Museum Archipelago

In the early days of this podcast, every time I searched for Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top result would be a small museum in rural Finland called the Archipelago Museum. As my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn't forget about the Archipelago Museum. Instead, I wondered what they were up to. What were the exhibits about? Did they ever come across my podcast? Were they annoyed by my similar name? And while the museum had a website and a map, there was no way to directly contact them. Years went by as the realization sank in—the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview. So, for this very special 100th episode, I went to Finland and and visited the Rönnäs Archipelago Museum. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Why is Ian in Finland? 00:45 Museum Archipelago's Early Days 01:30 Same Name 03:14 Arriving at the Archipelago Museum 04:05 Naomi Nordstedti 04:30 Life on the Archipelago 06:04 Opening the Museum 06:54 Boats 07:55 The Archipelago During Prohibition 08:28 Thoughts About 100 Episodes 10:40 Thanks For Listening 10:54 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games, so it lets them. The artifacts are fully-playable video games, from early arcade classics like PacMac to modern console and PC games, all with original hardware and controllers. By putting video games in a museum space, the Computer Games Museum invites visitors to become players. But, players can become visitors too. Video games have been inviting players into museum spaces for decades. In the mid 1990s, interaction designer Joe Kalicki remembers playing PacMan in another museum – only this one was inside a video game. In Namco Museum, players navigated a 3D museum space to access the games, elevating them to a high-culture setting. Since then, museums and their cultural shorthands have been a part of the video game landscape, implicitly inviting their players-turned-visitors to think critically about museums in the process. In this episode, Kalicki presents mainstream and indie examples of video games with museums inside them: from Animal Crossing's village museum to Museum of Memories, which provides a virtual place for objects of sentimental value, to Occupy White Walls where players construct a museum, fill it with art – then invite others to come inside. Image: The Computer Games Museum in Berlin by Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0) Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Computerspielemuseum Berlin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computerspielemuseum_Berlin) 01:23 Joe Kalicki (https://panoply.space/) 02:06 Namco Museum (https://youtu.be/y1rvBhJtmkY) 03:42 Digital Museum Spaces Elevating Video Games 04:26 Museum of Memories by Kate Smith (https://katesmith.itch.io/museum-of-memories) 05:25 Occupy White Walls (https://www.oww.io/) 07:18 Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88xjcvPKLJk) 10:11 Animal Crossing 11:29 Video Game Engines In Museums 12:44 Joe Kalicki's new podcast, Panoply (https://panoply.space/) 13:13 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party

When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned about the Panama Canal in school told a narrow story about the engineering feat of the Canal's construction by the United States. This public history reflected the politics of Panama and control over the Canal. Today, González is executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum, and she's determined to use the Canal and the struggles over its authority to tell a broader story about the history of Panama – one centered around Panama as a point of connection from pre-Colonial times to the present day. In this episode, González describes the geographic destiny of the Isthmus of Panama, how America's ownership of the Canal physically divided the country, and how her team is developing galleries covering Panama's recent history. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Panama Canal's Politically Sensitive History 01:20 Ana Elizabeth González, Executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum (https://www.museodelcanal.com/en/) 01:35 Opening of the Panama Canal Museum in 1997 02:44 Making the Museum About Panama, Not Just The Canal 03:10 Geography is Destiny 03:30 The Isthmus of Panama as a Point of Connection 04:20 A Brief History 04:50 French Attempt at a Canal 05:10 Treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay–Bunau-Varilla_Treaty) 06:30 Construction of the Canal 07:00 "Gold Roll" and "Silver Roll" 08:00 Martyrs' Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyrs%27_Day_(Panama)) 08:50 Work In Progress: Galleries of Panama's Recent History 09:10 Panama's Recent History, Briefly 11:10 The Museum's Future 11:15 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party

As the Apollo 11 astronauts hurtled towards the moon on July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the astronauts didn't make it – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Richard Nixon would have to address the nation. That haunting speech was written but fortunately was never delivered. But you can go to the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City and watch Nixon somberly reciting those words. It looks like real historic footage, but it's fake. Artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund used the text of the original address and media manipulation techniques like machine learning to create the synthetic Nixon for a film called In Event of Moon Disaster. It anchors an exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen. In this episode, Panetta and Burgund discuss how they created In Event of Moon Disaster as a way to highlight various misinformation techniques, the changing literacy of the general public towards media manipulation, and the effectiveness of misinformation in the museum medium. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 July 18th, 1969 00:40 The Safire Memo (https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events/centennials/nixon/images/exhibit/rn100-6-1-2.pdf) 01:38 Clip From In Event of Moon Disaster (https://moondisaster.org) 02:30 Nixon's Telephone Call (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_8tawnlwr8) 03:00 What is Deepfake? 03:30 Halsey Burgund (https://halseyburgund.com) 04:06 Francesca Panetta (https://www.francescapanetta.com/about/) 04:30 How They Did It 04:50 Why This Speech? 06:02 Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City (https://movingimage.us/event/deepfake-unstable-evidence-on-screen/) 07:05 Misinformation By Editing 09:53 Misinformation and Medium 10:23 Museums as Trustworthy Institutions (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/71) 11:27 What Would a “Deepfake Museum Gallery” Look Like? 13:43 In Event of Moon Disaster (https://moondisaster.org) 14:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Public historian and writer Tegan Kehoe knows that museum visitors act differently around the same object presented in different contexts—like how the same visitor excited by a bayonet that causes a triangular wound in an exhibit of 18th-century weapons could be disgusted by that same artifact when it's presented in an exhibit of 18th-century medicine. Kehoe, who specialises in the history of healthcare and medical science, is attuned to how objects can inspire empathy, especially in the healthcare context. Kehoe's new book, Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures, looks for opportunities for empathy in museum exhibits all around the U.S. Each of the 50 artifacts presented in the book becomes a physical lens through which to examine the complexities of American society's relationship with health, from a 1889 bottle of “Hostetter's Celebrated Stomach Bitters” that claimed to cure a host of ailments to activist Ed Roberts's power wheelchair that he customized to work with his range of motion. In this episode, Kehoe describes how her work has helped her see tropes in the way museums tend to present medical topics and artifacts, how the aura of medical expertise is often culturally granted, and how living through the current coronavirus pandemic changed her relationship with many of the artifacts. Image: Ed Roberts's Wheelchair, National Museum of American History. Treasures of American History online exhibition. (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1181889) Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Old State House “Weapons of the American Revolution” and “Medicine and the American Revolution” 01:35 Tegan Kehoe (http://www.tegankehoe.com/p/about-me.html) 02:00 Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures (https://bookshop.org/shop/tegankehoe) 02:30 How Museums Tend to Present Medical History 05:40 Who Is “Worthy” of the Most Care? 08:02 Ed Roberts's Power Wheelchair (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1181889) 10:06 Ambulance Damaged in the 9/11 Attacks 11:28 Lessons from the Latest Pandemic 13:41 Pre-Order Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures (https://bookshop.org/shop/tegankehoe) 14:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

In 1969, noticing that technological progress was changing their fields, heads of Finish industry came together to found a technology museum in Finland. Today, the Museum of Technology in Helsinki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Technology,_Helsinki) is the only general technological museum in the country. But of course, technical progress didn't stop changing, as service coordinator Maddie Hentunen notes, and that can be challenging for a museum to keep up. In this episode, Hentunen describes the museum's philosophical stance on technology, how the museum balances industrial development with more open source design practices, and how the museum thinks about its own obsolescence. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 1969 in Technology 00:49 Maddie Hentunen 01:02 The Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland 02:34 The Museum's Building 03:51 Original Exhibits 04:50 Today's Exhibits 07:07 The Museum's Philosophical Stance on Technology 10:29 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

The deliberate exclusion of Black history and the history of slavery in the Amerian South has been slow to reverse. But Jazz Dottin, creator and host of the Black Gems Unearthed YouTube channel says it can be just as slow in New England. Each video features Dottin somewhere in her home state of Massachusetts, often in front of a plaque or historical marker, presenting what's missing, excluded, or downplayed. The history discussed on Black Gems Unearthed has been left out by conventional museums, which are among the most trustworthy institutions in modern American life, according to the American Alliance of Museums. This trust may have more to do with power than truth-telling — and today, there are many different ways to build trust with an audience online. Shows like Dottin's might point to where our new relationship with the authoritative voice is heading. In this episode, Dottin describes how working as tour guide and creating travel itineraries influences her work today, how she came up with the idea for Black Gems Unearthed, and what the future holds. Image: Jazz Dottin in front of Emancipation in Boston, Mass. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 “Always Read The Plaque” 00:45 Jazz Dottin (https://blackgemsunearthed.com) 01:00 Black Gems Unearthed (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgCwmI7piZotRDZ3ZefnFmA) 01:20 Hopkinton, Massachusetts 02:00 Exploring Black lives in MetroWest, MA in the 1700s - Black Gems Unearthed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc31pxJ7pYE) 02:26 Museum Archipelago 42. Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray Are Erecting Historic Markers on the Slave Trade in New Orleans (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/42) 02:55 The Legacy of Slavery in New England 03:50 Working as a Tour Guide 05:35 The Idea for Black Gems Unearthed 08:21 Museums and Trustworthiness 09:36 Where The Name Comes From 10:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

In 1916, concerned that the remote Rhodope mountains would be hard to defend against foreign invaders, a young Bulgarian Kingdom decided to build a narrow gauge railway to connect villages and towns to the rest of the country. The Bulgarian King himself, Tsar Boris III, drove the first locomotive to the town of Belitsa to celebrate its opening. But the Septemvri - Dobrinishte Narrow Gauge Railway would far outlast the King and the Kingdom, the communist era that followed, and the rocky post-communst period. Today, the railway is still a fixture of life in the region as a vital link to remote villages with no road access. But decades of neglect have left many stations crumbling. Train enthusiast Ivan Poulevski, a member of the organization “For The Narrow Gauge Railway,” helped found the House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway in one of these abandoned stations. A sign on the building says the museum was built “for people, by people.” In this episode, Poulevski describes the decision to build the museum using only volunteers, how to interpret multiple eras of Bulgarian history through the lens of a railway, and why they have had no plans to seek official museum accreditation in Bulgaria. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Winding Through History (https://tesnolineikata.wixsite.com/home/history) 00:50 Septemvri–Dobrinishte narrow-gauge line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemvri–Dobrinishte_narrow-gauge_line) 01:10 Ivan Poulevski 01:33 Stoyan Mitov and the Engineering of the Railway 03:20 Tsar Boris III (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_III_of_Bulgaria) 03:50 The House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway 04:40 No Electricity and No Water Supply 05:30 After The Collapse of the Communist Era 05:55 Organization "For The Narrow Gauge Railway" 06:32 Restoring the Building / Making the Museum 08:30 Bulgarian Museum Regulations 10:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

