Day 5: Monday, January 29 | The Physical Object
How important are physical objects to the missions of cultural heritage sites?
Readings:
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 1-26. This essay was originally published in 1935.
- Jules David Prown. “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?” in Lubar, Steven and W. David Kingery ed. History From Things: Essays on Material Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), pp. 1-19.
References from this class:
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Day 6: Wednesday, January 31 | Intangible Cultural Objects
Readings:
- Matthew Reason. “Archive or Memory? The Detritus of Live Performance.” New Theatre Quarterly. 2003;19(1):82-89. doi:10.1017/S0266464X02000076.
- Browse the list of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage and select and view a couple of the examples. Be ready to talk to your peers about what you explored.
References from this class:
- Tonia Sutherland, “Restaging the record: The Role of Contemporary Archives in Safeguarding and Preserving Performance as Intangible Cultural Heritage,” Dissertation submitted to the University of Pittsburgh, 2014.
- UNESCO, “Intangible Cultural Heritage”
- Yumeng Hou, Sarah Kenderdine, Davide Picca, Mattia Egloff, and Alessandro Adamou. 2022. “Digitizing Intangible Cultural Heritage Embodied: State of the Art.” J. Comput. Cult. Herit. 15, 3, Article 55 (September 2022).
- Library of Congress, The Case of the Moved Body
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Day 7: Friday, February 4 | Object Labels
Due:
- Select an object from the Media Archaeology Lab or the Archives and Special Collections at Macalester to write an object label about. You may change your selection, but please do not select the same object as one of your classmates. Indicate your selections on this Google Spreadsheet.
In class:
Readings:
- Peter Walsh, “The Web and the Unassailable Voice,” Museums and the Web 1997.
- Beverly Serrell, “Chapter 2: What Are Interpretive Labels?” Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press, 1996), 8-18, https://archive.org/details/exhibitlabelsint0000serr/page/8/mode/2up. (This chapter is available through the Internet Archive- you’ll have to click “Login and Borrow” to read this. The service is totally free.)
- The J. Paul Getty Museum, “Complete Guide to Adult Audience Interpretive Materials: Gallery Texts and Graphics,” (J. Paul Getty Trust, 2011) pp. 3-5 and 16-21.
Featured image: Smithsonian lnstitution Archives. “Marine Specimens in Jars,” 1979. Photograph. Accessed January 5, 2024. https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_14103.
