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Friday, July 14, 2017 + Monday, July 17, 2017

I am thankful to say that data entry is over, and all responses have been recorded on the excel sheet! Now, the real work begins! Friday consisted mostly of completing data entry, cleaning the data, and investigating best methods for analysis. In fact, that same day I conducted an informational interview with a freelance Visitor Studies consultant who forwarded me some very helpful sources to aid me in approaching analysis and structuring the eventual report.  One such source is, Informal Science, a website that was introduced to us at the begging of the summer with our informational/introductory materials that provides educational, cultural, and science institutions free, online resources in support of program evaluations: http://www.informalscience.org/. This website has been great help to me this morning/afternoon in my continued exploration of understanding the data we gathered. In a meeting with Jess Bicknell today, she summarized some general standards for coding con...
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Isabella: First Deliverable

For today's update, I am providing the summary for Team Archives' first delivarable. I spent today preparing to submit a first draft to Dr. Zuberi and below is a comprehensive summary of what our work looks like so far: For our first deliverable, we are submitting the History of the Collections reference sheet, spreadsheets for the objects picked out for the exhibition,  an object spreadsheet for each of the objects in the African Sculpture in the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania book, and a specific timeline for the Gordon-Oldman correspondences. From the spreadsheets, each object intended for the future exhibition is included with culture, country, material, donor information, and specific provenance information. The spreadsheets are intended to go hand in hand with the History of the Collections reference sheet. If there is any object in the collection that you interested in learning more detail about its provenance, you can refer to the reference sheet for mo...
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Lara: Tuesday, June 27

With each week, the Team seems to be revealing even more exciting information from within the archives! While I could not say that my investigations today added much to the growing narrative, the information that Isabella revealed regarding the acquisitions of the Benin Bronzes, especially as the our objects relate to the military leadership in the Punitive Expedition, was extremely interesting and thought provoking. While the Penn Museum itself was not involved directly in the looting of the Benin material,  their relationship to the products of that destruction leave me feeling icky. These items, for all intents and purposes, are spoils of war, on par with the looting of artworks in WWII and the massive looting operations in Iraq in 2003 and the present.   In context of the Penn Museum, it's ironic that during our archival sessions where we uncover the complicity the museum had (and still does) in harboring stolen material, there is an exhibition upstairs justly scorning s...
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