The University of Michigan
School of Information and Museum Studies Program

SI 515: "Material Culture and the Interpretation of Objects"

Winter 2007
3 credits

Instructor: Robert L. Frost, 301-A West Hall; rfrost@umich.edu, 734-332-0031
Time/Place: 1-4 pm Thursdays; location: 412 West Hall.
Office Hours: 2-4 pm Tuesdays; and by appointment.

Course description & objectives:
Museum Studies and Information Studies intersect in a number of intriguing ways, not least in the fact that they both serve to make information-laden materials cognitively, culturally, and intellectually accessible. At the same time, however, the former deals with objects while the latter deals (primarily) with texts. Many of the tools and conceptual frameworks used in Information Studies map almost transparently to Museum Studies--modes of classification and description, for example--yet the information "content" of objects is often more elusive and ambiguous, sometimes to the point of near opacity. As Information Science moves increasingly beyond textual parsing into semantic and statistical analysis as a crucial method for pursuing and defining the meaning of texts, Museum Studies professionals can pride themselves on a rich tradition of qualitative interpretation.

At the same time, we must be aware that objects themselves are information-bearing entities. As such, they pose many parallel, yet some unique, qualities with respect to the text and data usually addressed by information science. Beyond the issues of meaning and interpretation, potential museum objects challenge our traditional notions of accessibility and hence, of classification. Most museums display only a small portion of their holdings, yet all such holdings must be made administratively accessible with rich systems of classificatory affordances. We will examine how text and object collide to destabilize and reshape our notions of sorting and labeling.

Successful completion of this course will provide School of Information students answers and approaches to a number of critical issues, including:

• How to address non-textual objects (images, artifacts, etc.) as information-bearing entities subject to many of the same classification and retrieval practices applied to textual information--with a number of specific caveats
  
• How choices of tags, labels, and classification criteria affect both information practices and user experiences
  
• How a study of objects and their arrangement/description is more "physical" than that of texts, as their presentation creates a very spatially-based environment
  
• How descriptive and classification strategies affect both viewers' interpretations and professionals' information practices
  
• How myriad different professionals and academics--from museologists and art historians to librarians and STS scholars--have addressed questions of interpreting material objects.
  
• The emerging tension between traditional museological professionals associated with "hard" artifacts and advocates of virtual museums
  
• How issues of representation and description shift in the context of "going virtual" in museums
  
• The origins of traditional institutions that build and maintain collections of objects (libraries, archives, and museums) and how they are adapting to fundamental social and technological change at the beginning of the 21st century.

This course explicitly builds upon and expands issues raised in School of Information 504, "Social Systems and Collections," in large part by focusing on the specifics of collection-building and management. For SI students, successful completion of SI 504 is highly recommended. In addition, we will leverage notions of collection structure, management, and lifecycle as we examine museum practices of acquisition, presentation, and re-purposing, and how such practices implicitly recast the context of meaning-making for information professionals as well as viewers.

course readings:
Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos
Edward P. Alexander, The Museum in America: Innovators and Pioneers
Robert Bogdan, Freak Show

-- plus a selection of articles available as Web-based electronic content.

assignments:

The key part of this course is to write the biography of an object of your choice, drawn from any museum or display on the UofM campus. Such objects can be built, such as the fourth floor (Statistics Dept) zone of West Hall, or strategically placed, such as an object on display on North Campus--not to mention, of course, myriad objects from the Kelsey or other formal museum sites. Impressive papers in the past have looked at, for example, zoetropes, the 18th-century Spanish mortar next to Hatcher Library, the faux-classical "rubble" outside of Lorch Hall, and the spinning cube next to the Fleming Building. This paper will be based on original research and (more importantly) independent conceptualization and it will run from 15 to 25 pages, containing an explicit discussion of your interpretive framework from the perspective of both the presenter and the viewer. In preparation for the paper, you will develop interim written work, from research proposals to outlines, though only the proposals will be graded. You will also write a book review on one of the books you use in your major paper. Finally, you will be asked to give an informal presentation of your work. Depending on when you are scheduled for presenting your material, you will be asked to discuss the research process, conceptual agendas, or the actual content of your work and its conclusions.

The research paper is intended to go beyond the usual research-and-write routine, as it focuses upon and uses concepts associated with collection-building and maintenance. Selecting an object of study is, of course, not a trivial exercise, and once an object is designated, you will address the relativeness of its context from the perspective of the originator, the curator, and the viewer. You will use that notion of multiple contexts to identify the different ways in which it might be classified, catalogued, and presented. You'll be invited to use Bruno Latour's notion of "immutable mobiles" to discuss how your object's meaning changes (or doesn't!) as it shifts contexts. You will also pose questions about your object's technological dependence on other technologies from its origination context, how (and whether) your object can be preserved and presented without unduly "domesticating it" into a museum environment. Of equal importance, you will show how your object's meaning shifts as its context changes in its path from originator to museum patron. Finally, as individual "collected" objects are presumably selected to be emblematic or representative of something else which is perhaps "larger," you will be invited to ask if, in the name of preservation, surrogates or of the object might suffice for that purpose.