The Pleven Panorama transports visitors through time, but not space. The huge, hand-painted panorama features the decisive battles of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78, fought at this exact spot, which led to Bulgaria’s Liberation. The landscape of Pleven, Bulgaria depicted is exactly what you see outside the building, making it seem like you’re witnessing the battle on an observation point. Bogomil Stoev is a historian at the Pleven Panorama, which opened in 1977. The opening was timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Ottoman Empire’s surrender following the battles and the siege of Pleven. The building itself is etched with the story of the siege and the battles, and because the landscape is filled with the remains of the combattants, this was the only structure allowed to be built on the spot. In this episode, Stoev describes how the creators of the Pleven Panorama learned from previous panoramas, how the museum contextualizes the history of Bulgaria’s Liberation, and how this museum has become a symbol of the city of Pleven. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Skobelev Park and the Remains of the Dead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skobelev_Park) 01:06 Bogomil Stoev, Historian at the Pleven Panorama 01:36 Our Story Begins in the 14th Century 01:58 April Uprising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Uprising_of_1876) 02:40 The Start of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Turkish_War_(1877–1878)) 03:10 The Pleven Panorama (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleven_Panorama) 05:16 General Skobelev (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Skobelev) 06:00 General Totleben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Totleben) 06:10 The Siege of Pleven (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Plevna) 07:00 December 10th, 1977 07:40 Episodes 47 and 54 of Museum Archipelago (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/tags/buzludzha) 08:07 Building the Museum 08:46 A Brief History of Panoramas 10:15 Pleven’s Enduring Symbol 11:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Museums can be a shorthand for truth, or for history, or for what a culture values. Disney theme parks all around the world use fake museums as a tool to immerse visitors in the themed environment. This detailed world-building can make the imaginary universe more real—or provide a setup to subvert a narrative. But these fake museums aren’t the only ways the Disney theme parks present history to visitors. Public experience advocate Shaelyn Amaio describes how the parks “traffic in the past.” By removing references to the present or a future with consequences, parks like Disneyland free the visitor from responsibility for what happened in history. Since the opening of Disneyland in 1955, there have been several iterations of Disney theme parks, each reflecting the way we think about knowledge and history in the times they were built. In this episode, Amaio describes examples of fake museums in Disney theme parks, details how corporate-sponsored edutainment can reflect the public's anxiety, and explains why EPCOT has the most museum-like spaces at Disney theme parks. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Yeti Museum (https://threadreaderapp.com/convos/1364956121258225670) 01:30 Shaelyn Amaio (https://twitter.com/heyshaelyn) 02:03 Amaio’s First Visit to Disney World 03:30 Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy: History and Innocence in the Magic Kingdom 05:50 EPCOT and World’s Fairs 08:01 17. Entertainment and History at Disney’s America (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/17) 09:12 Dinosaur at Disney’s Animal Kingdom 10:20 Layering in Theme Park Design 11:00 Overlap Between Museums and Theme Parks 11:55 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

The Grove Museum inside the historic Call/Collins House is one of Tallahassee’s newest museums, and it’s changing how the city interprets its own history. Instead of focusing on the mansion house’s famous owners, including Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, Executive Director John Grandage oriented the museum around civil rights. Cleverly tracing how Collins’s thinking on race relations evolved, the museum uses the house and the land it sits on to tell the story of the forced removal of indigenous people from the area, the enslaved craftspeople who built the house, and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott. Grandage says the museum’s interpretive plan and focus on civil rights wouldn't have been possible without the work of Black Tallahassee institutions like John G. Riley House Museum created by Althemese Barnes or the Southeastern Regional Black Archives built from FAMU Professor James Eaton’s collection. In this episode recorded at the museum, Grandage describes how historic preservation has always been about what the dominant culture finds worth persevering, the museum’s genealogical role, and the white backlash to Collins’s moderate positions on civil rights. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Ian at the 1992 Springtime Tallahassee Parade 00:55 White Supremacy in Tallahassee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tallahassee,_Florida#Black_history) 01:20 Smokey Hollow (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/85) 01:40 John Grandage 02:35 The Grove Museum (https://thegrovemuseum.com) 03:05 Developing the Interpretive Plan with a Focus on Slavery and Civil Rights 03:30 Governorship of LeRoy Collins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeRoy_Collins) 04:36 Tallahassee Bus Boycott (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallahassee_bus_boycott) 06:08 Presenting the Narrative through Collins 06:50 White Backlash to Collins’s Moderate Position on Civil Rights 08:15 The Construction of the House by Enslaved Craftspeople (https://thegrovemuseum.com/learn/history/) 09:45 The Genealogical Role of the Museum 10:50 Forced Removal of Indigenous People in Tallahassee 12:25 How Tallahassee Interprets Its History 13:00 The John G. Riley House (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/85) 13:10 The Meek-Eaton Black Archives (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/86) 14:08 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Dr. Tehmina Goskar, director of the Curatorial Research Centre, co-founded MuseumHour with Sophie Ballinger in October 2014. The weekly peer-to-peer chat on Twitter “holds space for debate” for museum people all around the world. This month, Goskar officially steps back from her role at MuseumHour. This episode serves as both an “exit interview” for Goskar’s MusuemHour work and a chance to highlight other projects that she has founded based on her curatorial philosophy. In this episode, Goskar discusses founding the Curatorial Research Centre, democratizing culture through her Citizen Curators program (in association with the Cornwall Museums Partnership), and how over six years of MuseumHour conversations have shaped her work. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 MuseumHour at 6.5 Years Old (https://twitter.com/museumhour?lang=en) 00:50 Tehmina Goskar (https://www.curatorialresearch.com/people/) 01:20 MuseumHour's Founding 03:00 Mediums and Platforms 04:35 Museum Conferences 05:30 What is Curation? 07:15 "To Care For" 07:30 The Curatorial Research Centre (https://www.curatorialresearch.com/) 09:20 Citizen Curators (https://www.cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk/citizen-curators/) 12:38 Archipelago at the Movies: How to Steal A Million (1966) (https://www.patreon.com/posts/archipelago-at-47449904) 14:05 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

During World War II, a Nazi collbatoring regime governed the south of France, and the city of Toulouse was a Resistance hub. The Vichy Government promoted anti-Semitism and collaborated with the Nazis, most specifically by deporting Jews to concentration and extermination camps. Fragmented Resistance fighters organized to form escape networks and build logistics chains to sabotage and disrupt the regime. In 1977, former Resistance members created a community museum in Toulouse about their experience. Today, that museum is called the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France, and is run by the regional government. Museum director Jérôme Blachon is reimagining how the museum tells the story of the French Resistance as the people who experienced firsthand pass away. In this episode, Blachon describes the challenge of presenting the fragmented nature of the resistance to a modern audience, the 2020 renovation of the museum, and his focus on transmitting precious memories. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Memorials in Toulouse (http://www.enseigner-histoire-shoah.org/visites-pedagogiques/les-lieux-a-visiter-en-france/le-memorial-de-la-shoah-toulouse/le-memorial-de-la-shoah-toulouse.html) 01:00 Toulouse During World War II 01:32 Jérôme Blachon, Director of the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France (https://fr.linkedin.com/in/jérôme-blachon-5a10314a) 02:20 "Engage, Collect, Transmit" 02:50 France During Nazi Germany's Administration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_military_administration_in_occupied_France_during_World_War_II) 03:38 Museum Archipelago Ep. 51 (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/51) 04:08 Presenting the Difference Forms of Resistance in the Museum 05:25 2020 Renovation (https://www.toulouse-visit.com/musee-departemental-de-la-resistance-et-de-la-deportation/toulouse/pcumid031fs0005f) 05:35 The Disappearance of the Last Witnesses 06:26 The Museum as Transmission 06:45 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Vitosha Mountain, the southern border of Sofia, Bulgaria, is home to about 15 brown bears and one bear museum. According to Dr. Nikola Doykin, fauna expert at the Vitosha Nature Park Directorate, the bear population is stable—if humans stay away and protect their habitat. To Doykin and his team, teaching children about the bears is the best way forward, and the Vitosha Bear Museum does just that. Founded in 2002 by repurposing an abandoned mountain shelter for the Vitosha mountain rangers, the Vitosha Bear Museum provides “useful tips on how to meet a bear.” It’s also sparse: the entire gallery is a single room, and the gallery lighting is powered by a car battery. In this episode recorded at the museum, Dr. Nikola Doykin describes why the location is so useful for eco education, how groups of schoolchildren react to exhibits, and what the museum plans to do when it installs solar panels. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Vitosha mountain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitosha) 00:50 The Viosha Bear Museum (http://park-vitosha.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/spisanie-ENG_July-2012.pdf) 01:05 Dr. Nikola Doykin (https://www.nature-experience-bulgaria.com/nature-tour-guides/nikola-doykin-vitosha-nature-park-tour-guide/) 02:10 The Location of the Museum (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Музей+на+мечката/@42.636078,23.2115471,14z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0xa27af03db6067ea9!8m2!3d42.636078!4d23.2251191) 04:00 "Useful Tips On How To Meet A Bear" (https://www.novinite.com/articles/204909/Vitosha+Nature+Park%3A+The+Bear+Museum+and+The+Museum+of+Owls+Open+for+Visitors) 04:35 Bear Markings in the Museum 06:40 Ep. 6 Muzeiko (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/6) 06:50 Ep. 46 Vessela Gercheva Directs Playful Exhibits at Bulgaria’s First Children’s Museum (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/46) 08:30 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

