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Leveraging Archaeology in an Asymmetrical Application of Scientific Thinking

I spent a surprising amount of time in graduate school concerned with an odd question: What's the scientific status of archaeology? The question emerged because of my work with the Mysteries of Catalhoyuk exhibit at the SMM, an exhibit on the post-modern archaeological methods ongoing in Turkey. My argument then and now is that the representation of archaeology in this exhibit -- of the cultural and social approach to thinking about what archaeology does and knows -- is one of the most sophisticated pictures of science I've seen in a museum. But was this kind of archaeology really science? Is a post-modern, post-structuralist anthropologically infused archaeology that goes post-post-process a good example of the scientific method? Simple answer: Yes, because it's put on display in a science museum. 

Now that I've visited too many science and natural history  museums to count, I continue to be surprised at the way archaeology is used to set up the basic ideas of science. It seems that the drama of digging, finding, collecting, cataloguing, and inferring things based on evidence is an efficient way to capture science as a way of looking and thinking. (See forthcoming post on archaeology at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History.)

So it wasn't really a surprise to see the open diorama of an archaeological site as the starting point and centerpiece of the Creation Museum's route (read: tightly controlled argumentive pathway).

Because I honestly don't feel equipped to really tear down the museum's approach here, let me describe what it does and what it means. 

The key move in this opening section is to put science and religion on the same footing: both begin with assumptions and both lead to different conclusions. What's fascinating is the use of this very traditional diorama and an appeal to "nature" to make this case. The main panel here states,

Dinosaur fossils don't come with tags on them telling us how old they are, what they ate, or how they died. We have to figure that out from a few clues we find.

On its face, this seems a rather nice way to introduce visitors to the scientific method, for it gets right to the heart of the problem of science: making inferences about things in the natural world based on signs and evidence. 

Just as the first two sentences here capture the foundations of scientific thinking, the next one subtly undermines it: "But because we never have all the evidence, different scientists reach very different conclusions, depending on their starting points."

But does this undermine a scientific worldview? After all, we never have all the evidence -- that's why science never stops, and it's true that different scientists work with different assumptions and, as a result, come to different conclusions. The history of science -- if viewed through the lens of Kuhn's paradigms -- is exactly this shifting of assumptions. So there's nothing in this panel that's problematic. Place it in a museum on the historical development of science -- one that explained Kuhn's paradigm shifts -- and it'd be a sophisticated way to engage the visitor. In short, then, this can be viewed as a very scientific opening, because it takes seriously a fundamental problem in the theory of scientific knowledge: how do we know from the evidence we see?

In the context of the larger museum, however, it does something else. Instead of setting the visitor up for an historical discussion of the development of science, this panel creates the provokes the level of doubt -- what can science really know and can it be trusted?  But the devious use to which this set-up is put isn't clear initially, at least not as clear as it will be later. Other panels in this room carry the theme, using evidence from the present to raise questions about the past. And this seems honest. For example, look at how the fossil of Lucy (Australopithecus) is introduced:

Again, this is not atypical, and if I found it in another museum, I'd praise it for the way it gets to the key questions and sets up  a discussion of how science knows. 

But the purpose of the set up is quickly made clear. It boils down to this question: which starting point would you rather rely on, fallible man or infallible God? 

Perhaps going out on a limb, but anyone attuned to a religious worldview -- and probably  many who aren't -- wouldn't choose to turn down the starting point of an infallible, omniscient being. Absolute ertainty is, after all, very comforting.   But the same appeals to "evidence" in this opening section quickly go out the window. We are not allowed to ask any questions about the evidence for God. We can't ask, for instance, "What do we know about God?" and we can't make parallel statements like "Evidence for God's existence doesn't come with tags" or even "But because the bible can be interpreted differently, different people reach very different conclusions based upon what they start with and what they include." There's a lack of symmetry here that's dishonest, which is where I get hung up. Science has no problems thinking about and honestly presenting its own epistemological hangups. It thrives on this. But you can't apply a deep skepticism to science and then let it go when you turn toward another way of looking at the world. The assumptions, in a sense, aren't equal. But the museum wants to make them so.

Why are there different views about the age of dinosaurs?

It all comes down to starting points: Where would you rather start?

This picture, I have to admit, isn't wrong. This is exactly why there are "different views." But the interrogation of both those views must be given the same airing. And if they're not, then this is dishonest and dangerous. It's an application of valuable critical thinking (how does science know?) to one side of the equation but not the other. It's the application of two standards. This is why it's not symmetrical. 

This exhibit, then, leverages the scientific drama of digging up dinosaur bones to go deep, hitting on the core problem separating a creationist view from science. It's a highly effective way to set the scene. Incredulity established, you won't be surprised where the exhibit goes next.

The Creation Museum's Introductory Trinity

Dinosaurs! (technically outside the museum, but it is the first "museumy" thing visitors encounter. The dinosaur appeal never fails.)

Control! Authority! Check yer t-shirts!

Religion!

And these together preview the false natural history, the assertion of authority, and the selective nature of the museum's religious content. 

The Humanities and Entrepreneurship -- Framing an Argument

Introduction

With entrepreneurship and innovation continuing to serve as key terms for the second decade of the twentieth century (see Obama's 2012 State of the Union address), it is no surprise that universities and colleges have embraced this momentum, with programs and courses popping up at institutions across the country. Within this growing educational movement, the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN ) has set itself apart by securing an important niche establishing and promoting an entrepreneurial mindset among future engineers. The KEEN model recognizes that not everyone should or will become entrepreneurs. It is a model that results in a sophisticated, real-world cultivation of innovators across a wide spectrum of industry and skill levels.  

The KEEN model is also well positioned to take advantage of the expanding interdisciplinary movement in higher education. Most entrepreneurship programs exist in specific departments, offer courses, minors, majors, and certificate programs that reach only those students who choose to pursue a specific path. KEEN's goal of infusing the principles of entrepreneurship through wide-scale curricular reform recognizes that "innovation occurs at the intersection of disciplines" (Kriewall 16). By extending the principles of entrepreneurship across the university experience, KEEN's model harnesses the interdisciplinary power of inherent in the entrepreneurship experience produces graduates prepared to innovate.

However, KEEN's interdisciplinary approach has a distinct challenge. Unlike entrepreneurship programs housed in local departments, KEEN's goal of curricular reform does not come ready-made with faculty, champions, and the prestige and power of institutional spaces. This flexibility allows KEEN to have wide-reaching influence, but to achieve its goal, it also requires a degree of disciplinary buy-in not required when entrepreneurship has a formal location and departmental mandate. In short, KEEN's model requires commitment and support from departments and faculty members who might not identify with the principles of entrepreneurship. Often, that problem of buy-in can manifest as active resistance. While these challenges can emerge from a  variety of places in the university, because these principles threaten to shift the pedagogical value of their courses and programs, one of the most challenging academic audiences to win over are those faculty in the humanities and liberal arts.

The Sources of the Challenge

KEEN itself has recognized this problem. In the flagship article of its journal JEEN, Kriewall and Mekemson admit that "KEEN leaders have run into strong resistance from key campus constituents" (15). While Krewall and Mekemson do not indicate the specific source(s) of this resistance, my experience as a part of the KEEN initiative at Kettering University has indicated that a portion of that resistance comes from faculty in the liberal arts.  The challenge of integrating the humanities in general is also indicated by the general lack of voices from the liberal arts in the pages of JEEN (The Journal of Engineering Entrepreneurship) and at KEEN's national conference, the outlier being MSOE's presentation there in January of 2012. 

The source of the resistance to KEEN's curricular mission can be located in two places, one general, one more specific. First, is the general resistance to the economic hyper-pragmatism of business and entrepreneurship that has begun to pervade higher education. There is a very real concern that the economic model (paired with the "student as consumer" model) fundamentally alters the nature of the educational experience. Thus, KEEN's attempt at curricular reform embodies a larger cultural shift in higher education that many who remain committed to the traditional, civic-minded goals of a liberal education actively resist. Importantly, though it might find its strongest source of resistance there, this reaction is not limited to departments in the liberal arts. 

But the challenge of buy-in among faculty in non-technical fields is not solely a result of individual mindsets, commitments to the liberal arts ideal, or political and economic outlooks. The second problem with securing commitment to the KEEN mission is found within within the mission itself. Even though Kriewall and Mekemson recognize the interdisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship and admit that those in non-engineering fields "have much to offer to the entrepreneurial mindset," KEEN's stated "Attributes of an Entrepreneurial Mindset" fail to reflect or make clear room for the contributions other departments might make (16).        

The most obvious attributes in KEEN's list relevant to faculty in the humanities include items like tolerance for ambiguity, leadership, ability to resolve conflict, altruism, prescience, creativity, maintain high ethical standards. Each of these can be fostered by courses in fields like history, sociology, literature, philosophy, rhetoric and composition, political theory, among others. But there are two problems. The first is that these attributes are not distinctly linked to the humanities, which means that KEEN does not meet those faculty half-way. Because all of the above attributes can be conveyed in technical as well as non-technical courses, KEEN has failed to recognize the specific and unique contribution from the faculty in the humanities. As a result, those faculty must accommodate course themes and assignments to a set of goals that aren't a clear fit. This is exacerbated by the second problem, which is that those attributes are framed under headings like "Business Acumen" or "Understanding Customer Needs," a framework which quickly becomes unpalatable to faculty who wish to explore the way story-telling creates a shared vision or who wish to encourage students to tolerate ambiguity, but not simply (or even primarily) for shortsighted, economic reasons. 

