<\/p>\n
I decided to examine the visitor map for La Brea Tar Pits & Museum because I thought it would be interesting to see how the museum organizes spaces which, ultimately, are outside of their control as natural phenomena. Although the name–La Brea Tar Pits & Museum–seems to indicate separation between the pits themselves and the museum space, the website treats the spaces as one. I suspect that the origin of this division is the fact that visiting the pits themselves is free and open to the public but visitors must pay admission to enter the museum building. Categories on the interactive site map include “pit,” “project,” “garden” and “museum.” Each “pit” and “project” is numbered (Pit 9, Project 23, etc.) and bears a descriptor on the map (“Where Mammoths Walked,” “Oldest Active Dig,” “Death Trap for Carnivores”). The pits themselves are not organized by content, history or activity because, as I mentioned before, it is not possible to control where the tar will bubble to the surface. The museum plan also includes the pathways that guide visitors through the park-like space that contains the pits and projects. The museum building is labeled on the larger map but I was unable to locate a map of the interior of the museum, only brief descriptions of the fossils and access to the “Fossil Lab” where visitors can see scientists handle objects removed from the tar. To me, the lack of an interior map indicates that the institution values the outside spaces more highly than the exhibitions housed inside the museum.<\/p>\n
I find the case of La Brea Tar Pits & Museum to be particularly interesting when considering the goal of a museum to make “rational sense out of the world.” Since this particular museum cannot physically determine the placement of its objects of observation, it must construct literal and figurative pathways: physical movement through space and a progression of understanding the science at play in the space. Now, in the case of an art museum or cultural\/historical museum, I would normally say that the role of the museum should be to provide information and context but that the viewer should be left to make their own judgments and interpretations. Yet in this case, I don’t think there is much that can be gained from “interpreting” a bubbling pit of stinky tar. At a science museum, therefore, the information provided by text and guides is perhaps more <\/em>fundamental to the educational value of the objects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I decided to examine the visitor map for La Brea Tar Pits & Museum because I thought it would<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","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\/310","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\/87"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}