History professor Dr. James Eaton taught his students with the mantra: “African American History is the History of America.” As chair of the history department at FAMU, a historically Black University in Tallahassee, Florida, he was used to teaching students how to use interlibrary loan systems and how to access rare book collections for their research. But in the early 1970s, as his students' research questions got more in depth and dove deeper into Black history, he realized that there simply weren't enough documents. So he started collecting himself, driving a bus around South Georgia, South Alabama, and North Florida to gather artifacts. That collection grew to become the Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum on FAMU’s campus. Today, museum director Dr. Nashid Madyun presides over one of the largest repositories of African American history and culture in the Southeast. In this episode, Madyun describes how the structure of the gallery flights the compression of Black history, how the archive handles dehumanizing records and artifacts, and how a smaller museum can tell a major story. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Dr. James Eaton (http://www.famu.edu/index.cfm?MEBA&THEFOUNDERS) 00:50 Starting The Collection 01:35 Dr. Nashid Madyun (http://www.famunews.com/2015/10/famu-names-nashid-madyun-director-of-the-meek-eaton-black-archives-and-research-center/) 02:44 Carnegie Library 03:20 13 Galleries at the Meek-Eaton Black Archives 04:56 The Compression of African American History 05:20 Jim Crow and the KKK Exhibit 06:02 Presenting Derogatory Material at the Museum 07:00 How a Smaller Museum Can Tell a Major Story 08:20 Manumission Exhibit and Reading Cursive Handwriting 09:24 No Visitors During the Pandemic 10:40 Museum Archipelago Episode 85 (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/85) 11:00 The First Steps to Telling Hidden Stories 11:50 SPONSOR: SuperHelpful (http://superhelpful.com/arc) 12:45 Outro | Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Sponsor: SuperHelpful This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SuperHelpful, an audience research and development firm dedicated to helping museum leaders create more equitable and innovative organizations through problem-space research. Kyle Bowen, the founder of SuperHelpful, has brought together a team of designers and researchers to build a new community for museum folks who want to support one another as they reimagine what museums will be in the future. To join—and bypass the current waiting list—use this special link just for Museum Archipelago listeners! Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 86. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] History professor Dr. James Eton taught his students with the mantra: “African American History is the History of America.” As chair of the history department at FAMU, a historically Black university in Tallahassee, Florida, he was used to teaching students how to use interlibrary loan systems and how to access rare book collections for their research. But in the early 1970s, as his students' research questions got more in depth and dove deeper into Black history, he realized that there simply weren't enough documents. Nashid Madyun: And that helped him to realize that the understanding of Abraham Lincoln, the KKK , the rise of the Black middle class, Jim Crow, all of the stories where will forever untapped properly if there is no repository. And he found that as people die, they had material in their attics. But in this region: South Georgia, South Alabama, Northern Florida, there was no place to present these wares. So he started to try to enhance his classroom with these artifacts. He took advantage of an available bus and went around the region, asking people for material and they were happy to share and donate. Nashid Madyun: And there was no formal museum practice or archive at the time. It was a professor of history trying to find a way to help the students see that there are two sides to a story. That collection grew to become the Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum on FAMU’s campus, one of the largest repositories of African-American history and culture in the Southeast. This is Nashid Madyun, director of the museum. Nashid Madyun: Hello, my name is Nashid Madyun. I'm director of the Southeastern, regional Black archives research center and museum at FAMU, that’s Florida A&M University. Nashid Madyun: So this institution was founded in 1971. It opened its doors officially to the public in 1976. Professor James Eaton was able to collect artifacts to enhance the classes he was teaching in history, in African American history. And he was able to utilize this building in the mid seventies to present the rare memorabilia and artifacts that he found to interpret African American history as he saw it and present public programs. The collection and museum are housed in the Carnegie Library on FAMU's campus. Dr. James Eton died in 2004, during the construction of a four story expansion building that was erected right behind the library to keep up with the growing size of the collections. Because the archive was started from artifacts and documents gathered by bus, there is some geographic focus on the North Florida region. But today the Museums interprets Black history in general -- with objects from all across the country. Nashid Madyun: The research we pulled together takes us to the entire Florida panhandle and South Alabama, South Georgia. So now we have what we consider amongst these four floors, 13 galleries. The highlight, the number one highlight would be our Jim Crow and KKK collection, an authentic uniform, the constitutions from the 1920s, the memorabilia that highlight the derogatory advertisements and propaganda of the Jim Crow era. We also have an authentic-style church highlighting the plantation churches of the TriCounty area, as early as 1830s and replicas of those churches. 64 churches were utilized for this exhibit. Nashid Madyun: We also have a changing gallery upstairs that we highlight items or issues that address some point or some aspect of popular culture. Public culture now would be Black Lives Matter. And that movement has been going on for the past couple of years, so what we have up now is an exhibit objectively presenting the subject of newsprint from the 1700s to the present, how the violence and Black Codes and legislation and perspectives have been portrayed in print media. And so people have been very interested in that exhibit, so that's very compelling. The galleries also include African Americans in the Military -- which features artifacts from the Civil War and the Spanish American War, and African American pioneers in medicine and science, which highlights FAMU’s role as a research institution. With the way the gallery is setup, Madyun fights against the compression of African American history -- when I was studying Black history in Tallahassee, Florida as a high school student, we moved quickly from the Emancipation to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, skipping the time between. Nashid Madyun: I like to integrate new possibilities and ways to tell stories that are hidden or not properly told. We call this particular exhibit Jim Crow and KKK, aside from Slavery to Freedom. So the exhibit previously had all of these words together. And I wanted to separate those two so that we could see that there was a split and time: there was bondage and then there was amancipationand freedom, and there was a gap from the 1880s to the 1930s, when cotton was king, tobacco was strong. You had the rise of the Black middle class and the rise of the Black middle class, the mobility of the Black middle class specifically coincides with the three waves of the KKK. Nashid Madyun: So we present the derogatory material in the face of the public and say, this is how it was, and this is why it was, you had people who feared this rise. Nashid Madyun: And so. You can interpret it how you want to, but we presented based on the information we have. We could talk about the rise of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the introduction of dentists and lawyers, the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance, all of these movements just so happened to coincide with the exact time frames of these waves of the KKK. And that's what's going on. And so I don't believe that any part of our history, whether slave chains or breathing beds or KKK robes should be hidden. The depth and breadth of the collection enables The Museum to tell a much broader story than just a historical house -- or a museum that is tied to a single event. For museums that interpret Black history, that’s still somewhat rare, but Madyun sees it as the beginning of a trend. Nashid Madyun: I've been in museums for 20 years and when I came into museums all the museums, the majority were mainstream, there were only a few African American museums. If there was an African American museum, it was an African American historic house, right? And so the idea that a major story can be told by a small museum in our new virtual world is possible. Nashid Madyun: It was not possible 10 years ago. Definitely not possible 20 years ago. So we have the opportunity. Unfortunately, we still need to catch up to the digitization that’s needed so that we can compete. Major museums, some city museums, you know, especially art museums, they receive city funding, even if they're attached to universities. And now we're starting to see that happen with the Black museums. And my role is to take advantage of these resources and bridge the gap. Madyun says that part of the gap is technological -- that museums are always trying to catch up to where visitors are. An example that he cites is seeing his student visitors not being able to read cursive handwriting. Nashid Madyun: We had an exhibit last year that we thought was wonderful and opened it up. And the students are coming in and looking at manumission, actual bills of sales from slaves, you know, former slaves buying their sisters and brothers and wives, buying their freedom. And so we're waiting for that jaw dropping expression, and they're looking at it like it's art. Nashid Madyun: I'm like, “oh, they don't know how to read cursive writing!” Here's a letter from Zora Neale Hurston talking about her ex and going through that divorce, you know, she's from Florida, understanding that the cost of a slave was $800 and pulling these details that you would normally get. And there's a generation gap. I'm in my forties and beyond, but the new generation that are not learning to write long form or manuscript or cursive writing. So now we're able to go back and look at some of these exhibits and enhance them and align them properly. It turns out, the museum has time to go back and enhance some of the exhibits because of the pandemic. Nashid Madyun: Because of the time we live in with the pandemic the idea of digitization has, really been propelled into a stage that is front and center. People were at home doing summer wondering what they could do. They wish they could go visit the museum. You've had three or four years to get to the museum in your hometown. Now we wouldn't really want to get out and get to the museum. We began to walk through the museums and pull out artifacts and have virtual tours. It's been a very good, very productive summer. Partly because we've had no guests so we've been able to focus on all of these very practical logistical projects. And we're going to come out a nice polished, shiny diamond able to look at K through 20. So the students on campus and the counties that surround us, the exhibits will be aligned to support curriculums. Students and teachers will be able to go to our website and pull down scavenger hunt and coloring pages or discussion questions and see artifacts to help illuminate that. The Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum is part of the Florida African American Heritage Network, which we discussed in episode 85 of this show. For Madyun, the increased focus on Black museums in the state and the slow progress towards more historic markers on Black history are stepping stones. Nashid Madyun: It's a stepping stone. These are the first step into establishing and acknowledging stores sometimes. And hopefully stories are our objective, but at the least you are able to identify the initial point of interest and organizations, nonprofits, grassroots communities can come together and expound on that. Whether they erect a structure, a walking park, an activity, but across the South specifically, and I'm from Arkansas, across the South, it's been wonderful to see places that have monuments, or a historic house, or parks or demonstrations where there was once just a marker. [Outro]

In the wake of the racist murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent 17th Century slave trader. Protesters rolled the statue through the street and pushed it into Bristol Harbor — the same harbor where Colston’s Royal African Company ships that forcibly carried 80,000 people from Africa to the Americas used to dock. In this episode, we examine the relationship of statues and museums. Why do so many call for statues of people like Colston to end up in a museum instead of at the bottom of a harbor? Looking at examples from Dr. Lyra Montero’s Washington's Next! project in the United States, American Hall of Honor museums for college football teams, and statues of Lenin and Stalin in Eastern Europe, we discuss the town-square-to-museum pipeline for statues. Image: CC Keir Gravil (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ksagphotos/49984347227/in/photolist-2j9WR18-2jazCE1-2cbCsz3-XD7Js5-UGSVnw-2jaMmP1-YJQ5tD-bnShow-YJQ5vc-YJQ5uv-bnSgD5-bnShdd-2ja9Hsz-YtCdDN-YJQ5vH-Gp9V5R-n2dXrg-6VsrMU-PDvmUa-KCcbg9-2cbCszU-2jaQiZc-FJGAe4-2ja1X1Y-2ddat65-2ddat7s-2cbCsBY-Lo4Y6-ckDyvJ-FtWJaQ-2df5dZR-ayEzVH-TjJrC9-2j9zUv2-25qrmQH-UyYa9n-2jb5YPJ-ckDxPy-ckDwBJ-ckDxeb-8ago8j-9Tub44-2ddat4b-ckDzh5-j83Vog-T9ws1o-YDcBwm-25RX15G-UyYacZ-27oTt6N)- Black Lives Matter Protest, Bristol, UK Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Tim Tebow Statue at the University of Florida (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jldkfqP8Ug) 00:50 Football Hall of Honor Museums 02:02 Tearing Down Edward Colston’s Statue in Bristol (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-53034050?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/england/bristol&link_location=live-reporting-story) 02:44 Dr. Lyra Monteiro (https://sasn.rutgers.edu/about-us/faculty-staff/lyra-d-monteiro) 03:00 Episode 77. Washington's Next! (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/77) 03:12 The “Slippery Slope” Argument 04:56 Dr. Sadiah Qureshi (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/history/qureshi-sadiah.aspx) 05:33 Should Colston’s Statue End Up in a Museum? 05:58 Episode 5. Stalinworld (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/5) 06:42 Grūtas Park (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grūtas_Park) 07:32 Episode 25. Museum of Socialist Art (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/25) 08:20 Museums of Bristol Website (https://museums.bristol.gov.uk/narratives.php?irn=2374) 08:40 Number of Confederate Statues in the United States (https://www.splcenter.org/data-projects/whose-heritage) 09:55 Archipelago at the Movies : National Treasure is Now Free for Everyone (https://www.patreon.com/posts/archipelago-at-31845538) 10:25 Outro | Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago

Old Sturbridge Village is a living history museum in Massachusetts depicting life in rural New England during the early 19th century. But the early 19th century isn’t specific enough for the site’s historical interpreters—to immerse visitors in the world they’re recreating, knowing exactly what year it “is” matters. Tom Kelleher, Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village was tasked with choosing that “default” date. He chose 1838 in part because the social and political change of that time period would resonate with today’s visitors. But there’s another aspect of the year that will resonate with visitors today once the museum reopens after closing due to Covid-19: how people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s. In this episode, Kelleher describes the difference between first and third person interpretation, and how visitors might react to seeing 19th century costumed interpreters with modern facemasks. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 What does the word interpreter mean? 00:56 Tom Kelleher, Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village (https://www.osv.org/explore-the-village/costumed-historians-artisans-and-farmers/) 01:34 Old Sturbridge Village (https://www.osv.org/) 02:30 First-Person Interpretation 03:30 Third-Person Interpretation 05:35 “Who’s the president?” 06:50 Picking a default year 07:40 How people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s (https://alhfam.blog/2020/04/03/the-asiatic-cholera-pandemic-of-1832/) 09:30 Living History Museums Interpreting Pandemics 10:00 Interpreters in facemasks 10:44 Archipelago at the Movies

The British Museum’s South Asia Collection is full of Indian objects. Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum, does not want visitors to overlook the violence of how these objects were brought to the UK to be held in a museum. So for the 2017 renovation of the South Asia Collection, Jansari, who is the first curator of Indian descent of this collection, made sure to create unexpected moments in the gallery. She highlighted artifacts bequeathed to the museum by South Asian collectors and presented photographs of a modern Jain Temple in Leicester, where she’s from. In this episode, Jansari talks about giving visitors the tools to think about the colonial interest in items in the collection, why she started her excellent podcast, The Wonder House, and how not to let the decolonization movement’s momentum evaporate. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Seleucid–Mauryan war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seleucid–Mauryan_war) 00:45 Megasthenes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megasthenes) 01:30 Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum (https://twitter.com/sushmajansari?lang=en) 02:00 How Events Are Transformed Through History 03:00 Decolonising Museums and Collections 04:21 39. Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum With James Delbourgo (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/39) 04:50 Empire and Daily Life in the U.K. 05:46 Being the First South Asian Curator of the South Asia Collection (https://twitter.com/sushmajansari/status/1053193933810008064?lang=en) 06:30 Working on the 2017 Renovation of the British Museum’s South Asia Collection 08:00 Creating Unexpected Moments in the Gallery 08:15 Mathura lion capital (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathura_lion_capital) 09:30 Visitation Trends Since the Update 10:58 “Not Just One or Two Tweaks” 11:10 Why Jansari Started The Wonder House Podcast (https://thewonderhouse.co.uk) 12:10 “Every Movement Has Its Moment” 12:30 Subscribe to The Wonder House Podcast (https://thewonderhouse.co.uk) Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1486140839?ct=podlink&mt=2&app=podcast&ls=1) 13:30 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS (https://pigeon.srisys.com/museums/) 14:28 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

The modern museum invites you to touch. Or it would, if it wasn’t closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The screens inside the Fossil Hall at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC say “touch to begin” to an empty room. The normally cacophonous hands-on exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco sit eerily silent. Museum exhibit developer Paul Orselli of Paul Orselli Workshop says he’ll be reluctant to use hands-on exhibits once museums open up again. But he hopes that future hands-on exhibits are more meaningful because museums will work harder to justify them. In this episode, Orselli predicts what hands-on exhibits could become, the possibility that the crisis will encourage museums to adhere to universal design principles instead of defaulting to touchscreens, and how Covid-19 might finally put an end to hands-on mini grocery store exhibits in children's museums. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Hands-On Exhibits in Museums 01:00 Michael Spock (https://bostonchildrensmuseum.org/michael-spock) 02:04 Paul Orselli (https://www.orselli.net) 02:40 The Growth of Hands-On Exhibits 03:30 “The last thing I want to do is rush into a super-crowded museum” 04:40 “Empty Interaction” 06:50 27. Yo, Museum Professionals (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/27) 07:30 The Future of Touchscreens 09:14 Universal Design Principles 10:20 The End of Mini-Grocery Store Exhibits 11:00 “Constraints Are A Good Thing For Creativity” 11:40 Archipelago at the Movies : National Treasure is Now Free for Everyone (https://www.patreon.com/posts/archipelago-at-31845538) 12:15 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS (https://pigeon.srisys.com/museums/) 13:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS

Museums across the globe are now closed because of Covid-19. Some of those shuttered galleries presented the science behind outbreaks like the one we’re living through. As Raven Forrest Fruscalzo, Content Developer at the Field Museum in Chicago and host of the Tiny Vampires Podcast points out, the fact that museums are closed is an important statement: they trust the scientific information. In this episode, Forrest Fruscalzo discusses the people that make up public health, how museums can be a trusted source of public health information, and examples of museum galleries that incorporate public health. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World at the National Museum of Natural History (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/exhibits/outbreak-epidemics-connected-world) 01:06 Raven Forest Fruscalzo (https://www.tinyvampires.com/about-1) 01:45 Public Health 02:08 Information Deficit Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model) 03:29 Museums and Trust 06:10 Museums That Present Public Health Topics 06:38 The Ancient Americas | Field Museum (https://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibitions/robert-r-mccormick-halls-ancient-americas) 07:04 Northwest African American Museum (https://www.naamnw.org) 07:40 Visitor Experience at Outbreak 08:40 Museum Closings Because of COVID-19 10:10 Tiny Vampires Podcast (https://www.tinyvampires.com) 11:00 SPONSOR: Pigeon (https://pigeon.srisys.com/museums/) 12:30 Outro | Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS

The statue of George Washington in New York City's Union Square commemorates him on a particular day—November 25th, 1783—the date when the defeated British Army left Manhattan after the American Revolutionary War. The statue celebrates the idea that Washington brought freedom to the country, but professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro researched how many people of African descent that Washington was enslaving on that same date: 271. Representing these people formed the heart of Washington's Next!, a participatory commemorative experience focused around that statue. In this episode, Monteiro describes how a tweet from President Trump was the inspiration for the name, how passersby reacted to the project, andthe subtle ways that public monuments have power. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 George Washington in Union Square (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestrian_statue_of_George_Washington_(New_York_City)) 00:30 Evacuation Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_Day_(New_York)) 01:50 Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro (https://sasn.rutgers.edu/about-us/faculty-staff/lyra-d-monteiro) 02:35 Trump’s Tweet (https://www.washingtonsnext.com/about) 03:30 The Slippery Slope Argument 05:30 George Washington Viewed As Beyond Reproach 07:26 Washington's Next! (https://www.washingtonsnext.com/) 09:10 Making Something the Public Wants to Engage With 11:05 How Public Monuments Have Power 12:50 Museums on Site (https://www.washingtonsnext.com/the-museum-on-site) 13:20 Episode 25. The Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia, Bulgaria is Figuring Out What to Do With All the Lenins (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/25) 13:40 Outro / Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago

Sometimes, a historical event is all about the branding. And the brand of Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts as the spot where the Mayflower pilgrims first disembarked 400 years ago this year is pretty strong. The branding is strong enough to override the fact that the Mayflower actually first landed on the other side of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown. The Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum commemorates that site. And even within a museum that’s trying to correct an inaccuracy, it has its own to grapple with: the museum used to portray the meetings between the members of the Wampanoag Nation and the Mayflower pilgrims with dehumanizing murals. In this episode, Courtney Hurst, board president of the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum, describes how the museum is working to correct these inaccuracies by working closely with the Wampanoag Nation. And as the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower arrival approaches, the museum is in the middle of yet another rebrand. Just as the word pilgrim was reframed by Mayflower passenger William Bradford as a way to tie his journey to stories in the Christian Bible, the museum is reframing the word pilgrim to include recent Provincetown history. This episode was recorded at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum on February 22, 2020. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Plymouth Rock and Historical Branding 02:00 Courtney Hurst 02:20 Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum (https://www.pilgrim-monument.org) 03:55 Portrayal of the Wampanoag Nation 04:30 Our Story 05:20 Corn Hill 06:00 Provincetown 400 (https://www.pilgrim-monument.org/provincetown-400/) 07:00 Reframing The Word Pilgrim 09:30 Spiritus Pizza Riot of 1990 (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Spiritus+Pizza+Riot+of+1990) 10:17 Historical Brands are Powerful 11:30 Archipelago At the Movies

Proprietary technology that runs museum interactives—everything from buttons to proximity sensors—tends to be expensive to purchase and maintain. But Rianne Trujillo (http://www.riannetrujillo.com), lead developer of the Cultural Technology Development Lab (http://www.cctnewmexico.org/ctdl/) at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU), realized that one way museums can avoid expensive, proprietary solutions to their technology needs is by choosing open source alternatives. She is part of the team behind Museduino (https://museduino.org), an open-source system for exhibits and installations. On this episode, Rianne Trujillo and fellow NMHU instructor of Software Systems Design Jonathan Lee (https://www.nmhu.edu/department-of-media-arts-technology/) describe the huge potential to applying the open source model to museum hardware. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Proprietary Technology in Museums 01:04 Rianne Trujillo (http://www.riannetrujillo.com) 01:24 The Cultural Technology Development Lab (http://www.cctnewmexico.org/ctdl/) 02:04 Museduino (https://museduino.org) 02:35 Jonathan Lee (https://www.nmhu.edu/department-of-media-arts-technology/) 02:50 Open Source Software and Hardware 04:09 Arduino 06:35 Hardware Lock-In 07:02 Where Museduino is Already Installed 07:24 Museduino Workshops 08:55 Archipelago At the Movies

Every time an Apollo astronaut said the word Houston, they were referring not just to a city, but a specific room in that city: Mission Control. In that room on July 20, 1969, NASA engineers answered radio calls from the surface of the moon. Sitting in front of rows of green consoles, cigarettes in hand, they guided humans safely back to earth, channeling the efforts of the thousands and thousands of people who worked on the program through one room. But until recently, that room was kind of a mess. After hosting Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Shuttle missions through 1992, the room hosted retirement parties, movie screenings, and the crumbs that came with them. Spurred by the deadline of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2019, the room was carefully restored with a new visitor experience. The restoration project focused on accurately portraying how the area looked at key moments during that mission, right down to the ashtrays and soda cans. In this episode, Sandra Tetley, Historic Preservation Officer at the Johnson Space Center, describes the process of restoring “one of the most significant places on earth.” Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:14 Apollo Mission Control Center (https://spacecenter.org/exhibits-and-experiences/nasa-tram-tour/apollo-mission-control/) 00:49 Sandra Tetley 02:00 “History Keeps Going” 02:35 Becoming a National Historic Landmark 04:00 Starting the Restoration 04:40 Gene Kranz Steps In (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kranz) 05:15 Mission Control Visitor’s Galley 06:30 The Visitor Experience 08:10 The Drama of the Room 09:37 Independence Hall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Hall) 10:10 Coffee Cups and Cigarettes 11:15 Apollo Flight Controllers Get to Celebrate 13:04 Archipelago At the Movies