Perhaps the most glaring instance of this is the role KEEN grants communication in the list of attributes. The importance of communication to a successful entrepreneur cannot be overstated, and yet writing, speaking and listening skills have been collapsed into a single item, with technical, economic, and business attributes comprising the majority. Communication faculty -- many of whom already appeal to the practical value of their courses to engineering and business students -- will be glad to find their discipline valued here. But by collapsing three skills into one item, KEEN does not afford them the respect or the space they deserve. After all, listening, writing, and speaking are at least as distinct as design synthesis, design characterization, and design verification, but these last three listed separately, which grants them an emphasis not given to the distinct communication skills. So not only do some non-engineering faculty initially resist incorporating principles of entrepreneurship into their courses, they will also have a difficult time time seeing how what they do is truly valued within the KEEN framework. This is true even where the humanities faculty can find what they do in the list of attributes. Thus, because KEEN has yet to fully recognize the potential of their unique contribution and make room for it, faculty in the humanities must contort themselves to fit a series of goals that are not their own. 

Fortunately, KEEN's interdisciplinary approach is flexibile enough to address these challenges. My task in this article, then, is two-fold. First, by drawing on research relevant to a number of non-technical fields, I intend to demonstrate the ways in which scholarship in the humanities and liberal arts enriches understandings of entrepreneurship. The purpose here is to show how KEEN's learning objectives can be extended to reflect and make room for that contribution. Second, I will then describe how KEEN's recognition of that contribution can be used as an appeal to faculty who might not see how their work or courses are relevant to entrepreneurship. To do this, I will be drawing from my experience at Kettring University, both as a communications and liberal arts faculty member and as a participant in our KEEN initiative. 

The Foundry, Day I: Confined Spaces

The foreman met me at the gatehouse. Mike, short with a mustache and an air of quiet annoyance, probably thinking "Another college kid..." He escorted me past the fence and into the choking and fuming and looming foundry. From the streets on the other side of these buildings -- the streets in pristine Kohler, WI -- you'd never know the grime and machines and noise was there. The ivy covered walls of the foundry on that side seemed civilized. On the other side, it was 5 a.m. late May. Still dark for another hour. This place, though, was alive. I was walking into a hell. 

Gear

Inside, I was assigned a lock and a brown mesh metal locker among banks and banks of the same. Mike handed me a generic pair of striped blue and grey coveralls, fire retardant, never to be worn twice. As I put on my coveralls and black boots with protective metal tongue that covered the laces, Mike attached the mesh face protector to a bright smooth blue hard hat. Then he set it on my head, adjusted it, and told me to never take it off up on deck. Next came a pair of tough leather gloves, dark as night sunglasses, and a black respirator. Change the filters every day, he said. New filters are up on deck. New gloves and earplugs, too. 

Orientation

Down and I was quickly lost. Rumbling, rolling machines muffled overhead contrasted the silent, dusty conveyer belts we passed below. Up again, and the din. Huge open spaces; bags on pallets; small carts shuttling back and forth; men arms white setting bricks in a new kiln; yellow lights sharply indicating just how much it wasn't day yet. Then quiet again as we entered the foreman's office. Nothing stuck in this 30 minute tour through a rule and regulation book. But the notion of "confined spaces" set my imagination awhir. I had no clue what my job entailed -- I was going to be slagging and charging furnaces; driving a crane, and filling ladles; sweeping and sitting. But this notion of confined spaces, together with my new getup, made me feel like I was heading down a coal shaft, to a place where I'd not be able to stand up or turn around or exit as quickly as I might want. (Later, as a teacher of technical communication, I wish I could return to this moment and review what that manual said.) The deck held no real confined spaces, so the emphasis, in retrospect, was a distractor. I'd rather have learned any one step in the protocols I was about to experience.

Deck

Back into the yellow light, we made our way past three huge holding furnaces, past faceless men in respirators and sunglasses whose stares seemed immediately menacing. Judging, with no personality, like automatons in matching gear. I was staring right into my own face -- shielded everywhere, only our height and weight set us apart. The deck was upstairs, and the men on my first shift crew were already slagging furnaces. They turned in unison to look at me -- the college kid coming to inconvenience their system. Suddenly, loud and indecipherable, "Charge George" echoed over the intercom, and the men turned back, moving to another furnace to take up position. 

I was taken through the bathroom, past the Gatorade station, and into a back room where I added earplugs to close off the last of my sensory systems. I now couldn't see (sunglasses), couldn't hear (ear plugs), couldn't talk (respirator), and couldn't feel (gloves). And the early summer heat was just beginning.

Slagging and Throwing

My first skill was learning to slag. The furnaces had three stages -- Charging, Throwing, and Slagging -- after which half the iron would be poured out and the process would begin again. Charging meant dumping in fresh iron or pig iron, adding to the molten mix already in the furnace. Throwing meant tossing different amounts of pyrite, carbon, and silicon (in 25 lb bags) into the furnace to get the chemistry right. Slagging meant raking the unmoltenable gunk that floated on top of the molten iron into a slag cart. 

Two men worked either side of a long rake, moving in unison forward and back to pull the dark, dirty slag out of the furnace. Without voices, you coordinated the rake in silence, maneuvering it to this side then this corner of the furnace without conversing. Someone led this dance. The frustration the other men felt slagging with me, the new kid, was never spoken aloud. But it emanated, through glances, nods and shakes of the head, and shifts in the body. I wasn't welcome here. 

After slagging, I watched as the men poured out the furnace. Then we were onto the next task. The control tower, which stood above and behind us, opposite the furnaces, directed us to one of the five furnaces -- Delta, Easy, Fox, George, and Hotel. Pick one. It needed bags of carbon to correct the chemistry. The control tower code indicated which furnace, then gave the numbers and types of bags. We lined up. One man picked up the bag and slung it to me. I turned, carrying his momentum, and threw it into the furnace. 

Splash! Not sparks but droplets of molton iron arced up and everywhere. I scoot quickly away. Dumb. A mistake. My first real sense that the danger here is real. 

Randy, my throwing partner, lowers his respirator and yells: "Not IN the furnace, slide it off the edge so it doesn't splash!" Though he has to repeat it three times, I do not make this mistake again. 

I don't yet realize how many of these rules are not in the orientation or the manual; they're idiosyncratic, not only to the deck, but to each activity and to each of the five furnaces. I don't yet know that most days I won't talk more than five minutes over my eight hour shift. I will eat alone, work in dim silence, make no friends here. I will learn that each of these tasks is easy but incredibly stressful. I will learn the meanings of all the secret chalk marks and blue lights. And I will learn when to disregard their obvious meanings. I will be shunted away in the crane until I screw up and overflow the holding furnace. I will cry. I will nearly knock over a forklift. I will crawl inside a furnace and brush its new, white brick interior. I will get burned, scarred, and singed. I will wake up every morning with fingers tightly clenched, fingers that pop open, individually and painfully, as I work them back into place. I will do this for two summers. But I don't know any of this yet. 

It was only day one. 

Ocean: Optimism?

The final section of Ocean presents six scenarios, each from a different area of the earth that will be affected by the changing ocean. These areas include: the Mediterranean, the Arctic, the Netherlands, Senegal, Bangladesh, and the Maldives. In each case, a general framing of the issues precedes a five minute "travel diary." Let me try to capture one of these experiences.

The Mediterranean

"Abundant, densely populated and at very low altitude, the western part of the French Mediterranean coast is also facing problems of erosion and submersion which could be compounded by rising sea levels. Recent storms have raised awareness of the risk. Will we be able to take the necessary sustainable measures?"

The following panel precedes three of the travel diary videos (the Maldives, the Mediterranean, and the Arctic):

Assessing Vulnerabilities 

"Geographically speaking, deltas, coral reefs, low-lying coastal zones and artic regions are facing the biggest threat. But the vulnerability of a territory also depends on its economic, social and political situation and therefore its capacity to adapt. Discover the strengths and weaknesses of some of the world's regions."

Another three are preceded by this panel (Bangladesh, Netherlands, Senegal):

How can we adapt?

"Building dykes, moving further inland, changing the economy? Local solutions will be as diverse as the situations. A global strategy could also be necessary with, for instance, mutual aid and insurance on a planetary scale. A prospect which raises the question of global governance."

As indicated by these brief panels, the scope and implications for adapting are global in scale. 

The five minute video in the Mediterranean case works like this. You sit down and the mayor of a coastal town in the Languedoc addresses you as someone who wishes to build a housing estate. The mayor is considering your request for a permit and is offering some feedback on the risks and problems your request raises. 

The mayor describes the low-lying geography of the area and indicates that this already fragile landscape is threatened by rising sea levels. He acknowledges that "the experts don't all agree", but still states, "it is predicted that the sea will rise between 40cm and 1 metre in the next 100 years." 

The mayor then provides an example (with photos) of how recent storms have made it clear that the coastline is at risk. He appeals directly to your experience as a housing developer: "If the coast was deserted that wouldn't raise any major problems and we could just adopt a 'laissez-faire' approach. But that isn't the case. And you are well placed to know it." 

