Penn Museum African Galleries | 2017

At this point in the research, it's becoming more and more difficult to figure out where to put my energies. I am proud to say that our master spreadsheet is complete and I have fully compiled all of the Oldman correspondences, biography file, and uploaded the important PDFs from his boxes. We are really near complete and I have to stop myself from diving into new projects, like cracking open the Hall Correspondences files or getting too invested in researching more minor donors. Today, I spent my time finishing up the ethnographic photo boxes from the African Section. I was less successful today, but I did find interesting photographs of old exhibitions that showcased models of Somali men in glass cases. I included the pictures in the deliverable file and perhaps it will be something to look further into in the future. The photographs did not include labels so I didn't have much information to go off of. After I finished those boxes, I spent the rest of my time beefing up t...

On Wednesday, my day was divided between attending the lecture on public programs in the morning and going through the photograph boxes from the African Section in the afternoon. The lecture on public programming was really interesting because it was focused on how to best engage young students with the museum. Growing up, I loved attending interactive museum events and it's really interesting to hear about the Penn Museum's programs and imagine what I would have thought about them as a child. One interesting part from the lecture was the idea that for children with disabilities, the programs aim to give them skills that they carry with them into future careers (such as emotion recognition) rather than content-based information. The focus is to give these children in particular skills that will help them become "productive citizens who can hold a job" later on. I understand the sentiment, but the whole idea sounds capitalistic (let me mold you into the ideal worker) a...

Today, Maeve and I were in crunch-time mode in the archives attempting to have the master objects list as complete as possible for our final check-in with Dr. Zuberi tomorrow afternoon. By crunch-time, I mean I spent the day plugging in individual object lists in each donor file, hyperlinking each donor folder next to the object they donated that will be included in the exhibition, and making sure that the donor files are as informative and as comprehensive as possible. This process involves a lot of pulling from previously developed folders and constant organizing. It's a little tedious and a little exhausting, but once it's complete, I believe it will be extremely useful and accessible for Dr. Zuberi. Already, the master list is 75% finished and it will definitely be done either by tomorrow or Thursday. If we complete it early, I will spend time beefing up the donor files with additional research and by uploading more pdfs into the Deliverable folder. I am hoping to hear what...

On Friday, I wanted to clean up the Gordon and Oldman Correspondences for the final deliverable. I went through and began taking pictures and uploading PDFs of all of the important letters and forms that would be interesting for Dr. Zuberi to see firsthand. Then, I went through the letters and made sure I had all of the important information included from their correspondences from 1908 to Gordon's death in 1923. Then, with Alex's assistance, I went through the Registrar's Office boxes to examine the African Section receipts and began taking pictures and uploading PDFs of the receipts that I thought were particularly interesting, from Oldman, Jack Buck, G.B. Gordon Estate, and the John Quinn Estate.  Through this process, here are the major questions that came up: Would Dr. Zuberi be interested in pdfs of the receipts of purchases (specifically, of the Oldman Benin Collection) or of shipping papers of the objects arriving from the Philadelphia Trans-Atlantic Line? ...

Today, I started testing the coding structure I had developed for the collected visitor data, and the inconsistencies in my initial structure became apparent. While I felt like I had a good grasp on the general trends of the data (i.e. a a sense for the typical responses informants put forth) while I structured the coding rubric, actually going through and matching the coding structure to the answers revealed its deficiencies, especially in-terms of addressing ambiguous answers. It was, however, a great lesson in the need for checking an double checking assumed knowledge, and I am glad I went back to address the coding. A big change to the coding will come from the way I split up the art vs. artifact question i.e. " What do you think of when you hear something described as African art vs. African artifact?" Initially my codes divided answers between the following content themes prominent in each response: geography, time, found vs. made, and f unctional vs expressive. Afte...

For today, my morning was dedicated to hearing lectures from representatives from the Development, Marketing, and Visitor Services departments. Each gave really interesting, in-depth looks at departments I was very unfamiliar with today. After listening to the lectures from the representatives at Development, I became more interested in considering development as a potential career path. In this position, I would be able to support the survival of the museum and its future projects while getting to travel and meet new people all the time. Continually, I was fascinated by the presentation given by the Visitor services department. One comment that really caught my attention was the idea that language is essential for visitor services in order to make the museum experience as accessible as possible for every guest. The importance of specific, accessible language goes beyond just the labels beneath the objects. The incredible intentionality of language can be seen on every sign, map, and g...