The field of conservation was created to fight change: to prevent objects from becoming dusty, broken, or rusted. But fighting to keep cultural objects preserved creates a certain mindset — a mindset where it’s too easy to imagine objects and cultures in a state of stasis. Sanchita Balachandran, Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, founded Untold Stories to change that mindset in the conservation profession. Through events at the annual meetings of the American Institute for Conservation, Untold Stories expands cultural heritage beyond preserving the objects we might find in a museum. In this episode, Balachandran talks about Untold Story’s 2019 event: Indigenous Futures and Collaborative Conservation, avoiding the savior mentality, and how the profession has changed since she was in school. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:14 The Conservation Profession 01:12 Sanchita Balachandran (http://www.objectsconservationstudio.com/) 01:35 Untold Stories (https://www.untoldstories.live/) 03:30 Mohegan Sun 2019: Indigenous Futures and Collaborative Conservation (https://www.untoldstories.live/mohegan-sun-2019) 04:58 endawnis Spears and the Akomawt Educational Initiative (episode 68) (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/68) 06:09 Savior Mentality in Conservation 07:37 Changing Working Practices 09:03 Changing Technical Practices 10:30 Changing Social Practices 11:25 Activating Cultural Heritage 12:15 Salt Lake City 2020: Preserving Cultural Landscapes (https://www.untoldstories.live/aic-2020) 12:30 Learn More About Untold Stories and Watch Recordings of Past Events (https://www.untoldstories.live/mohegan-sun-2019) 12:40 SPONSOR: StoriesHere Podcast (https://storieshere.com/) 13:40 Archipelago at the Movies

Museums tend to be verbal spaces: there’s usually a lot of words. Galleries open with walls of text, visitors are presented with rules of do and don'ts, and audio guides lead headphone-ed users from one piece to the next, paragraph by paragraph. But Speechless: Different by Design, a new exhibit at the Dallas Art Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, guides visitors as far away as possible from words with six custom art installations. In this episode, curator Sarah Schleuning and graphic designer Laurie Haycock Makela discuss how their personal experiences lead them to Speechless, and describe the process and considerations of putting it all together. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:14 Museums as Verbal Spaces 00:52 Speechless: Different by Design (https://dma.org/speechless) 01:05 Sarah Schleuning 01:30 Schleuning’s Personal Experience 02:45 Picture Exchange System 03:40 Planning Speechless 05:00 Yuri Suzuki’s ‘Sound of the Earth Chapter 2’ (https://earthsounds.dma.org/) 05:17 Misha Kahn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misha_Kahn) 05:38 Laurie Haycock Makela 06:08 Makela’s Personal Experience 06:55 The Exhibition's Ground Rules 07:11 The Exhibition's Design 09:26 Museum Fatigue (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/2) 11:30 What Keeps Schleuning Up at Night 12:16 Museum Selfies (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/9) 13:29 Introducing Archipelago at the Movies

Museums are seen as trustworthy, but what if that trust is misplaced? Chicago-based independent curator Elena Gonzales provides a solid jumping off point for thinking critically about museums in her new book, Exhibitions for Social Justice. The book is a whirlwind tour of different museums, examining how they approach social justice. It’s also a guide map for anyone interested in a way forward. In this episode, Gonzales takes us on a tour of some of the main themes of the book, examining the strategies of museum institutions from the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia to the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Trust in Museum Institutions 01:00 Elena Gonzales Website (http://www.elenagonzales.org) Twitter (https://twitter.com/curatoriologist) 01:45 Exhibitions for Social Justice (https://www.routledge.com/Exhibitions-for-Social-Justice-1st-Edition/Gonzales/p/book/9781138292598) 03:05 What is an Exhibition for Social Justice? 04:20 National Museum of Mexican Art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_Mexican_Art) 07:12 “Questioning the Visitor” 07:50 Anne Frank House Museum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank_House) 08:25 Eastern State Penitentiary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_State_Penitentiary) 11:23 Buy Exhibitions for Social Justice On Routledge (https://www.routledge.com/Exhibitions-for-Social-Justice-1st-Edition/Gonzales/p/book/9781138292598) (Use Promo Code ADS19 for 30% Off) On IndieBound (https://www.indiebound.org/search/book?keys=Exhibitions+for+Social+Justice) On Amazon (https://amzn.to/2BQxb2s) 12:30 Introducing Archipelago at the Movies (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago)! Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://mailchi.mp/6aab38a7b159/museumgo) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago

To the extent that there was a Communist capital of humor in the last half of the 20th century, it was Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Situated in a valley of the Balkan mountains, the city prides itself on its unique brand of self-effacing humor. In 1972, the Museum House of Humor and Satire opened here, and the city celebrated political humor with people in Soviet block countries and even some invited Western guests. Today, three decades after the collapse of Communism, the Museum House of Humor and Satire remains one of the region's most important cultural landmarks. The museum has had to reinvent itself to interpret not only a democratic Bulgaria, but a the global, meme-driven, and internet-forged culture most visitors live in. I went to Gabrovo to visit museum director Margarita Dariskova, who describes how the museum's strengths in its early years—like knowing how to present political humor without arousing the interest of the authorities—inform how the museum thinks of its role in the world today. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Gabrovo, Bulgaria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabrovo) 01:07 Margarita Dariskova 01:44 How the Museum House of Humour and Satire Started 02:40 How to Run A Humor Museum Under Communism 04:05 1st International Biennial of Humour and Satire in the Arts in Gabrovo 05:55 The Museum in 1989 06:40 After the Collapse 07:00 Humor is Not Universal 07:30 Media Freedom in Bulgaria 07:55 Addressing Civic Space in Bulgaria: Garden Town (https://www.humorhouse.bg/engl/exhibitions/temporary.html) 09:09 The Museum and the Internet 11:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://mailchi.mp/6aab38a7b159/museumgo) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago

From Apollo Mission Control in Houston, Texas, to the field in southeastern Russia where Yuri Gargarin finished his first orbit, there are many sites on earth that played a role in space exploration. But Hutchinson, Kansas isn’t one of them. And yet, Hutchinson—a town of 40,000 people—is home to the Cosmosphere, a massive space museum. The Cosmosphere boasts an enormous collection of spacecraft, including the largest collection of Soviet space hardware anywhere outside Russia. How did all of these space artifacts end up in the middle of Kansas? To find out, I visited Hutchinson to talk to Cosmosphere curator Shannon Whetzel. In this episode, Whetzel describes the story of the Cosmosphere as “being in the right place at the right time,” why the museum’s collection includes “destroyed” artifacts, and how she interprets Soviet hardware for a new generation. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Cosmosphere (https://cosmo.org) 01:20 Why Not Kansas? 01:35 Shannon Whetzel (https://cosmo.org/about/team) 01:45 Patty Carey (https://www.hutchgov.com/1912/Cosmosphere---Patty-Carey) 02:18 Starting the Collection 04:10 Apollo 13 Command Module (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13) 05:02 Successes and Failures 05:50 Soviet Hardware 06:50 Space Race Gallery 07:58 Lunasphere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_2) 08:35 Teaching the Political Context of the Space Race 09:30 Leaving Trash on the Moon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_the_Moon) 09:58 Site-Specific Museums 10:51 Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://mailchi.mp/6aab38a7b159/museumgo) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago

Akomawt is a Passamaquoddy word for the snowshoe path. At the beginning of winter, the snowshoe path is hard to find. But the more people pass along and carve out this path through the snow during the season, the easier it becomes for everyone to walk it together. endawnis Spears (https://www.akomawt.org/about-us.html) (Diné/ Ojibwe/ Chickasaw/ Choctaw) is director of programming and outreach for the Akomawt Educational Initiative (https://www.akomawt.org). She saw a need to supply regional educators with the tools to implement competent education on Native history and Native contemporary issues. She co-founded the Initiative with Chris Newell (Passamaquoddy) and Dr. Jason Mancini to make those tools. In this episode, Spears talks about the different between living culture and sterile museum artifacts, her discussion at Untold Stories 2019: Indigenous Futures and Collaborative Conservation (https://www.untoldstories.live/mohegan-sun-2019) about how Native narratives are violently presented through a white lens in museums, and the potential for museums to disrupt that for many visitors. Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://mailchi.mp/6aab38a7b159/museumgo) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago

Cité de l'Espace (https://en.cite-espace.com/) in Toulouse, France is a museum in the middle. It is in the middle of France’s Aerospace Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospace_Valley) and the European Space Industry. But it is also geographically in the middle of the two competing superpowers in the Space Race that ended with Apollo 11. From its vantage point in the middle, Cité de l'Espace has its own story to tell. The museum features a mix of Soviet and American space hardware, like an American Apollo lunar module and a Soviet Soyuz capsule. The museum also features an extentive collection of French-made space hardware. In this episode commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, I visit Cité de l'Espace to see their preparations for “Apollo Day,” discuss a museum on the lunar surface (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/32), and see how the Space Race is presented from the middle. Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://mailchi.mp/6aab38a7b159/museumgo) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago

The most-visited room in the most-visited science museum in the world reopened last week after a massive, five year renovation (https://extinctmonsters.net/2019/06/14/deep-time-is-a-masterpiece/). Deep Time, as the new gallery is colloquially known, is the latest iteration of the Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. It might not seem like much in geologic time, but the Smithsonian Fossil Hall has been welcoming visitors for more than 100 years. Over those years, the dinosaur bones and other fossils—even some individual specimens—have remained at the center, even as the museum presentation around them has changed dramatically. You can measure the change by the different names of the hall through time. What is today Deep Time first opened in 1911 with a different name: The Hall of Extinct Monsters. In this episode, we’re going back in time through the iterations of the Fossil Hall with Ben Miller (https://extinctmonsters.net), an exhibitions developer at the Field Museum in Chicago. From its opening as The Hall of Extinct Monsters in 1911, to renovations in the 1960s and 1980s, to the forceful climate crisis message of 2019’s Deep Time gallery, the Smithsonian Fossil Hall has answered life’s biggest questions. This is the story of how museum workers shrugged off their “cabinet of curiosity” roots and embraced education-oriented exhibits like what we see in the gallery today. Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://mailchi.mp/6aab38a7b159/museumgo) to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago

Everything decays. In the past, human heritage that decayed slowly enough on stone, vellum, bamboo, silk, or paper could be put in a museum—still decaying, but at least visible. Today, human heritage is decaying on hard drives. Sarah Nguyen (https://twitter.com/snewyuen), a MLIS student at the University of Washington, is the project coordinator of Preserve This Podcast (http://preservethispodcast.org/), a project and podcast of the same name that proposes solutions to fight against the threats of digital decay for podcasts. Alongside archivists Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie (https://twitter.com/theaudiosignal), and producer Molly Schwartz, Nguyen advocates for Personal Digital Archiving (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_archiving), the idea that for the first time, your data is under your control and you can archive it to inform future history. Personal archiving counters the institutional gatekeepers who determined which data and stories are worth preserving. In this episode, Nguyen cautions that preserving culture digitally comes with its own set of pitfalls, describes the steps that individuals can do to reduce the role of chance in preserving digital media, and why automatic archiving tools don’t properly contextualize. Image (left to right): Mary Kidd, Sarah Nguyen, Molly Schwartz, Dana Gerber-Margie, and Lyra Gerber-Margie Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://mailchi.mp/6aab38a7b159/museumgo) to never miss an epsiode. Unlock Club Archipelago