Finally, after acknowledging there are unpopular solutions (like move housing and infrastructure back from the coast) and expensive solutions (like breakwaters) he comes to his final appeal:

"What's certain is that if we want to preserve the beauty of our region, if we want tourism which is the foundation of our economy to flourish, we must contain the erosion and maintain the coastline to avoid flooding. We must work together, politicians, business people, citizens, to find sustainable solutions."

In the end, the goal was a consensus and a partnership. THe mayor seeks accord. It becomes clear that the Mayor's goal was to convince you to alter your request -- essentially, he's made a case turning down your request as it stands. But he would like to work together: "In any case, I suggest we meet up to discuss a solution for your housing estate. In fact, wouldn't it be better to build it inland rather than by the sea? I ohpe to see you soon in our delightful village."

The other videos are similar, though the visitor plays a different roles. The other two cases I have collected have you addressed as "professor."  

Like some of the interactives in Atmosphere (and distinct from the voting section at the HMNH), these well-produced videos are quite effective at creating a situation in which you sink into a particular roles, thinking through the complexity of a situation from the perspective of someone in the know. This allows the exhibit to make a stronger case -- the individuals on the screen represent their countries, and so they're not expected to be neutral. And because the scene is set so that you're seeking information for some purpose, the focus is narrow enough to be dramatic and yet wide enough to allow for a wide range of relevant facts.

While each video captures the way that these geographic areas must adapt, they each end on a positive note, indicating how that adaption will make it possible to sustain the area into the future. 

This is a tempered optimism. In each case, the real impacts of climate change on ocean and coastal regions is already happening. And in each case, the expectation is that it will get worse. Yet, even so, the videos embrace adaptive practices that give hope to a world in which climate change can be successfully managed, even if that process requires the willing participation of large organizations and the willpower of stakeholders who may have to act against their wishes. 

Ocean: Fatalism

Compared to Atmosphere, Ocean is a serious, sober look at global climate change. The playful, near-cartoonish games found in the London exhibit are missing here. And while Ocean creates a powerful, immersive environment, there's something tame, reduced, or controlled about it. Perhaps it's a result of the exhibit's more controlled pathway through three areas. But I think the color palate, font choices, and tone also contribute. This is not a "fun" gallery. 

This sobriety is found most clearly in the exhibit's fatalism, something that seems rare in science museums and science centers. Unlike other exhibits, Ocean is much more assertive about the existence and effects of global climate change. The first line of the opening panel does not hedge: "It's a fact, climate change due to human activities is under way." But it's not just that climate change is underway, it's that (also from the opening panel) "we must anticipate and, in order to adapt, it is better to understand the ocean and its role in the climate so we can identify applicable solutions acceptable to the populations at risk."

Adaptation -- how we can manage the effects of climate change -- is the exhibit's final message. This is not about preventing sea change -- we are not admonished to adapt technologies or practices that might yet prevent a warming ocean. To carry this message, the arc of the exhibit walks us through the role of the ocean in the climate, how the ocean changes in response to the warming climate, and what we can do in the future to manage its effects. There's something a little depressing about this way of talking that is not present in the other two exhibits. At the HMNH there was a lot of certainty about the facts of climate change, but there was still a sense that we could skip the most dire consequences if we adopted choices now. The final video implied as much. In a different way, Atmosphere's playful, open experience allows visitors to construct their own messages about a variety of facets of climate change, but this same lack of control means that the stark assertion of future impacts was limited. 

Ocean is assertiveness at the outset is matched and reinforced in a panel titled "What are the future scenarios?" which offers four possibilities drawn from multiple climate models and reports. The scenarios range in temperature increases from 1.8C to 3.4C over the next 85 years. What's most telling, however, is that the factors assessed to determine these increases are economic growth, technological development worldwide, balancing of energy resources, and demography. Few of these have to do with personal choices. These are broad, big problems not easily answered by any one country. 

All of this means that the exhibit must end with a discussion of adaptation: the world is changing; we might slow it, but the ball is in motion. According to the exhibit designer I interviewed, this is the "positive" or "optimistic" section of the exhibit. Yet the fatalism is forceful, which is again different from the other exhibits: "By 2100, depending on the scenario, water levels could rise by [sic] between 20 cm and 1 m, impacting the 40% of the world's population living within 60 kms of the coast."

Ok, so strong assertions of fact, dire consequences, a need to adapt: how does this exhibit end on a positive note?

Initial Thoughts on the Creation Museum

1. This is a very powerful experience. If you attend the exhibits with even a little skepticism about the veracity of evolutionary theory, I believe this exhibit will increase your confidence that evolution is a weak theory.

2. This museum is at war. I've never seen a museum so relentlessly or so aggressively attack the tenets of science -- or even another ideology. A mirror image of this museum is nearly impossible to imagine, since the direct attacks against the foundations of religious faith in Genesis would be so vocally and passionately protested. But it's less the open mocking of scientists (evident only in the rather cocky introductory video) and more the unfair assumptions, the specific cherry-picked challenges, and the overuse of unsubstantiated Biblical authority to assert particular views that is so frustrating. 

3. Yet at times, it's clear the museum is less about science vs. religion and much more about religion vs. religion. It's about asserting a particular religious point of view. In other words, the impetus for the fight against evolution is not a fight necessarily against science. It's a fight against a non-literal reading of the Bible. So while I'm put off because science is misrepresented and a whole heap of metaphysical realities are asserted (and assumed) with no evidence, those who have a different faith, who understand that the "days" of Genesis can be read more broadly as "ages" or "billions or millions of years" will not feel at home here. This is the starkest version of Christianity, and I know plenty who would find this not to their taste. 

4. Coherence is the name of the game. According to the Museum's reading of the Bible, if God said at the end of seven days that things were "very good," then there was no death, no disease, no poison, dinosaurs didn't eat meat, etc. until after the fall. Similarly, those first six days have to be 24 hour periods. If they weren't regular, 24 hour days, then the whole Bible would tumble down like a house of cards. And because the museum seeks to set religion and science on the same level as starting points, this expectation for perfect coherence is transferred over to science. If science can't explain a particular phenomenon (or if the museum claims it can't explain it), then this starts to erode the foundations of the scientific worldview. Because the museum is not fairly comprehensive and fails to give science any voice for explaining why a complexity or perceived inconsistency makes sense in the bigger picture, science in this museum does come across as a house of cards, as a series of assumptions and failures to explain. To that end, the museum is highly effective. But science isn't a house of cards.

5. The museum moves through seven C's: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation. Only the first four are on display. The last three are covered in a 15 minute video reminiscent of The Passion of the Christ. But jumping from the Tower of Babel to Christ's Crucifixion means a large majority of the Bible is skipped over -- that's a heck of a lot of text that must figure in any attempt to make this literal reading coherent. 

6. I'm not a big fan of the form-content divide, but the amazing thing in this museum is that the museum/exhibit form is very authoritative, very powerful, very convincing. It looks and feels legitimate. And while the museum form lends this museum much of its power, the fact that it works so well reflects back on the museum form in general, making experiences in other museums feel a bit indoctrinating. I have much more work to do on this, but the initial feeling I had when I visited the Cincinnati Natural History Museum was that the tactics -- spatial and linguistic -- were the same. It made the Natural History Museum feel dirty. This went away as I appreciated more what that museum was after, but I'm not sure I can explain exactly why that happened. Was it because I buy the ideology on display? Or was it something more? Is the Natural History Museum more honest? More exploratory? More evidence-based? More comprehensive? Must spend more time here. 

Thoughts on a Table of Contents

Combining two really useful suggestions, I finally sat down today with my huge list of "museum ideas" and started to see how they might fall together into some kind of structure. This is my inductive approach. I banged my head against this for about five hours, and I'm not sure I'm any closer. I've arrived at three ideas; I'll lay them out here.

1. Five to seven chapters "Doing Interesting Things," each drawing from a multitude of exhibits, with an introductory chapter on the rhetoric of museums/exhibits and some kind of powerful conclusion.

2. Three Parts: Part I - two chapters on the rhetoric of museum/exhibits and the museum/exhibit as text; Part II - three to five thematic chapters drawing on small moments from the multitude of museums/exhibits I've seen; Part III - three sustained analyses that draw on and demonstrate the ways in which the themes from part II play out in specific exhibits for different ends (Race, Catalhoyuk, and the comparative case study Ocean/Atmosphere).

3. Introduction chapter on the rhetoric of museums/exhibits, followed by four to seven chapters organized thematically, each of which would begin or end with a sustained analysis of a single exhibit epitomizing the importance of that theme.

After describing the pitfalls and roadblocks to each of these approaches, Liz voted for the second approach. And after talking about it, that one made the most sense to me as well. It would integrate my broad "museum as text" reflections with the many exhibits I've seen with the sustained analyses that I think serve as the real demonstration of a useful approach.  

For now, I think I can roll with the second structure, and move forward "as if" it'll work out -- heck, I know the race, catalhoyuk, and ocean/atmosphere exhibits will sustain chapters (and each for different reasons) -- now it's time to continue to think about the themes and how I can build out that middle section of the proposed book.  

I still don't have a model for this sort of thing...

Thoughts welcome. 

