For the purposes of this assignment, I selected the Petersen Auto Museum in Los Angeles, California as my subject of analysis.\u00a0 The museum was founded in 1994 and considers it mission to the be the exploration and presentation of the history of the automobile on American life and culture.\u00a0 The museum houses several collections of rare, vintage, and historical automobiles and includes sculpture, photography and other artwork that pertains to car culture. It sits on the corner of Fairfax and Wilshire in Los Angeles and is housed in a purpose-designed structure that includes three main floors and a subterranean vault.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, when I visited the museum’s website, no map was available. An “about” page listed the three main floors by theme: Artistry, History, and Industry.\u00a0 Summaries were listed under each category but no detail about actual content.\u00a0 I looked around and realized that the museum app had a map category, which I downloaded to my phone and was able to pull up pretty easily.\u00a0 The floors were divided into the above listed sections, but physical maps were present to detail the contents a bit more.\u00a0 They were listed as follows: Artistry – Artistry of the Automobile, Auto Art; Industry – Special Exhibits, racing culture, high performance, hot rods and manufacturing; and History – classic model A, model T, Film and Television, Concept cars.<\/p>\n
I gave some thought to the arrangement when I visited the museum over winter break and then again when reviewing this assignment. The idea that categorization and ontologies help us make sense of the world resonated with me, given that I explored the museum with a husband who could rattle off the specs of every car we encountered without looking at his phone once. In my estimation the collection was arranged in order of interest, with most visitors stopping by History first. In my husband’s point of view, the collection was ordered to best offer insight into the evolution of car culture and the need to innovate or be left behind. The museum has tasked itself with the preservation of rare automobiles and the folklore associated with the inception of different cars and racing culture. The arrangement conveys a deep love and respect for the subject material.\u00a0 At risk of seeming disingenuous I would say that I could do little to improve upon the chosen categorization of this collection. If I were to change anything, I would consider an ontology that considered geographic areas of origin and chronology – to have an idea of the evolution of the automobile across specific cultural lines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the purposes of this assignment, I selected the Petersen Auto Museum in Los Angeles, California as my subject of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-432","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\/432","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\/54"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}