The Space Shuttle Atlantis Experience, which opened at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Space_Center_Visitor_Complex) in Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2013 brings visitors “nose to nose” with one of the three remaining Space Shuttle orbiters. The team that built it used principles of themed attraction design to introduce visitors to the orbiter and the rest of the exhibits. Atlantis is introduced linearly and deliberately: visitors see two movies about the shuttle before the actual orbiter is dramatically revealed behind a screen. The orbiter’s grand entrance was designed by PGAV Destinations (https://pgavdestinations.com), whose portfolio includes theme parks and museums. Diane Lochner, a vice president of the company who was part of the architectural design team, says that without that carefully-planned preparation, visitors wouldn’t have the same powerful emotional reaction to the Shuttle. In this episode, Lochner is joined by Tom Owen, another vice president at PGAV Destinations to talk about the visitor experience considerations of the Shuttle Atlantis Experience, whether attractions engineered to create a specific emotional response in visitors are appropriate for museum contexts, and the broader trend of museums taking cues from theme park design. Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://mailchi.mp/6aab38a7b159/museumgo) to never miss an epsiode. Club Archipelago

The Museum of Old and New Art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art) opened in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia in 2011. With a name like that, MONA (https://mona.net.au/) could include any type of art. But looking at the collection, it’s clear that its creator, millionaire gambler David Walsh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Walsh_(art_collector)), has a fascination with sex and death -- and bets that the rest of us do too. Walsh himself calls MONA a “subversive adult Disneyland.” The building’s architecture is designed to make you feel lost, and the art is displayed without any labels whatsoever. It’s just you and the art. In this episode, Hobart-based musician Bianca Blackhall (https://www.facebook.com/biancablackhallmusic/) talks about how she’s watched MONA reshape the creative community and art landscape of the island, what makes the museum different from other art museums, and how Hobart is now in “Sauron's Eye of tourism.” This month on Museum Archipelago, we’re taking you to Tasmania (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/tags/tasmania). Over the course of three episodes, we’re conducting a survey of museums on the island, and exploring how each of them relates to the wider landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE) to never miss an episode. Club Archipelago

The displays at the Tiagarra Cultural Centre and Museum (https://tiagarra.weebly.com/) in Devonport, Tasmania, Australia were built in 1976 (https://tiagarra.weebly.com/tiagarra-opening-and-timeline-1975---1979.html) by non-indigenous citizens and scientists without consulting Aboriginal Tasmanians. David Gough (http://www.utas.edu.au/community/naidoc/community-bio-david-gough), chairperson of the Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation, (https://www.facebook.com/groups/434417366698696/) remembers visiting the museum when he was younger and seeing his own culture presented as extinct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanians). Today, Gough is the manager of Tiagarra. When he took over, one of the first things he did was put masking tape over the inappropriate and incorrect descriptions and write in the correct information. As Gough explains, racist language covered up and written over by the very people it describes is the perfect metaphor for what Tiagarra was in the past and what it is going to be in the future. On this episode, Gough and fellow Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation board member Sammy Howard give a special tour of the museum, describe using the museum to educate members of their community and the wider public, and discuss the future of Tiagarra (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Tiagarra+Mersey+Bluff&t=h_&ia=web). This month on Museum Archipelago, we’re taking you to Tasmania (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/tags/tasmania). Over the course of three episodes, we’re conducting a survey of museums on the island, and exploring how each of them relates to the wider landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE) to never miss an episode. Club Archipelago

Penal transportation from England to Australia from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s was used to expand Britain's spheres of influence and to reduce overcrowding in British prisons. The male convict experience is well-known, but the Cascades Female Factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascades_Female_Factory) in Hobart is at the center of a shift in how Australians think of the role that female convicts played in the colonization of Tasmania. Dr. Jody Steele, the heritage interpretation manager for the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority (https://portarthur.org.au/about-us/), which includes the Female Factory, says that having a convict ancestor used to be considered shameful. But in the past 20 years, attitudes have shifted dramatically. Sites like the Female Factory (https://femalefactory.org.au/), the Female Convicts Research Centre (https://www.femaleconvicts.org.au), and a general interest in geological research have helped the public better understand how the forced labor of women built the economy of the island. Today, the museum is on the cusp of a major renovation (https://femalefactory.org.au/event/cascades-female-factory-design-and-interpretation-centre-project/). Dr Steele describes how the proposed design, chosen by an all-female panel, will present the female convict experience in Tasmania. This month on Museum Archipelago, we’re taking you to Tasmania. For the next three episodes, we’re conducting a survey of museums on the island, and exploring how each of them relates to the wider landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE) to never miss an episode. Club Archipelago

The fight for racial diversity in museums and other cultural institutions is not new: people of color have been fighting for inclusion in white mainstream museums for over 50 years (https://amzn.to/2udBIYZ). Dispose these efforts, change has been limited. A 2018 survey by the Mellon Foundation (https://mellon.org/media/filer_public/e5/a3/e5a373f3-697e-41e3-8f17-051587468755/sr-mellon-report-art-museum-staff-demographic-survey-01282019.pdf) found that 88% of people in museum leadership positions are white. Stephanie Cunningham (https://twitter.com/stephacunning) has a clear answer for why these white institutions aren’t changing: “When you’ve been practicing exclusion for so long, you can’t change overnight.” That’s one of the reasons why she co-founded Museum Hue (https://www.museumhue.com) with Monica Montgomery in 2015. In this episode, Cunningham traces Museum Hue (https://twitter.com/MuseumHue)’s trajectory from a small collective to a national membership-based organization (https://www.museumhue.com/join), and spells out why being a well-meaning institution is necessary but not sufficient for equity in the field. Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE) to never miss an epsiode. Club Archipelago

There’s a new tool in young-Earth creationists' quest for scientific legitimacy: the museum. Over the past 25 years, dozens of so-called creation museums have been built, including the Answers in Genesis (AiG) Creation Museum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum) in Kentucky. Borrowing the style of natural history museums and science centers, these public display spaces use the form and rhetoric of mainstream science to support a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, including the creation of the universe in six days about 6,000 years ago. In her 2009 thesis, “Faith Displayed As Science: The Role of The Creation Museum in the Modern Creationist Movement (https://ncse.com/files/pub/library/Theses/Duncan_Julie-%20Faith%20Displayed%20as%20Science%20-%20The%20role%20of%20the.pdf)”, Julie Garcia visited the AiG Creation Museum and three other creation museums: The Creation Evidence Museum in Glenrose, TX, Dinosaur Adventureland in Pensacola, FL, and the Institute for Creation Research which is near San Diego, CA. In this episode, Garcia discusses her findings and explores why museums are a particularly well-suited medium for creationist ideas. Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Castbox (https://castbox.fm/x/10jh_), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE) to never miss an epsiode. Club Archipelago