House of Cards: Climate change and a moving metaphor

I am not a stylist. I rarely use metaphors or other devices. I do not study figuration.  But I try to attend, nevertheless, to the style I see. So I was struck, as I compared Ocean and Atmosphere, that they both used the metaphor "house of cards," and they use them in very different ways and to very different purposes. I'm calling it a moving metaphor, because I think the two uses of "house of cards" -- for whatever it does for our understanding of climate change or climate science -- remind us of the fecundity, the flexibility, the fluidity of rhetorical devices, devices that can succinctly capture connections or quickly clarify concepts.  

Atmosphere does it big, with a painting as exhibit backdrop. Standing at the front of the gallery looking down the center, the house of cards painting on a black wall stands out, aesthetically distinct from the rest of the gallery. To my eye, it felt out of place, like it didn't belong, a remnant of an exhibit past. But I'm thorough, and when I looked closer, at the surprisingly antiquated video display, I learned that the floor to ceiling painting of a house of cards by David Shrigley was commissioned for the gallery. It's the first in a series of commissioned works that will accompany the exhibit.  

Shrigley describes his painting this way: "My artwork is a scaled-up drawing of a house of cards. The metaphor I have used is quite a quite straightforward one: our atmosphere and environment are in very delicate balance; a balance that would be disastrous for us to upset."

The obviousness of his description and the piece of art is disappointing. I rather appreciated it more when I thought it was doing some vague, other work that wasn't associated with the exhibit -- "What's this all about?" led me in other directions. But it's a house of cards. It represents the delicate balance of climate change. And, to be honest, I'm bored. 

Yet the banality of Shrigley's use of this metaphor speaks to the power of the metaphor generally. My problem -- and my initial confusion -- is thus an effect of a metaphor's possible uses. In being so "straightforward" the work has no real connection to the specific content of climate change. The implication exists, but it's weak, undermined by an aesthetic not consistent with the rest of the exhibit space. Move this art installation anywhere, and its meaning shifts, becoming tied to the space and context in which it's located. This should be expected, I suppose, in a commissioned piece. What is more, while this movability indicates the beauty and power of the core metaphor, it simultaneously indicates the weakness of this instance of it. Standing alone, it does no real critical work, because alone it's the archetype of "the house of cards metaphor" -- not a real application that creates a specific meaning.  

It's weak for another reason as well: does human induced global warming impact the climate as if it were a house of cards? Will the climate tumble down, crash, fail structurally? When the house of cards tumbles, it's no longer a house; it's a (rather flat) pile of cards. In what ways does the climate tumble? For us? Forever? In short, all the "house of cards" metaphor does is highlight a sense of balance; and like its own metaphor, it sort of falls apart thereafter. One might have asked, "Why not paint a large image that represented the idea of 'tipping point' instead?"

This instance of the metaphor is easily contrasted by its use in Ocean, the gallery in Paris. While not at all prominent and mostly likely missed by the majority of visitors, this use of the "house of cards" metaphor does more interesting work.  It shows up in my favorite section, the Uncertainty in Climate Science unit, where Sondrine Bony, a climatologist, speaks to why gaps in the scientific picture do not upend our entire understanding of the climate change.  She says:

"The presence of numerous uncertainties is in no way incompatible with also having certainties and well established facts. Indeed, the state of scientific knowledge is more like a jigsaw puzzle than a house of cards: hesitating over the position of a given piece does not diminish the fact that the other pieces are definitely in the right place given that their positions math with the various adjacent pieces or with the overall image."

Here the "house of cards" metaphor isn't simply representational (the balance of forces in Shrigley's work). This use not only creates a clear image of the epistemological structure of science, but it effects a mental shift in our understanding of the way science works, which, subsequently, alters our critical relationship to it.  Granted, much of this occurs because one metaphor is contrasted with another. Nevertheless, the use to which "house of cards" is put does more to indicate the power of metaphor than the "straightforward" one used by Shrigley.  His is the archetype, the metaphor that can move but means little; Bony's is the instance that, because situated, illuminates. 

Road Trip

We're heading south! To the Creation Museum near Cincinnati! 

I'm excited to see what's really going on here and to determine whether this museum might serve as a good starting point for a book project. After all, it -- along with the Scientology psychology museum in CA -- really brings home the power of museums to persuade and communicate messages: if the work science and natural histories do didn't matter, then they wouldn't need to countered by these other institutions.

Stay tuned!

Just a Title?

I started this comparison of climate change exhibits with the assumption that the way the three were framed (based loosely on the way they were titled) would matter thematically.  While the HMNH wasn't titled as simply as the other two exhibits, I read into it a planetary -- almost an astronomical -- framework, an organization that takes us across time and through space.  Atmosphere and Oceans, the two european exhibits, have more parallel titles which I expected would yield a more parallel comparison. Essentially the question I imagined I'd be asking was "In what ways does the titles organize, frame, or influence the shape of the exhibits?"  In my case, this question boiled down to "What are the differences that matter between a planetary, an atmospheric, and an oceanic exhibit on climate change?"  But there's a factor here that I overlooked, and it speaks to the sophistication of museum rhetoric and it reinforces the research methodology I need to be employing more often.  That factor is that sometimes a title is just a title.

The substantive point first. When I find an exhibit that seems useful, I've been contacting museums for interviews with designers, curators, and program developers. Sometimes this pans out, sometimes it doesn't. It really depends on the character of the institution. The Wellcome Collection, for instance, is very different from the Science Museum in London. The Wellcome does no evaluation, doesn't really believe in it, but the Science Museum is based on it, and much of its funding requires numerous evaluation reports. So when I visited atmosphere, I was able to speak to the lead designer and she shared many of the early planning documents and research. One of those documents is a research report titled "Naming the Climate Change Gallery," and it's a fascinating window into the titling process. 

The purpose of the research was to determine the answer to what are essentially audience analysis questions:

• What are the expectations of the gallery in terms of topic, content and experience?
• How appealing is the name and does it motivate to visit?
• Who is the perceived target audience?
• What emotional reaction do the titles engender?

To get at these questions, the document reports on a study of six small group discussions, each with four to five potential visitors from a variety of age groups.  Discussion centered on eight candidate titles evaluated on the above four questions:

• Our Planet, Our Challenge
• Climate Change
• A Climate of Change
• Changing Our World
• Our Changing Climate
• Atmosphere
• Climate Science
• Our Changing World

After the discussion and analysis, the titles were then plotted on a quadrant with more appealing/less appealing as the x-axis and more informative/less informative as the y-axis.   From these groups, the research team concluded that exhibit titles with the words "climate change" in them received a "fatigued response."  They recommended choosing a title "with some degree of intrigue." The final recommendation was to pick one of three: Atmosphere; Our Planet, Our Challenge; or Our Changing World.  

What this report tells us is that the title "atmosphere" plays a primarily rhetorical function. It does not frame, organize, or indicate key themes. This goes against initial expectations, but the exhibit's content reinforces the point: beyond the commonplace description of greenhouse gasses, there is little in the exhibit focused on the atmosphere itself. Instead, "atmosphere" is a rhetorical ploy to capture visitor interest without inducing climate change fatigue.  As the report concludes, it's a vague, "cool" title that intrigues, bringing visitors into what is ultimately a very engaging climate change exhibit. But beyond this function, it doesn't do much heavy lifting for the exhibit. It's just a very smart title.

When I turn to the Oceans gallery next, it will be clear that this title frames and organizes. It accomplishes the same rhetorical effect but still meets expectations by being thematically relevant.  It joins the framing of the HMNH with the rhetorical power of the Science Museum. It's not just a title.

Now to the methodological point. Could I have made this argument without the planning document? Definitely. But I wouldn't have been as confident with it.  The exhibit's content does not develop atmosphere, and the question of relevance comes up easily.  But having the planning documents triangulates the point. It's a reminder that, where possible, it's important to secure these resources. It's also a reminder to have more confidence in some of my claims even in the absence of them.

Aiming

Possible publisher?  At the very least, a resource for relevant works and a community I can't ignore.

Moved by Moving: the rhetoric of interactive exhibits in atmosphere

I think the most exciting thing to note about the atmosphere exhibit, though, is the way that the exhibit engages visitors. I've always struggled with how to make sense of an exhibit's interactive components.  The push me/pull me/press me exhibit elements are usually frustrating failures at really communicating basic scientific principles or capturing the essence of scientific inquiry. And more often than not, I fail to get the point, even after spending lots of time working with the buttons and variables. Not that I'm the benchmark, but if I can't understand what's going on, how can I expect a kid to? or someone who spends even less time on it? But the interactives in atmosphere finally made a bit of sense to me and I was able to locate part of their rhetorical function. 

The key -- and this will come up again when I get to the Oceans exhibit from Paris -- is that the most powerful interactives here place visitors in a specific role.  Visitors are city planners allocating resources to save houses from the flooding Thames (climate changed induced flooding, of course); they're reporters gathering information for stories on current technologies that can help prevent further climate change; they're interns building climate models; they're scientists running those models for people across the world to see how different environmental changes affect regional livelihoods; and they're engineers joining the energy firm for the mock-city Gridland.  Much of the exhibit is focused in these games and simulations rather than in text-heavy panels. That text exists, but it's funneled into digital components and on-line resources, each deep and rich with visuals, video, and more text than any one exhibit should reasonably include.

