The Hong reading provides many definitions for materiality and discusses how those definitions have evolved over time. The word “material” was initially used to refer to a physical object. However, the word “materiality” has come to encompass other aspects of an object such as an objects “aura” thanks to philosophers like Walter Benjamin. The Conn reading discusses how physical objects are beginning to disappear at museums. Many museums are trying to incorporate more educational and entertainment based experiences in order to seem more inviting to the public. However, this has come at the cost of a decrease in display cases and an increase in interactive and often digital experiences. The Smithsonian X3D website is an excellent example of this as it allows an individual to see an object as well as information about that within the museums collection without the museum having to put it on display.<\/p>\n
While I see how presenting objects in a digital format can allow for more objects to be available to the public as well as allowing the museum to provide more information about each object, the “aura” of an object doesn’t translate through a computer or phone screen. When we visited Special Collections last week, we were able to physically hold the papers and contracts that started the Lincoln Motion Picture Company. These papers were made before women could legally vote in the US and African Americans were still being lynched in the south. We could feel how thin and fragile those papers had become with age which is an experience that could not be translated to a digital format. The small action of being able to physically feel the difference between the paper of 1916 and the handout we were given in class helped me understand how different the time in which George P. Johnson lived is from 2017. I feel very lucky to be able to have that kind of experience with my class especially since the librarian (and finding aid for that matter) mentioned how they have microfilm of the documents within the collection. However, she too seemed to think that the experience of actually handling the documents would be better than experiencing them in a mediated form.<\/p>\n
While I do think it is important to have the physical objects in exhibits, I do believe that museums have improved their guest experience by including more interactive and informational aspects. For example, it was really interesting the see the data visualizations the group from last spring were able to create based on their race films database. I believe that including information like that to our exhibit for the George P. Johnson exhibit as well as displaying physical pieces from the collection will help highlight different but important aspects of the collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Hong reading provides many definitions for materiality and discusses how those definitions have evolved over time. The word “material”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}