Presentations will be worth 10% of the grade, book reviews will be worth 20%, proposals will be worth 15%, class participation worth 15%, and the paper worth 40%. Due dates are as follows:

Research proposals: Week IV
Book reviews: Week VIII
Major papers: Week XIV

a note on academic honesty:
Whatever your attitudes toward material property, as mental workers, you must respect intellectual property. Plagiarism (the claim that the ideas of another author are your own) and cheating are severe crimes and will be met with a failing grade. While you are required to consult written sources and encouraged to work with other students, you are expected to do so with high standards of personal honesty and integrity.

schedule of meetings & topics:
Week I (Jan. 4): Course Introduction.

Topics: defining our terrain: basic approaches.

Issues: Genres of static and "living" museum objects: art, technological devices, scientific instruments, imperial/colonial collectibles, geological items, archeological artifacts, objects for diversion and wonderment, works of "art," cabinets of curiosities; how do objects and texts differ (and, perhaps, converge) in the context of information practice?

Readings: none.

Week II (Jan. 11): Theories and Practices of Interpretation and Collecting.

Topics: From the social construction of technology to cultural anthropology, the politics of display, learning from literary criticism; what are the implicit classification tags that guide the building of collections of artifacts and where are they epistemologically located?

Readings: John L. King and Margaret L. Hedstrom, "Epistemic Infrastructure in the Rise of the Knowledge Economy," paper commissioned by the OECD January, 2002); Madeleine Akrich, "The De-scription of Technological Objects;" Bruno Latour, "Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts," Clifford Geertz, "The Balinese Cock-Fight."

Week III (Jan. 18): Early Assemblages and Collections: Cabinets of Curiosities.

Topics: From reliquaries to collections: self-referentiality and the role of the collector; the picture frame, the act of framing, and the problem of epistemological frames; collection as anti-narrative; what does an alien classification framework tell us about the contextual contingency of those we use?

Readings: Michael Wintroub PowerPoint on cabinets of curiosities, in PowerPoint or QuickTime format (take care: either file is over 30 Mb!), William Mueller, "Mathematical Wunderkammern," American Mathematical Monthly 108 (November 2001), 785-796; "Devices of Wonder" (a contemporary cabinet at the Getty Museum); Patrick Geary, "Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics," in Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, Ch. 6. The Geary and Mueller articles are available as well as electronic library reserves under SI 515. Here are a few pictures of relics and reliquaries: a nice reliquary from Korcula, Croatia, and two relic photos from Kotor, Montenegro (1, 2). The modes of display are pretty impressive. BTW, Anne R. Kenney, of Cornell University Library, created a "Requiem for a Reliquary"—it's fun, but some might find it offensive. If you need a PowerPoint reader; here it is :

--••-- research proposals are due on Week IV --••--

FYI, here's a pair of proposals, one old, one newer; they should offer a sense of what these beasts should look like.

Week IV (Jan. 25): The Self-Effacing Eye and the Grandiosity of the Marginal Individual: Early Scientific Instruments and Imperial Collections.

Topics: Galileo, Boyle, and other scientists: modernity and the objective objectif; claims to see the world "as it is" with the eye of science; instruments as social mobilization devices; can Big Science offer a transcendent framework for classification and description?; what happens when the "rules" of scientific knowledge change?

Readings: Michael Wintroub, “Taking Stock at the End of the World: Rites of Distinction and Practices of Collecting in Early Modern Europe,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30: 3 (September 1999): 395-424; Mario Biagioli, "Galileo the Emblem-Maker”, Isis 82 (1990), 230-258; Steve Shapin "Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology,” Social Studies of Science 14 (1984), 481-520; Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, Chapter 2, "Crossings," and Chapter 8, "Removals." If you're interested in the contemporary way that "foreigners" (shifted in time, space, and/or culture) present ancient Egypt today, you should check out the Eternal Egypt virtual museum, the product of a collaboration betwwen the Egyptian government and IBM. It's pretty impressive.

Week V (Feb. 1): The Emergence of New Public Epistemologies

Topics: The birth of public civic space, 1780-1830, concurrent with the rise of the democratic nation-state; museums and libraries as makers of collective civic and national identity; constucting cognitive and class differences between science and technology; epistemological framing of things.