The comparison with the Harvard exhibit is instructive for how we understand the rhetorical effect of these simulations and games. The HMNH exhibit was didactic and organized chronologically, establishing fact before letting the visitor loose on a voting installation about policy decisions. In atmosphere, those policy decions are spread throughout the exhibit and used not as a culminating experience but as part of the persuasive appeal.  I can simplify it this way. In the HMNH exhibit, we see a very standard rhetorical approach: become comvinced of the facts of a case and then use those facts to affect policy. It's epideictic in its core because the celebration of science in the exhibit proper feeds into the pseudo-democratic experience and then, ideally, into a real one outside the exhibit.  In atmosphere all that is flipped around. 

Each of the games and simulations model deliberative behavior by an expert -- a city planner, journalist, scientist, proto-scientist, etc.  And internal to each of these installations is a series of facts and assumptions about how climate change, greenhouse gasses, and the environment work.  Instead of being convinced of the facts and then moved to act, atmosphere merges the two experiences. In doing so, the rhetorical act is short circuited. Visitors are already making decisions based on the facts of climate change, even if they don't understand them fully or fully believe in them.  In short, visitors are persuaded not before but through the interactive experience.  

What's more, by taking up the role of these diverse experts, visitors begin to think with a real level of responsibility.  The effects and choices are made real -- the need to compete to save money and houses, get their four stories on the front page, improve the climate model, inform the international citizen, etc.  So, besides coming to occupy the mindset of the scientist expert and the requisite assumptions they use to make choices, there is also a required empathy in many (though not all) of these tasks.  There is a bigger picture -- houses lost, scientists left un-helped, people with real problems not informed, etc.  However false and simulated, visitors become invested in their choices and in their outcomes. There's a reality to the simulations that the reality of the didactic exhibit fails to capture. The interactives have a broader resonance, even if they don't fully capture or convey the state of scientific knowledge. 

Visitors occupy the position of people who understand, believe, and act on the facts of climate science. They might not be persuaded in a traditional fasion, but they're moved by moving. 

The Initial Authority of Atmosphere

On a related note, the opening panel also establishes and diffuses the exhibit's basic appeal to authority.  Like the Making the Modern World exhibit discussed below, atmosphere also uses a degree of self-consciosusness for interesting effects.  This comes across in two sections of the opening panel that follows the introductory section I just discussed.

"This gallery has been created with the support of a huge range of individuals, from scientific institutions to businesses and governments. Working together, we can push ideas futher and find solutions faster -- something we all need to be good at in a climate-changing world." 

A third section discuses the exhibit in terms of its own environmental impacts:

"How do you create a gallery that will inspire hundreds of thousands of visitors -- and tread lightly with your carbon footprint at the same time? We knew it wouldn't be easy...  With the help of experts we've traced the carbon emissions that lie behind many different items. We've considered the energy they will use, how they're made adn transported to the Museum, as well as how long they'll last and how they'll be disposed of. Armed with these details we set out to make informed choices. And at the same time, the team looked at more efficient things to do in our own offices."

Each of these extensions of the exhibit's initial message do interesting things to both exhibit and museum ethos.  The first one effectively diffuses the exhibit's authority, bringing in a variety of broader stakeholders in order so that the force of the exhibit's authority doesn't rest only on the museum itself.  The diffusion has the effect of enhancing the exhibit's ethos, especially among those audiences that are concerned that environmental policy will have negative effects on businesses.  This is reinforced by the exhibit's "principle sponsors" -- Shell and Siemens -- both of whom get short blurbs about their commitment to the environment and understanding climate change:

Shell: All of us need energy to develop and grow. But to protect our planet we must produce less CO2. That's why at Shell, we are working hard to build a new energy system whil supporting a deeper understanding of climate science.

Siemens: Siemens is proud to sponsor atmosphere -- inspiring future scientists and engineers to answer the world's toughest questions in search of a sustainable future.

Both of these statments, however, can be read in a much more cynical way. The first one trades on "deeper understanding", a common trope for climate skeptics; and the second appeals not to understanding but to the creation of smarter workforce, a move that focuses on a result secondary to the exhibit's primary goals.  

The second addition to the introductory text also establishes that the exhibit walks-the-walks of environmental thinking, thus preempting any visitor that would point to the museum's huge carbon footprint as way of indicating the exhibit's hypocrisy. It's a savvy move, and it reinforces the power of exhibit self-consciousness and the way that this raises the bar for critical visitors and critics alike.

Planet vs. Oceans vs. Atmosphere Part II: Atmosphere and Scientific Authority

While I didn't pick the most significant climate change exhibit in the US, when I turn to compare it with exhibits across the Atlantic, I see some pretty dramatic differences. I'm returning to atmosphere here, the large exhibit at the Science Museum in London. I spent a good part of two days in this exhibit and talked with the lead designer who was kind enough to share a number of really fascinating planning documents. My initial pass highlighted the exhibit space -- the atmosphere of atmosphere.  A closer look at my photos reveal a few other aspects of the exhibit worth noting.

One of my basic assumptions -- or I guess hypotheses -- going into this project is that topics like global warming and evolution would be treated discernibly differently between the states and Europe.  Part of this hypothesis is that the exhibits in Europe won't be as defensive, because they wouldn't have to defend themselves against the skeptics and doubters and religious fundamentalists. Those populations and movements just don't have as much traction there as here.  But atmosphere surprised me.  The opening panel (always critical, right?) starts this way:

"Working out what's happening to our climate really matters for our choices today and into the future. Science doesn't have 'final answers', but it's a powerful way to make sense of this incredible and complex planet. atmosphere aims to help you make sense of that science -- to see for yourself what's happening, why, and what could be around the corner..." 

Remnants of my graduate student self loves the "final answers" bit, but it's the subtle transition (or the quick move) from that admission to the real purpose of the exhibit that indicates the exhibit remains in a defensive stance.  Heck, even the "final answers" phrase indicates this, right? That phrase acknowledges fundamental uncertainties and contingencies in scientific knowledge, but the exhibit brushes past it to give the visitor the current state what scientists know. 

The distinction is a hard one for me to explain. So let me try again. If we assumed that climate change was settled science (as I hypothesized the exhibit would be more free to do than its US counterparts), then framing the exhibit around what scientists know now wouldn't be necessary. Instead, the exhibit would jump right into explaining the processes, not explaining how science knows these processes. I must be cautious here, though, because I'm the guy that seeks exhibits that "explain how science knows its processes."  Let me show you what I mean, and you can judge whether I'm wrong or not.  

The exhibit is organized around a series of hubs. Each hub responds to a theme. The themes are as follows (not in any particular order, since this is an open exhibit): Climate System, Earth's Energy Balance, Carbon Cycle, What Might Happen, Future Choices.  Many of these include what I'll call key questions that provide a link to the explanations that occur through the hub's objects and interactives.  These questions go like this:

• Can science and technology help tackle climate change (geo-engineering)
• How do scientists know the Earth's climate is changing? (measurement tools)
• How do scientists know what the Earth's climate was like in the past? (measurement tools)
• When did scientists discover the greenhouse effect and its influence on the climate? (historical personages)

To my ear, each of these captures, in essence, much of what is going on in the Harvard exhibit: establishing the state of scientific knowledge in order to enhance public understanding. But by talking about science itself, this feels more defensive to me.  In other words, this becomes an exhibit about the state of scientific knowledge and not scientific knowledge.  With me?

I'm very torn here, though, because what I'm finding a problem with is something I always want to see: the display scientific processes and the state of science itself.  But if I'm not just throwing up my own defensive stance onto the exhibit, then for me the feeling of defensiveness undermines that approach. Instead of honestly exploring the history and nature of scientific knowledge, these questions and this approach essentially reinforce a more basic scientific authority, the kind that is easily dismissible and fails to illuminate the nature of science for the public. 

Biking to Save Your Life

Created by: Healthcare Management Degree

Becoming a Diagnostician

I can't help but read this quote by Daniel Kahneman through the lens of a writing instructor. It points to both the gaps in my own training and a large part of what I try to convey to my students:

To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), p. 3

Planet vs. Atmosphere vs. Oceans: Three Frames for Exhibiting Global Climate Change (Part I)

My task these past few weeks has been to write up more bloggable moments, brief insights that seem worthy of developing as articles or chapters. I've also been writing some conference proposals that I hope will successfully be serious deadlines for 2012.  The abstract task sometimes seems at cross purposes with the bloggable moments. Brief insights don't constitute a very compelling conference proposal.  So I'm working slowly to attack one of my larger ideas: That the ways three different museums chose to frame global warming affords very different types of exhibits.  

The three exhibits I'm working with are Atmosphere at London’s Science Museum (SM), Oceans at Paris’s Cité des Sciences (CS), and Climate Change: Our Global Experiment at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH).  It's a superficial starting point, after all, anyone would notice that the titles of these exhibits are different. My question is whether those titles -- and the way they frame and direct the entire exhibit -- matter in a meaningful way. 

I'm starting with the HMNH exhibit because I've not reviewed it recently, and so it's the largest unknown. When I visited it in 2010, I was impressed. It was organized, well-developed, powerfully argued, and, most importantly, culminated in a nice voting installation that activated visitors as engaged citizens deciding policy. 