Joe Galliano (https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephgalliano) came up with the idea for Queer Britain (https://twitter.com/queer_britain), the UK’s national LGBTQ+ museum, during the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Offences_Act_1967). Discouraged by the focus on male homosexuality and on legislation, he launched a bid to preserve histories that have been ignored or destroyed. If all goes well, the museum will open in London in a few years. In this episode, Galliano talks about the UK’s history of anti-gay legislation, how he is working to create a ‘catalytic space’ at Queer Britain, and why the medium of museums is right for this project. The word ‘queer’ was synonymous with ‘strange’ or ‘weird’, and a common slur thrown at LGBT individuals. Activists in the 1980s reclaimed the word and used it as an umbrella term for a wide range of sexual orientations and gender identities. Nowadays, queer is an increasingly popular way to identify within the community, but as historical traumas persist, and the word can still be found in hostile environments, it’s important to note that not everyone is in agreement. Joe Galliano and Queer Britain use the term as a proud self-identifier, and an intentional move away from using the word ‘gay’, and male homosexuality in general, as a stand-in for all identities. Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE) to never miss an epsiode. Sponsor: Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, GW University This show is brought to you by the Museum Studies Graduate Program at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University. With a graduate degree in Museum Studies, you will be equipped to respond to the evolving museum profession by engaging in hands-on training in the heart of the nation’s museum capital. To learn more, click here. Topics and Links 00:00: Intro 00:15: Joseph Galliano 00:35: 50th anniversary of the Partial Decriminalization of Homosexuality in England and Wales 01:55: Legislation from the 'Buggery' Act to Today 02:58: Legislation Focusing on Male Homosexuality 04:00: "Rightful Place" 04:43: The Word Queer 05:28: The Plan for Queer Britain 06:20: Dan Vo at the V&A 07:25: Virtually Queer 08:45: Museums Asking Questions 10:40: Fundraising and Partnerships 12:09: Sponsor: Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, GW University 13:18: Outro | Join Club Archipelago Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 58. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] Joe Galliano: Turns out, in order to launch a museum, it’s a long, complicated, expensive process. Who knew? This is Joe Galliano, one of the co-founders of the Queer Britain Museum. Joe Galliano: Hello, my name is Joe Galliano, the co-founder and CEO of Queer Britain, the national LGBTQ+ museum for the UK. Galliano came up with the idea for a national LGBTQ+ museum in 2017, during the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts in the UK, an anniversary commemorated by cultural and heritage institutions across the country. Joe Galliano: I felt slightly conflicted because it’s an anniversary that’s focused around men. It’s an anniversary that was focused around criminality and victimhood. Some of the fairly familiar tropes that we get rolled out that we get when we start talking about gay men, largely, and it’s not very inclusive. We’re living in a world, thankfully, where there’s a rich and wildly diverse set of sexulaitlies and gender identities and it left me slightly sad that it wasn’t entirely recognized. And also the fact that it was hung on an anniversary, and I didn’t wanted it to be another 50 years before there was something major happening again and I wanted to make sure that we build on the momentum that was being gathered around that anniversary and that it didn’t just fizzle away: it turned into something with real lasting value. The emphasis on an anniversary of legislation could have come from the context of a long history of formal, legal repression of male homosexuality the UK, going all the way back to the Buggery Act of 1533. Joe Galliano: We had the Buggery Act, which was introduced under Henry VIII, which was very much around male sexuality, male same-sex attraction and policing that. And this all stayed on the books in various forms until 1967 when there was partial decriminalization. With partial decriminalization, the age of consent was set at 21, where it was 16 for everybody else. At that point, as well, prosecutions absolutely rocketed. As soon as there was some allowance for people to behave naturally, it then became a bigger stick to beat people with. The legislation only focused on male homosexuality, which is, of course, telling. Joe Galliano: It’s interesting that those laws were always about men. Women with same sex desire were almost rendered invisible to public life and the law. Yeah, I think there’s also, if we’re talking about that kind of legislation, there actually have been a prejudice, a lot of it is about patriarchy, about male views of sexualty and sex, who has an active sexuality, who has a passive sexuality. I think through a large portion of history, women’s sexuality was seen as in service to male sexuality, and so would you legislate against that? There are also some stories. When some of the later bills will brought to Queen Victoria, they were too embarrased to talk about lesbianisim or anything like that. How much truth there is in that, I don’t know. Of course, the focus of Queer Britain will not be legislation. But as Galliano says, the laws previously on the books, and the increasing number of violent homophobic and transphobic attacks in the UK today have distorted the country’s understanding of itself — and tie directly into the mission of the museum. Joe Galliano: We’re talking about a central hub that will visible globally and within the mainstream that will give a message that here is a catalytic space that will collect our stories and here’s a way of helping progress Britain’s understanding of itself by giving Queer stories their rightful place. So that means rightful place within the culture. And also a rightful place. A place that can be their own. The word ‘Queer’ has a complicated history. It wassynonymous with ‘strange’ or ‘weird’, and a common slur thrown at LGBT people. Activists in the 1980s reclaimed the word and used it as an umbrella term for a wide range of sexual orientations and gender identities. Today, Queer is an increasingly popular way to identify within the community, but as historical traumas persist, and the word can still be found in hostile environments, it’s important to note that not everyone is in agreement. Galliano and the Queer Britain Museum use the term as a proud self-identifier and as an intentional move away from using the word ‘gay’, and male homosexuality in general, as a stand-in for all identities. The plan is for Queer Britain to have a physical space in London, opening sometime in the next few years. Although the UK is full of museums, some of which are have Queer artifacts and Queer stories, Galliano is conscious of how backsliding can happen. In legislation and culture, the laws and norms of today don’t guarantee that the future will look the same. Institutions like museums are a part of maintaining today’s momentum — and can give people who have had their stories told by others a chance to narrate their own history. Joe Galliano: I think there’s fantastic movement within the museum communities now to Queer those spaces, to make sure they are unearthing those stories and seeing how they can weave them through the main of their collections. Are they there yet? No. Some places have gotten further than others. Some aren’t doing anything. But there’s some really really good work. I would look at a volunteer like Dan Vo at the V&A who is conducting really good museum tours, LGBT museum tours and is a great volunteer activist. I think that part of my fear is that much of the movement forward relies on activist curators and really excited volunteers and it doesn’t take too many people to leave the sector, and that’s lost. The other thing I think is really important is that there’s such a rich and wildly diverse set of stories to tell. That those museums are never going to be able to tell all of those stories. Whereas what we have the ability to do is to create a catalytic space, where we can pour all of those stories in and where we can keep telling different stories and we can change the exhibitions all the time. And that LGBT people can be in control of telling their own stories as well. Over history, so often, it has been other people who have told our stories. When these other people and institutions tell the Queer community’s stories, they often become the de facto intergenerational gatekeepers — if they decide to keep and organize the information at all. This can have devastating consequences. Galliano is acutely aware that stories are being lost every day. Joe Galliano: That’s about making sure that we’ve gathered the stories of people who are with us now. They can add their voices into the archives and become part of that. It’s important really that we gather the stories now while people can actually talk to us. In terms of understanding where we’re gonna be headed with the archive to start with is that we are designing a national survey of museums around the country, which we’re doing with the assistance of the National Archives. What we really want to do is just get a proper sense of what is the nation’s holding of material that we would think of as LGBT focused. That will mean that it will give us steer as to where are the important gaps. How do we fill those gaps? That’s going to kind of give us a sense of where to focus our collecting activity. When a museum is still an idea, what the word museum means is still flexible. In addition to educational exhibits about Queer history and culture, the proposed museum is also a place for people to upload their own stories and The Whole projects serves as an antidote to the psychological damage of homophobic and transphobic attacks and oppression. Joe Galliano: Museum’s an interesting word, isn’t it, because it comes with all sorts of baggage. And actually, we’re talking about something very much broader than just a museum in the traditional sense. They show inherently show what a culture values and they’re a really good way of understanding what we are now, understand how we got there, and then take that understanding and use them to imagine the best of all possible futures. They ask questions. Who are we? How did we get here? Who do we want to be? It should be different every time you come to the museum when the physical space itself opens. Which we’re a few years off yet. What we’re looking at is a series of guest curators, a rolling series of guest curators so that each time we bring somebody in we’re like, “What is the story that you need to tell? What is the story that hasn’t been told? What’s the material that sits unexplored in other museums’ archives that we’re able to shine a light on?” Sometimes it’ll be about the blockbuster exhibition. What’s the exhibition that’s going to be bringing lines ‘round the block? Which of the exhibitions will there be telling community stories that haven’t been told? For example, it could be everything from - and I’m talking off the top of my head right this moment - It could be everything from, “What is Elton John’s stage costumes?” through to “What is the queer Bangladeshi experience of Birmingham in the 1950s?” It will be a space to tell a vast, endless set of experiences. Creating a new museum is no small task, but Galliano is ready for the challenge. As he goes through the process of collecting and fundraising, he’s also focused on building partnerships. His route to creating a robust institution begins with acknowledging that it’s a project bigger than just one person or one identity. Joe Galliano: There’s as many challenges as you want to look at and they’re all fascinating and exciting to step up to. I think the other thing is how do you carry the responsibility to make sure that something that there is such a need for and such a desire, certainly within the LGBTQ+ communities, how do you carry the weight and the responsibility of having said that you’re gonna this thing and making sure that you’ve delivered for those people. I want to create an organization that if I step away from it, we’ve got the right … There’s another person that will be able to take over that mantle. So that the organization isn’t about one person, but we’ve created a robust organization that will be able to delivery fabulously. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever worked on because it’s the thing that I’m most … I’ve never worked from something I feel so passionately is important. I’ve never picked up a project as brilliantly challenging as this in it’s scale, in the scope of all the different stakeholders we need to make sure are brought close and are doing the right things. And that we keep a laser focus on the strategy to make sure that it happens. [Sponsor] This has been Museum Archipelago [Outro]

In American history most often told, the vitality of Black activism has been obscured in favor of celebrating white-lead movements. In the 19th century, an enormous network of African American activists created a series of state and national political meetings known as the Colored Conventions Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Conventions_Movement). The Colored Conventions Project (http://coloredconventions.org) (CCP) is a Black digital humanities initiative dedicated to identifying, collecting, and curating all of the documents produced by the Colored Conventions Movement. In this episode, two of the CCP’s cofounders and co-directors, Jim Casey (https://twitter.com/jimccasey1) and Gabrielle Foreman (https://twitter.com/profgabrielle) are joined by Project Fellow Denise Burgher (https://www.english.udel.edu/people/dburgher) to discuss how the Project mirrors the energy and collective commitments of the Conventions themselves, how to see data as a form of protest, and creating an a set of organizational principles. Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE) to never miss an epsiode. Club Archipelago

Lana Pajdas (https://twitter.com/LanaPajdas) is the founder of Fun Museums (http://funmuseums.eu), a heritage and culture travel blog with a radical idea: museums are fun. It is the guiding principle of her museum marketing, consulting work (http://funmuseums.eu), and even her photographs (https://www.instagram.com/funmuseums). In this episode, Pajdas describes Heritage Sites in her native Croatia, from the interpretation of the 1991 Battle of Vukovar at the Vukovar Municipal Museum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vukovar#Vukovar_Municipal_Museum) to the Game of Thrones-inspired Over-Tourism in Dubrovnik Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast for free to never miss an episode. Sponsor: The Museums, Heritage, and Public History program at the University of Missouri at St. Louis This episode of Museum Archipelago is sponsored by The Museums, Heritage, and Public History program at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. The program is currently accepting applications for the Fall 2019 semester. They offer an MA degree as well as a Graduate Certificate. Their programs address pressing needs of museums and heritage institutions in the 21st century and prepare students for professional careers in museums, historic sites and societies, cultural agencies, and related organizations. Financial support is available for a limited number of students and applications are due on February 1st. For more information, please call 314-516-4805 or visit their website. Topics and Links 00:00: Intro 00:15: Croatia 00:40: Over-Tourism in Dubrovnik, Croatia 01:14: Lana Pajdas and the Fun Museums Blog 02:39: Disney’s America on Museum Archipelago 03:15: Vukovar Municipal Museum on the Battle of Vukovar 05:12: “Museum Procrastination” 06:14: Sustainable Tourism 07:59: Possible Solutions to Over-Tourism 09:08: FunMuseums.eu 09:18: Sponsor: The Museums, Heritage, and Public History program at the University of Missouri at St. Louis 10:11: Outro | Join Club Archipelago Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 56. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] Lana Pajdas is from Croatia. Lana Pajdas: We are a small country, and we have fewer inhabitants that some US cities. We don’t have as many fields of industry or strong economy or whatever, and tourism is maybe the most important field we have. But in recent years, the Croatian city of Dubrovnik, due in part to being a prominent filming location of the TV series Game of Thrones, has experienced dramatic overcrowding. Lana Pajdas: I was there last time, and it was pretty much terrible to see that people were waiting in lines to enter inside the old town, inside the walls. There were so many agencies selling Game of Thrones tours and taking people to some specific areas where it’s kind of difficult to have so many people in the same place, even for safety reasons. Pajdas is the founder of Fun Museums, a heritage and culture travel blog. Lana Pajdas: Okay, my name is Lana Pajdas, My blog is called Fun Museums because I like to say that visiting museums is fun above all. Visiting museums is a fun experience, and people shouldn’t think that museums are something cold, elegant, smart, intelectual. It’s just, people can have that experience in their leisure time. Pajdas is also a museum marker and consultant. Her overall theme is that museums are fun. It is a radical idea — and it influences everything, from her philosophy on museum marketing to a way to approach overcrowding in museums and heritage sites. Lana Pajdas: Exactly, that is my guiding principle. The way I write my articles it to say the most cool, funky stuff about each museums I visit. Sometimes museum professionals don’t like this at all, that’s why some people from museums, museum curators for instance, museum marketing professionals or education professionals, they send me messages: “could you stop saying things that way because it is in contrast to our professional values.” But then I said, okay, but that’s what people like to know. That’s what people like to hear. If you think it should be more intellectual, you have to understand that most people can’t read it that way, understand the way you want to present it to them. But there is a real tension, because the axis isn’t just between what’s fun and what’s intellectual. In episode 17 of Museum Archipelago, I cover the spectacular failure of a Disney theme park concept called Disney's America in 1994. The park, which would open in Virginia not far from Washington DC, would showcase [quote] “the sweep of American History” within a fun theme park environment. It is particularly notable to witness the confidence and enthusiasm Disney executives had for a tightrope between entertainment and American history. Lana Pajdas: An example is a town on the east of Croatia, its name is Vukovar. This town was heavily destroyed in the most recent war in this part of Europe in 1991 when it was occupied. Almost all the buildings were destroyed, most of the people have to go away from there, and it was one of the most terrible stories that happened in Europe after the Second World War. And now the city has been quite well restored some people went back to live there, and the museum was completely renovated. And obviously, the visit to that museum is a nice and pleasant experience, but in recent history you really need to deal with some awful stuff that happened less than 30 years ago. It’s difficult for a person from Western Europe to understand what happened in ex-Yugoslavia. Even sometimes too complicated for people from this areas. It’s not as simple as some books like to present or some journalists like to present and there are many different opinions. So I think that museums sometimes need to take certain sides, even if some will disagree. Museums that deal with that stories needs to first of all show those emotions and to collaborate with people who suffered those emotions. Of course some emotional intelligence is very important for people who create that storytelling, who transmit emotions of certain people or people who will be just visitors, or maybe have nothing to with those areas or stories. No matter what kind of museum you’re about to walk into, you have a sense of what you might find inside. And since that sense is partially informed by a museum’s marketing, Pajdas has made a habit of noting how people react to museums before they go. Lana Pajdas: In most cases, it happens that people procrastinate their decisions to go to a museum. That happens more often than not. Next time I would really like to visit that museum, but today I feel a bit tired. I’m hungry, I want to go to eat to drink, I prefer to stay at home, watch a movie, I would really love to go the museum, but maybe one day. When my friends go to Paris, for instance, they say, I want to visit Louvre, I know there are other museums, but maybe another time. Because Louvre is already enough for me for these three days. This tendency to choose the most popular museum to the exclusion of less frequently-visited ones is part of Pajdas’s interest in sustainable tourism. Lana Pajdas: I’m parallel interested in sustainable travel and the museum thing, and these are the two areas I mentioned as my primary focus and interest. So museums and sustainable travel. Sustainability has so many faces, I’m quite interested in seeing about energy efficiency and waste management. But overtorusiim being one of my focus areas even though I don’t really pretend to know what could be a solution to that. Some attractions like the Alhombre Castle in Spain introduced online booking and you can’t just come in, buy a ticket and enter, but you have to book your spot in advance online and sometimes you can’t get a ticket if you just remember a week before you go. These are some of the solutions. I do wonder how much of this heavily concentrated overcrowding has to do with the nature social media itself -- there’s a network effect of a geotagged photo, not just a particular heritage site, but at particular spot within that heritage site that presents the best angle for a photo or looks exactly the way it did on Game of Thrones. Of course, there are many other factors that lead to overcrowding — the cheap flights, the increasing ability of people to travel, and the dynamic of travel as a product. And if the Acropolis is at already capacity every single day, what it is going to look like 10 or 20 years from now? And to go back to Disney, tourism as a product already has an answer — just raise the prices. But heritage for the rich isn’t heritage anymore. Lana Pajdas: Heritage should be accessible. Obviously, for many people around the world, it’s not really affordable to go to some places. What I want to be avoided is it becomes too expensive that only wealthy people can afford visiting those attractions. That’s what I would like to be avoided. And another thing, I would really like to encourage more people who really like to travel to visit secondary attractions, not go necessarily to the most famous places, but to visit some places around that usually also need visitors and more local people could make money for living, if they get visitors on those particular places, because more people could be employed in those places and businesses could flourish. That’s the basic thing. And this is what ties all aspects of Pajdas (pydash)’s work together — to use the social media network effect to share the secondary attractions of a city, balancing the pressure on the most popular heritage site. To read Pajdas (pydash)’s blog, and to learn about her consulting work, visit Funmuseums.eu. Her twitter handle is @LanaPajdas.