Readings: Nina E. Lerman, "The Uses of Useful Knowledge…," Osiris 12 (1997), 39-59; Alexander, Chs. 1, 2, 7, 12, & 13; surf the site of the Musée du Centre National des Arts et Métiers; Kathryn Henderson, "The Visual Culture of Engineers," in Henderson, On Line and On Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) 25-58.

Week VI (Feb 8): The Conceptual Alignment of Things: Dilemmas of Classification

Topics: Epistemological frames and the early sorting of species; Enlightenment systems for classifying knowledge; objects, provenance, and texts: problems of situating things; the lifecycles of information objects.

Readings: Susan Leigh Star and Geoff Bowker, Sorting Things Out, Chs. 9 & 10; Robert Darnton, "Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge," in The Great Cat Massacre; Christine Hine, "Representations of Information Technology in Disciplinary Development: Disappearing Plants and Invisible Networks," Science, Technology, & Human Values XX:1 (Winter, 1995), 65-85; Tony Bennett, "Speaking to the Eyes: Museums, Legibility and the Social Order," in Sharon MacDonald, ed., The Politics of Display, Ch. 2.

-•-A pair of [optional] "FYI" pieces here on categorical incommensurabilities, both by Malcolm Gladwell-•-

-•-the first on John Rock of birth-control fame, the second on SUV safety-•-

Week VII (Feb. 15): Politics of Display I: Collecting Animals, Barbarians, and Casualties

Topics: From menagerie to zoo: collecting and emergent public culture; taming the wild with cages, reversing the imperial gaze; how do museologists and information professionals construct collections that generate collective memory and what are often the components of that memory? Contexts and meanings: how present agendas recast past meanings (see the Hottentot Venus and Ota Benga links).

Readings: Hanson, entire (it's not as long as it looks!); Web resources on the Hottentot Venus (1) (2) (3), and Ota Benga (1) (2) (3) (4), Dan Sherman on WW1 monuments; Bernadine Walsh, "Authenticity and Cultural Representation: A Case Study of Maori Tourism Operators," in C. M. Hall & S. MacArthur, eds., Heritage Management in Australia and New Zealand, 202-207; Gould, Stephen Jay "The Hottentot Venus," in The Flamingo Smile: Reflections in Natural History (NY, W.W. Norton & Co): 291-301. (ca. 1987).

--••-- book review is due on Week VIII --••--

Week VIII (Feb. 22): Politics of Display II: The Problem of Agency

Topics: Concurrent with the medicalization of freakdom and the "march of progress," techno-heroic display; the rhetoric of progress and movement through exhibition and historical space; how collection practices are influenced by novelty; how well do strategies of serial arrangement replicate more abstract norms for classifying and arranging textual objects?; how do multiple perspectives on objects (including people, if they are on display) shape their meanings, and how do specific meanings come to prevail?

Readings: Bogdan, entire (it's a pretty quick read), Robert L. Frost, "The Mechanical Marianne: Democracy and Progress Talk in Twentieth-Century France" in L. Winner (ed.), Democracy in a Technological Society.

--••-- Winter Break: Feb. 24 – Mar. 5 --••--

Week IX (Mar. 8): Anthropological Approaches in Focus

Topics: Cultural relativism and the problem of imputing motives and agendas; can objects be labelled trans-contextually? If we seek a "thick description," as Clifford Geertz would have us do, in whose interpretive context will that be located, and how would it lend itself to the practices of classification and description among information professionals?

Readings: A New Yorker piece on Franz Boas and the birth of anti-racist anthropology, Paul A. Roth, "Ethnography without Tears," Current Anthropology XXX:5 (December 1989), 555-569; Ann Laura Stoler, "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance," Archival Science II: 1-2 (2002), 87-109; Ala Rekrut, "Material Literacy: Reading Records as Material Culture;" Steven Lukes, "Different Cultures, Different Rationalities?" History of the Human Sciences XIII:1 (2000) 3-18; Robert L. Frost, "Semiotic Narratives…;" Pierre Lemonnier on New Guinea pigs as ordinary wealth.

Week X (Mar. 15): Virtual Museums and New Problems of Representation

Topics: Can existing artifact databases be "ported" and "tweaked" in order to repurpose them for Web use?; We know that the meanings of objects change when their sites and contexts change; can we predict what sort of meaning shifts occur when artifacts are virtual, when they are essenttially surrogates for surrogates?; XML and problems of uneven tagging and authority lists; accentuated issues of surrogacy and authenticity; how do the ambulant narratives of the traditional museum translate into paths within Web sites--should the linearity of the "old" museum be replicated in the virtual museum?