Clear from the title, this exhibit is framed planetarily.  What does this framework afford the exhibit? This is a tough question to address, because the temptation is to assert that any framework causes or forces a particular representation, argument, or experience. I don't believe this is true. There are a number of factors influencing the shape of this exhibit, perhaps most important here is the academic background of the authors (Harvard University Center for the Environment) and the institution (HMNH).  

The exhibit's planetary focus -- it is, after all subtitled "our global experiment" -- is developed in three chronological sections: Climate Past, Climate Present, and Climate Future. Though it begins with a panel common to most climate change exhibits explaining how the greenhouse effect works, the planetary framework is evident employed rather quickly.  The Climate Past section puts the climate of the Earth into planetary and historical perspective. Earth -- a sort of Golidlocks planet, not too hot, not too cold -- is efficiently compared with Mars (cold) and Venus (hot) in order to show us the climate possibilities for a planet like ours. We are then thrown into the past -- the Pleistocene and the Eocene, epochs of extreme cold and warmth respectively -- to see how the larger climate trends on Earth have worked.  Climate Present section is structured in two parts, the first demonstrating that the Earth is heating up and the second demonstrating that human-produced CO2 gases are the primary cause. 

So what?  

While I know I can't say that the decision to use the planet as the focus has any necessary effects, it does afford certain kind of arguments. This will become clearer, I think, when I compare it with the other two exhibits. But for now, let me try to summarize what I see as the relevance of the planetary frame with some brief comparative points where necessary.

Essentially, the argument I want to make is that the generic planetary focus in this exhibit creates the broadest intellectual space for demonstrating the existence of anthropomorphic global climate.  If an exhibit wishes to make the strongest, most compelling argument for global climate change, then this foundation affords this, because an exhibit can fold in everything it needs.  And here the HMNH doesn't disappoint.  In short, the exhibit marshals the planetary perspective, first and foremost, to argue for a specific conclusion, a conclusion that is expected to motivate you in the final installation. If a visitor felt ignorant and sought understanding, this exhibit provides a nicely comprehensive case.   Similarly, if a climate change skeptic encountered this exhibit, they'd be forced to navigate a very powerful argument, one that would be difficult to easily dismiss.

One effect of this sort of design is that it generates an exhibit that is rather remote for visitors.  The comparison of planets and the comparison across distant epochs are both important intellectual arguments, they are so distant from our experience that they don't capture our emotions. I will argue that the other two frames -- Oceans and Atmosphere -- do not necessarily fall prey to this problem.  

In the end, Climate Change: Our Global Experiment turns out to be a rather traditional, textbook-on-the-walls kind of exhibit. While it ends with visitors deciding on future policies, the voting is only allowed once the entire argument has been imbibed. Only once they understand our climate past and our climate present can visitors have a voice in our climate future. This is the deficit model, the transmission model, where the exhibit's real purpose is to remedy the lack of visitor understanding.  Again, there is nothing about a planetary framework that necessitates this kind of exhibit. But this framework does facilitate it, affording an academic design team in an academic setting the basis on which to build a very didactic exhibit.   

A Recent Dream

We're on a cliff, or maybe a building with a railing. It's windy. Below is a huge mountainous canyon. A vista. A speck indicates the town where we're staying and where we'll land. It's high and I realize I don't like heights. I am holding a piece of paper and a hoody that I won't believe is a parachute.  I am skeptical. I really don't want to do it. But you are excited, as usual. But before I can make my case, you leap, and I'm amazed at how fast you fall. Down, hair trailing up as you go feet first. Suddenly, a gust of wind blows the paper out of my hand and I realize I must follow. I shoulder the hoody and jump after you, not brave but duty-bound and frightened.  My stomach is horrible until I am at top speed. Aerodynamic. Fast. You're slower, more keen on enjoying the fall. I can catch up, but I have to get the paper first. I close in, reach for the floating scrap, fumble, finally grab it. Then I'm head-first, streamlined, aiming for you.  You're encouraging, and we come together in a hug of smiles. I admit that this was a good idea. But we're still falling and you're suddenly serious. The ground is coming up, so you push me away and go first. I struggle to get my hoody on, awkwardly letting it cover my face for a bit, renewing some fear. But the parachutes open and the sudden slowness is a shock. The rushing ground stops and we recalibrate our speed: we're close. As we float into the town, I lean way back to extend the glide through main street, passed the restaurants and bars and shops. People marvel and point. Finally, we land in front of the tour company and quickly grab our trailing parachutes and stuff them away before they trip up the bystanders. We're safe. 

Reflections on Liberating an IBM Correcting Selectric III

I've been gushing over this typewriter -- an IBM Correcting Selectric III typewriter to be exact -- since I liberated it from Kettering and parked it in my office at home.   It's been a find, transforming my writing process and making it fun to hop on and write every day.   

I saw it immediately when I opened the door to the building. Down the hall was a typewriter, right outside the Old Gym where everything no one wants goes for indefinite storage. I've never been in the Old Gym, but I'd heard stories. (Apparently there's an EV1 inside.) I knew that if someone was sticking a typewriter outside, it meant the object was not long useful in this world.  As I got closer, I saw the note. Scrawled in big sharpie letters on bright yellow paper was "Doesn't Work." It was an IBM Correcting Selectric III. It was huge and cubicle tan and weighed 30 pounds.  

I stared down at it. It looked up at me, worn but quiet with potential, full of possibility, full of words and meanings and maybe a book or an abstract, at the very least a love letter or sappy poem.  Did the sign really mean anything? Was it really broken or did they just not know how to use it? Or perhaps it just needed some oiling and wasn't beyond simple repair? Or did the person just want to get this 30 pound writing machine out of the way?  Timid and unsure, I passed it up and made my way to my office, my mind on the typewriter the whole way.  I swung open my door and paused, "I could always put it back, right?" I said to nobody.

So I unloaded my gear and wandered back down and wheeled the grey cart into the elevator and down the hall to my office.  The hum when I turned it on was encouraging and inviting. It wasn't so busted that it clicked away for no reason.  I pulled up a chair, inserted some paper, and typed what my mom would type (and has always typed on my typewriters): 

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.   

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG.

Then I tabbed till I heard it ding and hit return,

zzzzzzzziiiiiiiiiiiiip. hummmmmmmmmmmm...

It waited, poised, bouncing up on its tip toes from foot to foot wanting more, the little golfball element just daring me to test how fast it could swivel and bust out capital letters and symbols.

That night I brought it home, lugged it up onto the kitchen table, and, since both of our parents were visiting, made everyone type on it. Now it's on its little stand next to my desk. I write on it everyday, and it's been transformative.  Let me see if I can explain how.

In courses over the past four or five years I've used the typewriter as an example of a technology with important, powerful consequences. I don't argue for what we lost by adopting the typewriter over handwritten documents. Instead, in the face of bewildered students who can only see technology as unadulterated goods and who can't imagine typing on anything but a laptop, I argue that we lost something when we moved away from typewriters, when we adopted computers. What we lost is a built in writing process.  

Copy and paste, delete, spell check, etc. all easily accessible (and I might add, a godsend when writing a dissertation) alter dramatically the way I think as a writer. The typewriter forced rewriting, revision, and rethinking. A spelling error on a new document meant you had to go back and retype it. If you wanted to shift a section around, you had to retype it. And each time you retyped something, you were forced to reconsider it, reimagine it, and rework it. 

On a computer, that process is shortened and made instantaneous. We rarely rewrite whole paragraphs. We tweak. And this means that our revision is always more granular, our rethinking rarely holistic. Substantive rethinking isn't as accessible because we'll just keep what we have and fiddle. Sometimes it's better to scrap it and rewrite it anew. And when we do this, it feels risky, the jettisoning of a paragraph feels significant. On the computer, revision is a forced, conscious effort, like deciding not to bring your cell phone to the meeting or turning off the tv during the card game.  Whereas in the past, it was a natural process to revise before finalizing, now we have to explicitly and thoughtfully build it back in, force it externally. Today the problem with technology isn't adopting it, it's turning it off. Putting away technology takes more effort than leaving it on.  

But after three weeks of typing (and I am not yet convinced this is a habit that will stick), I've come to appreciate a different part of this experience. Right now I brainstorm and draft on the typewriter, then I revise on the computer. I like this workflow, because the first step on the typewriter is focused and freeing. On a computer, if I pause for a bit, I'll just go check my email or the news or rearrange files or play with fonts or look at watch bands or whatever.  When I pause while I write on the computer, I will look somewhere else.  The typewriter keeps me moving. 

It keeps me moving because its tactility (as my friend K likes to call it) is perfect. It feels amazing to type, like real inscription. This isn't pixels glimmering across the screen, this is punched out film on paper (the Selectric doesn't use ink ribbons). This is thought made physical. It's like writing with your favorite pen or pencil on the best paper -- the materiality, the sound, coaxes. It feels right. It draws me to it. I want to type, to inscribe.

And when I type, I am always thinking forward. Without a delete button (all this correcting typewriter is good for is replacing a few letters at a time) whatever I write stays. And that means that I keep. thinking. as. I. type.  And sometimes, because there is no delete key, I end up revising what I just wrote because it wasn't clear enough or was way off track, and that's a productive experience. It trains me to stay ahead of myself, to sharpen my thoughts as they're formed. The stack of paper that builds up next to me gives a real sense of what it means to "write a page," and the physicality of words and the feeling that those words mean productive thought -- not tweaked thoughts, new thoughts -- delivers a very different reward.

