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Dr. James Eaton (http://www.famu.edu/index.cfm?MEBA&THEFOUNDERS) 00:50 Starting The Collection 01:35 Dr. Nashid Madyun (http://www.famunews.com/2015/10/famu-names-nashid-madyun-director-of-the-meek-eaton-black-archives-and-research-center/) 02:44 Carnegie Library 03:20 13 Galleries at the Meek-Eaton Black Archives 04:56 The Compression of African American History 05:20 Jim Crow and the KKK Exhibit 06:02 Presenting Derogatory Material at the Museum 07:00 How a Smaller Museum Can Tell a Major Story 08:20 Manumission Exhibit and Reading Cursive Handwriting 09:24 No Visitors During the Pandemic 10:40 Museum Archipelago Episode 85 (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/85) 11:00 The First Steps to Telling Hidden Stories 11:50 SPONSOR: SuperHelpful (http://superhelpful.com/arc) 12:45 Outro | Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Sponsor: SuperHelpful This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SuperHelpful, an audience research and development firm dedicated to helping museum leaders create more equitable and innovative organizations through problem-space research. Kyle Bowen, the founder of SuperHelpful, has brought together a team of designers and researchers to build a new community for museum folks who want to support one another as they reimagine what museums will be in the future. To join—and bypass the current waiting list—use this special link just for Museum Archipelago listeners! Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 86. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] History professor Dr. James Eton taught his students with the mantra: “African American History is the History of America.” As chair of the history department at FAMU, a historically Black university in Tallahassee, Florida, he was used to teaching students how to use interlibrary loan systems and how to access rare book collections for their research. But in the early 1970s, as his students' research questions got more in depth and dove deeper into Black history, he realized that there simply weren't enough documents. Nashid Madyun: And that helped him to realize that the understanding of Abraham Lincoln, the KKK , the rise of the Black middle class, Jim Crow, all of the stories where will forever untapped properly if there is no repository. And he found that as people die, they had material in their attics. But in this region: South Georgia, South Alabama, Northern Florida, there was no place to present these wares. So he started to try to enhance his classroom with these artifacts. He took advantage of an available bus and went around the region, asking people for material and they were happy to share and donate. Nashid Madyun: And there was no formal museum practice or archive at the time. It was a professor of history trying to find a way to help the students see that there are two sides to a story. That collection grew to become the Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum on FAMU’s campus, one of the largest repositories of African-American history and culture in the Southeast. This is Nashid Madyun, director of the museum. Nashid Madyun: Hello, my name is Nashid Madyun. I'm director of the Southeastern, regional Black archives research center and museum at FAMU, that’s Florida A&M University. Nashid Madyun: So this institution was founded in 1971. It opened its doors officially to the public in 1976. Professor James Eaton was able to collect artifacts to enhance the classes he was teaching in history, in African American history. And he was able to utilize this building in the mid seventies to present the rare memorabilia and artifacts that he found to interpret African American history as he saw it and present public programs. The collection and museum are housed in the Carnegie Library on FAMU's campus. Dr. James Eton died in 2004, during the construction of a four story expansion building that was erected right behind the library to keep up with the growing size of the collections. Because the archive was started from artifacts and documents gathered by bus, there is some geographic focus on the North Florida region. But today the Museums interprets Black history in general -- with objects from all across the country. Nashid Madyun: The research we pulled together takes us to the entire Florida panhandle and South Alabama, South Georgia. So now we have what we consider amongst these four floors, 13 galleries. The highlight, the number one highlight would be our Jim Crow and KKK collection, an authentic uniform, the constitutions from the 1920s, the memorabilia that highlight the derogatory advertisements and propaganda of the Jim Crow era. We also have an authentic-style church highlighting the plantation churches of the TriCounty area, as early as 1830s and replicas of those churches. 64 churches were utilized for this exhibit. Nashid Madyun: We also have a changing gallery upstairs that we highlight items or issues that address some point or some aspect of popular culture. Public culture now would be Black Lives Matter. And that movement has been going on for the past couple of years, so what we have up now is an exhibit objectively presenting the subject of newsprint from the 1700s to the present, how the violence and Black Codes and legislation and perspectives have been portrayed in print media. And so people have been very interested in that exhibit, so that's very compelling. The galleries also include African Americans in the Military -- which features artifacts from the Civil War and the Spanish American War, and African American pioneers in medicine and science, which highlights FAMU’s role as a research institution. With the way the gallery is setup, Madyun fights against the compression of African American history -- when I was studying Black history in Tallahassee, Florida as a high school student, we moved quickly from the Emancipation to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, skipping the time between. Nashid Madyun: I like to integrate new possibilities and ways to tell stories that are hidden or not properly told. We call this particular exhibit Jim Crow and KKK, aside from Slavery to Freedom. So the exhibit previously had all of these words together. And I wanted to separate those two so that we could see that there was a split and time: there was bondage and then there was amancipationand freedom, and there was a gap from the 1880s to the 1930s, when cotton was king, tobacco was strong. You had the rise of the Black middle class and the rise of the Black middle class, the mobility of the Black middle class specifically coincides with the three waves of the KKK. Nashid Madyun: So we present the derogatory material in the face of the public and say, this is how it was, and this is why it was, you had people who feared this rise. Nashid Madyun: And so. You can interpret it how you want to, but we presented based on the information we have. We could talk about the rise of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the introduction of dentists and lawyers, the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance, all of these movements just so happened to coincide with the exact time frames of these waves of the KKK. And that's what's going on. And so I don't believe that any part of our history, whether slave chains or breathing beds or KKK robes should be hidden. The depth and breadth of the collection enables The Museum to tell a much broader story than just a historical house -- or a museum that is tied to a single event. For museums that interpret Black history, that’s still somewhat rare, but Madyun sees it as the beginning of a trend. Nashid Madyun: I've been in museums for 20 years and when I came into museums all the museums, the majority were mainstream, there were only a few African American museums. If there was an African American museum, it was an African American historic house, right? And so the idea that a major story can be told by a small museum in our new virtual world is possible. Nashid Madyun: It was not p