Readings: Archive and Museum Informatics had a special issue in 1997 addressing Web museum issues; try these pieces: Jennifer Trant's "Editorial: Museums on the Web;" in "The Web and the Unassailable Voice," Peter Walsh challenges the cultural ventriloquism of traditional museography and argues that the Web offers a way not to repeat that error—and, indeed, he offers a number of ways to use the Web to present collections in entirely new ways; looking at sci-tech museums as sites of situated knowledge, Terry Hemmings and others examine how local knowledge can be leveraged into making exhibits much more effective. Finally, please surf some selections from the proceedings of the annual "Museums on the Web" conferences: http://www.archimuse.com/conferences/speakers_list.html; selections from Archives and Museum Informatics http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/museums.html (contacts with David Bearman, managing editor, will facilitate access, as the journal has now been supplanted by Archival Science, with much of the museological and material culture content omitted.) For an intriguing Web museum, try this one on the Great Chicago Fire.

We discussed the issue of museological ventriloquism in the unit above; for a recent example of political ventriloquism, check this out…

Week XI (Mar. 22): Museological Dilemmas and Disasters: Enola Gay, Native Americans, and Bilbao

Topics: The political construction of representation in public/civic space; constraints on public curators; reversion to private collections?; civic boosterism and the architectural annihilation of the artifact: Bilbao's Guggenheim; can presentation and politics annihilate content?; whose bones?; can political agendas "overdetermine" interpretive agendas set by information professionals?; how can museums change as historical interpretations change?

Readings: Beth Yakel on the Enola Gay; a short piece by Patricia Nelson Limerick on "The Smithsonian Scandal That Wasn't;" Alan Trachtenberg, "Contesting the West," Art in America (September 1991), 118-123, 152 [reformatted]; virtual walk through of the Guggenheim-Bilbao; A. Guillford, "Bones of Contention: Repatriation of Native American Human Remains;" Public Historian 18(2), Fall 1996: 119-143; Kristine A. Haglund, "Implications of Repatriation For Museums And Archives." ASC Newsletter 21(5) (October 1993): 53, 58-60; K. Anthony Appiah, "Whose Culture is It ?" New York Review of Books LIII:2 (2006-02-09); Andrew Barry, "On Interactivity: Consumers, Citizens, and Culture," in Sharon Macdonald, ed., The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 98-117.

Week XII (Mar. 29): Authorship, Attribution, and Intellectual Property: Problems of Ownership

Topics: Cultural production as jamming, quotation, spoofing, and reinvention; authors, owners, and "attributees;" public and private data; the new Third World "gold rush:" legal piracy and the intellectual property of indigenous peoples.

Readings: Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 1 [alternative link, with only the assigned sections]; Andrea Abernethy Lunsford, "Rhetoric, Feminism, and the Politics of Textual Ownership," College English LXI:5 (May 1999), 529-45; Barbara J. Culliton, "Authorship, Data Ownership Examined," Science (Nov. 4, 1988), 242; Michael F. Brown, "Can Culture Be Copyrighted?," Current Anthropology XXXIX:2 (April 1998), 193-221. Recommended readings: Robert L. Ostergard, et al.,"Stealing from the Past: Globalisation, Strategic Formation and the Use of Indigenous Intellectual Property in the Biotechnology Industry," Third World Quarterly XXII:4 (August 2001), 643-656; Stephen B. Brush, "Bioprospecting the Public Domain," Cultural Anthropology XIV:4 (Nov. 1999), 535-556; Katy Moran, et al., "Biodiversity Prospecting: Lessons and Prospects," Annual Review of Anthropology XXX (2001), 505-26; Ted Striphas, "Freedom of Expression™," [review of Kembrew McLeod, Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Law] Cultural Studies XVI:3 (2002), 485-487.

--••-- Note Well: long papers due on Week XIV! --••--

Week XIII (Apr. 5): The "Bleeding Edge" of Contemporary Museum Practice

Topics: Museums without walls; participant observers; virtual objects in virtual spaces; renegotiating the conceptual and presentational frame; the convergence of archives and museology; can IT be an object of museum display or just a new mode of content delivery?

Readings: A tour of selected virtual museums [under evolving construction];George F. MacDonald, "Change and Challenge: Museums in the Informations Society," in I. Karp, C. M. Kreamer, & S. D. Lavine, eds, Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, 158-181; articles on the "ecomusée" movement in France and other "living museums;" Eric Gable, "Maintaining boundaries or 'mainstreaming' black history in a white museum," in Sharon MacDonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (London: Blackwell, 1996), 177-202; Gloria Meraz, "Cultural Evidence: On The Common Ground Between Archivists And Museologists." Provenance 15:1-26 (1997); IT museum sites linked via: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~mturk/AHOC/web%20links.html.

Week XIV (Apr.12): Student Presentations & Future Prospects

Topics: Open!

Readings: As suggested by students to accompany their presentations.