Inevitably, though, the words stop. I pause. And I stare. Where to now?  But the hum is still there, and I can't look away. The words I just wrote are curling behind the carriage in front of me. I am presented three choices. I can reread what I've written and initiate the revision process. I can catch my breath and move forward, continuing to type, enjoying the sharpness of the inscription, and further exploring the thoughts I'm fighting to find.  Or I can shut it off, give up, and do something else. 

Late at night I choose the last option. But in the morning, I've been consistently surprised to find I'm eager to write again, to sit down to write, purposefully. This is a new feeling, and however fleeting and however tied to the excitement of a new toy, I'm going to indulge it as long as I can. 

Japanese Robot Riding a Fixed Gear Bicycle

Just as it says:

 

Hat tip to Kyle, who spoke true: "Seriously, I can't think of a more perfect video to send you."

Raising the Stakes

One of the joys of studying texts is the feeling you get when you gain a bird’s eye view of how those texts work. I'd guess this usually happens when those texts are understood historically, though I wouldn't rule out an intuitive experience. An historical view animates the ways texts shift and respond, take up genre features and let others die away. Adding this perspective (not always required) to any piece of criticism complicates your accounting and requires you to make your accounting more incisive. The case of the science museum is no different.  

While I don't pretend to have the strongest grasp of the history of science museums, I've read enough that it's raised the bar on what I expect myself to say when I leave a gallery. Essentially, I'm cautious of the too-easy critique; hence my obsessive concern with "the museum as text."

The ways that history illuminates genres or groups of texts (are exhibits genres?) by indicating how they've responded to criticism is an offshoot of the theory/practice divide. Critical appraisal of designed works alters practice by creating a new climate to which those who design texts must respond. It's fun to see how this occurs over time. It's even more fun when you realize that it's still ongoing, and that the texts you're exploring today capture and react to arguments that you can appreciate.  But as exciting as this might be, it also poses a critical challenge.  To the example!

At the Science Museum in London, one of the largest galleries is the Making the Modern World.  This gallery is suffused with masterpieces of technology -- cars, engines, computers, airplanes, wheels, locomotives -- as well as too many small things to mention.  If you enter the gallery through the normal route, on the right side is a series of five cases that represent “Technology in Everyday Life.” Each case captures a specific era and includes a variety of different objects from different areas of life. Obviously, it's fun to see the range of objects and then see how quickly they change from year to year -- how fast, for instance, we move from wood and metal to plastic everything.  But the objects are not my concern here. Honestly, they're overwhelming and tiring. There's so much to look and marvel at, but with no real narrative hook and after a day wandering, the tired mind balks at the task.

What fascinated me on my visits was that printed on the lower left corner of each of the big glass panes was an explanation of the organizing principle of all the stuff in each of the case. Each era had a different way of organizing the objects, and each was appropriate for the time: 1750 - 1820, Diderot's and d'Alembert's classification in their Encyclopedia; 1820 - 1880, Lyon Playfair's classification for the Great Exhibition; 1880 - 1939, Patrick Geddes's never exhibited schema for classifying the world; 1939 - 1968, the South Bank catalogue for the centenary of the Great Exhibition; and 1968 - 2000, Stewart Brands's taxonomy from The Whole Earth Catalog. 

In the (relatively recent) past, a more perspicuous critic than I would have grasped these organizational schema by careful looking or a wiser visitor by asking a curator to explain. Today, though, we understand the taxonomy because the exhibit has made them explicit, and it's this explicitness that indicates one moment in the historical transformation of science museum exhibiting where criticism alters practice. 

The trick for critics doing this kind of work was to discover, through careful analysis and close observation, the underlying schema of organization that animated exhibits and entire museums. These are what I'd call the invisible messages that the critic wanted to discover (since critics are often in the business of determining what's unsaid and why what's unsaid matters).  This task changes dramatically when, after the insights of those earlier critics have been internalized, the museum becomes self-aware and self-conscious about its organizational frameworks.  The explicitness in the Making the Modern World gallery is a direct effect.  The museum has stepped back. It no longer asserts a specific schema for organizing the world (perhaps its most traditional task) and instead offers an historically relative, shifting set of rubrics. 

This self-consciousness means that, at the level of the exhibit, it is no longer necessary or interesting to uncover those structures. The too-easy critique of assessing what the hidden organizational structures is no longer meaningful. The stakes have been raised; the object of criticism changes, and as a result, the task of the critic must change. 

The fact that I feel this is new territory does not indicate that I'm diagnosing some massive shift. It simply means that I can no longer ask the questions of other critics. I must ask my own, as indicated by the exhibits I visit. But those questions shift the ground.  Not: "What's the taxonomic principle coordinating these objects, and what epistemological and axiological relevance does it have?" But: "What does it mean for the museum to reflexively and self-consciously identify its ways of organizing the world?" In the past, we might have asked the inverse of this question, "What does the lack of explicitness mean?", but that question points back to the theoretical foundations of our criticism, and so an answer was assumed as part of the background of what we did. Now that that theory has been incorporated into practice, the modern question has legs. We're up a level here.  And for my part, this is the excitement of modern museology and the challenge of modern criticism. 

A Vision

At the end of an all staff, all faculty breakout visioning session yesterday, the Kettering's President responded brilliantly to the question, "So, what's your vision?"

He said, "I can do it in one sentence, well, part of a sentence: 'Flint comma Michigan comma home of Kettering University' and [shrug] then the rest of the sentence."

If it doesn't work for you, I think he meant for us to imagine it as the lead sentence in a news article. It indicates, I think, a vision of Kettering as so much a part of Flint that the two are synonymous, and celebrating that relationship is something to be proud of. I think it's inspired, and it was a pitch perfect way to end the session.

Responding to "Neil Postman is a Hypocrite"

Every time I teach Neil Postman's Technopoly students react to his criticism of technology by calling him a hypocrite. After all, they argue, he both uses and benefits from technology, therefore he's wrong through and through. If he really means what he says, then he shouldn't be using a computer or publishing a book. Abracadabra, this book is junk.

This argument has become so common that I now try to inoculate them against it. I tell them early on that if they don't like Postman's argument, they need to show where he's wrong, not where you think his personal choices allow you to jettison the argument. If that's how arguing works, I tell them, then we're going to hold you all to the same standard and you'll quickly see that everything you say in this class can be explained away as disingenuous or hypocritical.  

But there's a better way to use their inclination for this ad hominem attack against them. The fact that they think Postman is a hypocrite actually reinforces Postman's argument that technology has unanticipated consequences that dramatically alter the way our culture works. One of these is that for Postman to even gain an audience for his argument he must write a book. If he doesn't, then he doesn't communicate his point. He must use the means of communication that our culture has adopted. Even one of the harshest critics of technology, the Unabomber, had to use technology to get his messages out of his cabin. Even Plato wrote down his criticisms of writing. It does not damn their argument. Rather it very simply and very powerfully reinforces their point that technology has so altered our world that the critics must use its power to help make us aware of technology's unanticipated consequences.

Imagine this today, with Facebook and Twitter. To be heard, to be a "friend," to see photos of new babies and weddings, to hear about someone's day, to keep up with the news we all use different media. To use this media to criticize that media -- e.g., to use Facebook to challenge the social world Facebook creates -- doesn't negate the validity of the argument, it highlights the argument.

And in other Postman linkages, this week's Freakonomics podcast explores the unanticipated consequences of the ultrasound in China. Those consequences? About 100 million missing women. It's a fascinating report, though it should have hedged against the technological determinism that it espouses. It's a provocative, incomplete account. 

 

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My niece Sydney and her amazing straight smile.

Representation and the Unit of Analysis

Since returning home I've immersed myself in some history and sociology of science books, which has been a nice way to reflect back on the history of science museums especially. Today I wrapped up Steve Woolgar's Science: The Very Idea, which is a nifty little primer from the 1980s. Old, but Woolgar does a superb job of framing many of the problems that SSK and Science Studies subsequently took up. He provoked a series of reflections about my project, the first of which was what to do with the notion of "representation" that has always guided my project: How do museums represent science for the public? I've always had to be careful about how I understood "representation," because I don't come at this with some defined, objective, essentialist definition of what science is. Instead of measuring the museum's depiction of science against some idealistic conception, my goal was instead to describe how the museum actively constructed the public's conception of science. This is descriptive work, not prescriptive assessment. 

Yet I've tended to be critical, meaning that I am often disappointed in how science is represented: it's too simple, too rule-goverened, too ahistorical, too apolitical, too objective, etc. If I have an essentialist leaning, it's to ask for a more complex representation of science.

Woolgar has helped me frame representation more distinctly, and he's also raised the very real issue of reflexivity: if we don't believe in essentialist representations and if we don't believe the museum should be depicting them, then how can we trust that my representation of what the museum is doing is accurate? I'm not ready to deal with this yet. Does anyone know of work on the rhetoric of reflexivity? Has our discipline grappled with this? Perhaps in Rhetorical Hermeneurics?

No matter the troubles with the accuracy of the representations within rhetorical criticism, I at least need to be clear about my unit of analysis. As a methodological point, I've written about this before. But here I want to explore it a bit further in order to test out a distinction. I want to assert that in our critical appraisal of how a museum represents science, we must treat the exhibit -- not the museum -- as the unit of analysis.

As I wrote before, the main problem with treating the museum itself as the unit of analysis is that most (though definitely not all) rotate through exhibits that differentially represent science. Even museums that don't reotate exhibits through usually have multiple permanent exhibits that do different representational work. In other words, the museum itself is rarely coherent enough across exhibits to be treated as a unified text. 

The exhibit, however, is bounded spatially and conceptually (even when left in large open spaces and without distinct pathways for visitors) and can be considered a coherent structure and narrative.   

This partly resolves the problem of how to bring together exhibits in the same museum that represent science differently. If we are to make a claim about the museum as a whole, then we must integerate all of those representations, a task that seems unnecessary, especially when we remember that visitors don't typically experience all exhibits. 

However, the tendency to treat whole museums as the unit of analysis is routine. I would continue to argue that large museums with rotating and shifting galleries cannot be easily wrestled into a narrative about representations of science, at least without writing extensively about the scope of the exhibit. Other museums, however, are more amenable to this analysis. The Hunterian, the Royal Institute, the Whipple, and many others can be treated as coherent texts because they are meant to be experienced as a whole. They are, I argue, essentially one large exhibit -- bounded, coherent, narratively consistent, thematically and structurally whole. Thus where the museum is moving, the exhibit is the unit; where the museum is small and permanent it functions as an exhibit.

Where does this leave the museum? Calling up Mcluhan, I consider the museum to be the message. But what this means requires another post.

Mad Men as Rhetorical Education

Has anyone used Mad Men to teach audience? Small moments are very good at conveying sensitivity to different audiences, even if some of them are based on very strict 1960s race and gender roles. The problem is that while short clips can capture the persuasive pitch, I'm afraid they only make sense within the larger narrative of the show. Maybe it's the sign the show's fantastic character development and commitment to the chronology that you can't excise a 5 minute clip to make a theoretical point. Still, I'd think it worth the try. Surely someone has written on this already.

Reflections on Seasoning Cast Iron

When I was on my cast iron pan binge, I scrubbed, fired, and chemically cleaned more pans than I could ever use. I had so many that everyone in my family was worried they'd get them for Christmas one year. My mom had to intervene to make sure I didn't gift them. They found other good homes.

Every now and again I think I want to re-season the few pans I kept around. But the information out there is crazy complicated, and thorough research settles none of the debates. No one has a definitive method. Different oils, different temperatures, different durations abound, and there are so many forums, lists, methods, and advice columns that it's all pretty much a toss up.

So here's what I'd add to this discussion. It has two parts. First is that what we mean by "seasoned" is vague. After scoring and cleaning their pans, most people's next step is this: Put a coat of oil on it (crisco, lard, flaxseed, canola, coconut, whatever), bake it for about an hour at 450 - 500 degrees and then let it cool. Do this a few times and the pan is "seasoned." And it truly is, so long as you think of "seasoned" as something less than "nonstick" but more than "will rust."

The problem is that everyone wants to season their pan this way and then cook eggs or make cornbread, and if these don't slide right out, then they've failed to season their pans. They return to the advice columns and complain on message boards. Seasoned =! nonstick, though that's what we're led to believe because when we use the same verb to describe what happens over years of cooking. Your grandma's pan was so exceptionally seasoned that it was nonstick. But she didn't achieve that through some artificial method. Something else is needed.

So the first point is to stop expecting some artificial oven method to suddenly turn cast iron into your teflon coated pan. It's not easy like that.

It's easy like this: cook with it.

But this, too, is unclear because our expectations and cooking methods have changed. We think that if we toss a tablespoon of olive oil in the pan and fry up some onions or eggs that this furthers the seasoning process. Perhaps, but only a little. And if you fry tofu or tomatoes or something that sticks a lot, then you will inevitably be scraping the pan. Scraping the pan slows down the seasoning process (the real seasoning process).

Your grandma didn't use olive oil and she didn't fry tofu. She deepfried fish and chicken. She cooked with lard and butter and crisco. and she used lots of it. The pan was often flooded with oil. This wasn't some spritz of EVOO, it was teaspoons and tablespoons, one for each pancake. And once you start using solid fats and cooking with lots of them, you'll immediately find the pan seasoned completely differently. This is the seasoning that lasts generations. And so long as you continue to cook like your grandma did, not like the P90X cookbook wants you to, the pan will continue to have that deep, dark sheen you want.

So, in short, realize that the oven method will never cure your pans to a non-stick surface. Cook with lots of oil, preferably solid fats, and do so often. Only then will your pan be able to survive your uncle's tomato sauce or perfectly release your grandma's pancakes.

 

Initial Thoughts on a Table of Contents

Original book proposal TOC:

Chapter 1: History and Theory of Informal Science Institutions
Chapter 2: Celebrating Science
Chapter 3: Reflecting and Catalyzing Conceptual Change
Chapter 4: Deliberating Science
Chapter 5: Representing Science
Chapter 6: Beyond Exhibits

Two things immediately strike me about this initial draft of a structure. First, it's booooring. Where's the creativity in the titles? Sure, they help describe the shape of the book, but who the hell wants to read this book? The second thing is that the chapter titles indicate a very general readership -- there's nothing rhetorical about this; not even a concern with communication. The chapter descriptions did some of this work, but the titles do not help at all. Also, these are thematic chapters, which  means that my original plan was to integrate readings of multiple exhibits into each of them. Heading to Europe, I wasn't sure about the viability of thematic chapters for a number of reasons. It's hard to do justice to multiple exhibits in one chapter, and I'd be giving up a degree of depth. In Europe I had hoped to find more star exhibits that would allow me to reorganize the book around specific cases. Unfortunately, that didn't really happen. So while I have a few strong case studies, a lot of my thinking has been comparative, and as a result, thematic.  

Exhibits that would work as case studies, primarily because they were large, significant, and I was granted access to lots of information about each:

• Race: Are we so different? (SMM and traveling; from dissertation; sample chapter.)
• Mysteries of Catalhoyuk (SMM; dissertation chapter)
• Disease Detectives (SMM; dissertation chapter)
• Oceans (Cite des Sciences, Paris, France)
• Atmosphere (Science Museum, London, England)
• Nanotechnology (Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany)

Comparitive Cases:

• Ocean vs. Atmosphere
• Sex in the Natural History Museum (Sex Museum, New York vs. Natural History Museum, London)
• BMW vs. MAN (BMW Museum and the Deutsches Museum, Munich)
• History of Science (Royal Institute, Whipple, OMHS, Hunterian, Fleming, Artes and Metres, Galileo)
• Evolution and Darwin (European: LNHM, Oxford NHM, Berlin NHM, Sedgewick; American: Harvard NHM, Boston SM, AMNH, Nebraska Project,  )
• Climate Change (Harvard MNH, AMNH, Atmosphere and Ocean, Field Museum)

Another approach is to look not at exhibits but at entire museums. If this doesn't end up being an approach for chapters, it will at least be an important methodological point. Most of the large institutions (the Science and Natural History Museums in London, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the Da Vinci Museum in Milan, and even the Wellcome Collection) can't be assessed as a complete unit. The exhibits change too often to create a coherent account of the whole -- at least if my approach is a close reading of an exhibit or two on display in the summer of 2011 or 2010. But there were a few museums that can be read completely. These include:

• The Fleming Museum, London
• The Hunterian, London
• The Royal Institute, London
• The Whipple, Cambridge
• The Communication Museum, Berlin (even if I couldn't read it)
• BMW Museum, Munich
• Artes and Metres, Paris

So which way to go? Perhaps a mix of detailed case studies, comparative analyses, and thematic chapters is in order. I think it depends on the book's main point, which is...undecided as of this writing. But I can imagine three specific case studies (Race, Catalhoyuk, Nanotechnology) that would illuminate the density of rhetorical strategies at play in any one exhibit. To these I would add a chapter (or two) looking at the variety of ways the history of science is represented across Europe (LSM, Whipple and Oxford, Galileo, Artes and Metres). Next I would add two or three comparative analyses: Global climate change (Atmosphere vs. Oceans), Sex (Museum of Sex vs. LMNH exhibit), and cars/engines (MAN vs. BMW). Add an introduction and conclusion, and I'd be all set. 

But I'm still not happy. The articles and book chapters I've read do very different things, so I'm not following a specific model here. I'm trying to find a way to coordinate and marshall my visits into a meaningful whole. Perhaps I am still biting off more than I can chew with each exhibit. Perhaps the approach is to home in on those smaller moments I've already blogged and explode them into more detailed, more thorough readings that illuminate or complicate relevant rhetorical theories. Perhaps my approach at this point is not fine grained enough. What I need is a thesis statement for each chapter and a narrative that ties all those together. Get that, and I'm not sure if the hodgepodge of exhibits and chapters really matters -- they'd be tied together by their relevance and contribution to rhetorical theory.

The Einstein Blackboard

I was struck by the lack of blockbuster works in the history of science museums in Oxford and Cambridge. I had expected to see more instruments that were used to carry out revolutions in science, objects tied to celebrity science or scientists. There was, however, one piece at the Oxford Museum of the History of Science that for some visitors is the primary motivation for their visit: The Einstein Blackboard. But it was an anomaly.