Barbara Hicks-Collins grew up in a Civil Rights house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_%22Bob%22_Hicks_House) in Bogalusa, Louisiana. In her family breakfast room in 1965, her father, the late Robert “Bob” Hicks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_%22Bob%22_Hicks), founded the Bogalusa chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice). The armed self-defense force was formed in response to local anti-integration violence that the local police force complicitly supported. The house became a communication hub, a safe house, and a medical triage station for injured activists denied medical services at the state hospital. After her father’s death, Barbara Hicks-Collins decided that the house has one more chapter: as the Bogalusa Civil Rights Museum (https://roberthicksfoundation.squarespace.com/civil-rights-museum). In this episode, Barbara Hicks-Collins talks about growing up with the Civil Rights movement in her living room and describes the process, progress, and challenges of today’s Bogalusa Civil Rights Museum project. Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE) to never miss an epsiode. Club Archipelago

High in the Balkan mountains, Buzludzha monument is deteriorating. Designed to emphasize the power and modernity of the Bulgarian Communist Party (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7I65bs_HH4), Buzludzha is now at the center of a debate over how Bulgaria remembers its past (http://www.buzludzha-monument.com/archives/). Architect Brian Muthaliff (http://cargocollective.com/bmuthaliff) wants the building to evolve along with Bulgaria. His master’s thesis on Buzludzha describes a re-adaption of the site to subvert the original intention of the architecture, including installing a winery and a theater. Unlike architect Dora Ivanova’s Buzludzha Project (http://www.buzludzha-monument.com/project), which we discussed at length in episode 47 (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/47), Muthaliff’s plan (http://cargocollective.com/bmuthaliff) only calls for a single, museum-like space. In this episode, we use Muthaliff’s thesis as a guide (http://cargocollective.com/bmuthaliff/R-E-D-Reconstruction-in-an-Era-of-Dilapidation) as we go in-depth on what a museum means and discuss the best path forward for this building and for Bulgaria. Image: Rendering from R.E.D | Reconstruction in an Era of Dilapidation: A Proposal for the Revitalization of the Former House of the Communist Party by Brian Muthaliff Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE) to never miss an epsiode. Club Archipelago

The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum (https://www.ahtahthiki.com/), on the Big Cypress Reservation in the Florida Everglades, serves as the public face of the Seminole Tribe of Florida (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/16). But the museum collaborates with the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office (http://www.stofthpo.com/) (THPO) next door to preserve the tribe's culture, working for and with the community through various shared projects. One of the projects is called Are We There Yet: Engaging the Tribal Youth with Story Maps (https://www.ahtahthiki.com/mosaic/), which is now on display in the museum. Quenton Cypress, Community Engagement Coordinator at THPO, and Lacee Cofer, Geo Spatial Analyst at THPO, started the project with Juan Cancel, Chief Data Analyst at THPO. The team taught 11th grade students at the Ahfachkee School (the school on the Big Cypress Reservation) GIS mapping software and helped the students create their own maps about a Seminole or Native American topic (https://afstof.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=cd4597ad79cb4ca8ab920cbe7b548442). In this episode, the THPO team talks about the process of teaching the students how to use geospatial software, the Story Maps that the students created, and how the students reacted to seeing their work in the museum gallery. Image: Lacee Cofer, Juan Cancel & Quenton Cypress presenting thier project at the Esri User Conference in San Diego in 2018. Club Archipelago

By day, Paula Santos (http://www.culturaconscious.com/about/) is Community Engagement Manager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County_Museum_of_Art). By night, she hosts the excellent Cultura Conscious (http://www.culturaconscious.com) podcast. On Cultura Conscious, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary, Santos interviews cultural workers on their work with justice and equity. The discussions dive deep into what Santos calls the "nuts and bolts" of museum work. On this episode, Santos describes her thoughts about the relationship between cultural institutions and the communities they identify as “underserved,” gives examples on how institutions can cede power, and explains how the idea for her podcast came out of a cultural worker discussion collective she was a part of in New York City. Club Archipelago

The Jewish Museum of History in Sofia, Bulgaria (http://www.sofiasynagogue.com) is housed on the second floor of the Sofia Synagogue in the center of Bulgaria's capital, just steps away from an Orthodox Church, and Sofia's Mosque. This clustering of places of worship — it's hard to find another example of this in Europe — is part of the unique story of Jewish people in Bulgaria. While the museum tells the full story of the Jewish people in Bulgaria (http://www.sofiasynagogue.com/index.php?content_id=5) from ancient Roman times to today, Yulina Mihaylova of the Jewish Museum of History says that the culmination of the story is the rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria from deportation to Nazi death camps during the Second World War. The museum takes on the complexities of this story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Bulgarian_Jews), including the fact that not all Jews in Bulgarian-controlled territories were saved from deportation, and uses it to challenge young visitors. Subscribe to Museum Archipelago for free to never miss an episode. (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/subscribe) Club Archipelago

When the American Writers Museum (https://americanwritersmuseum.org/) opened in Chicago in 2017, it became the first museum in the US to celebrate all genres of writing. Early in the planning phase, founder Malcolm O’Hagan made a couple of key decisions: no artifacts and no single curator. In this episode, the museum’s programs director Allison Sansone (https://americanwritersmuseum.org/about/staff/) explains how these decisions continue to shape the museum, from a timeline of 100 significant authors of fiction and nonfiction to galleries honoring the craft of writing. This episode was recorded at the American Writers Museum in Chicago, IL, USA on September 2nd, 2018. This episode was released in tandem with Club Archipelago 5. 50th Episode Extravaganza

The campus of the Bulgarian National Museum of Military History in Sofia is defended on all sides by a garden of missiles and tanks. But as Director of Public Relations Deyana Kostova points out, many of the exhibits inside focus on the consequences of war rather than the tools of warfare. One of these exhibits, called 'The Little Man in the Great War', explores the Bulgarian World War I experience through overarching emotions. In this episode, Kostova gives a tour of the exhibit, explains how the museum contextualizes Bulgarian and world history, and describes the mission of the museum to present history from multiple points of view. Club Archipelago

Ariana Lee and Palace Shaw create The Whitest Cube, an excellent new museum podcast about people of color and their experiences with art institutions as artists, visitors, workers, activists, or casual admirers. The podcast interrogates the city of Boston and its museums through the lens of race. In this episode, Lee and Shaw talk about the reasons for starting the podcast, what diversity in museums really means, and how to pressure cultural institutions to change. If you’re interested in museums, you should subscribe to the Whitest Cube on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or Instagram. You can support their work directly on Patreon. Club Archipelago

High in the Bulgarian mountains, Buzludzha monument is deteriorating. Commemorating early Bulgarian Marxists, it was designed to emphasize the power and modernity of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Buzludzha is now at the center of a debate over how Bulgaria remembers its past. Some people want to destroy it, some people want to restore it to its former glory, but Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova has a better idea.Ivanova wants to turn it into a museum, and she founded the Buzludzha Project Foundation to do exactly that. In this episode, Ivanova describes how the city of Berlin inspired her plan for the preservation of Buzludzha, how to preserve the past without glorifying it, and the next steps to making her plan a reality. Topics Discussed00:00 Intro00:15 Buzludzha's Opening Ceremony01:04 Buzludzha Today01:38 Buzludzha As Propaganda02:00 Dora Ivanova02:20 "The Cathedral of Socialism"02:45 Ian's Buzludzha Visit03:30 Ivanova on Perserving Buzludzha04:22 What To Do With Old Monuments04:59 Ivanova's Museum Proposal06:20 Tower Elevator07:05 Next Steps07:56 Inspiration From The City of Berlin09:22 The Buzludzha Project Foundation09:37 Outro - Join Club Archipelago Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago