THE MONUMENT CIRCLE PROJECT: CURATING DIGITAL HISTORY FOR COMMUNITY DISCOURSE

poster abstractDigitized museum and library collections have transformed the knowledge landscape. The Internet enables audiences to explore high-resolution images of primary documents from around the world with a click of a button. Yet in spite of increased accessibility, many online collections remain concealed by inadequate search terms and incon-sistent citation methods. Under the guidance of Modupe Labode, Assistant Professor of His-tory and Museum Studies at IUPUI, I curated Monument Circle Project, an online collection of primary documents, annotated research materi-als and an interpretive blog to frame E Pluribus Unum, a controversial public art proposal, within a historical context. In 2007, contemporary artist Fred Wilson proposed to re-appropriate a figure of a freed slave from the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Community outreach meetings revealed that broader perspectives of social and racial con-ventions from late nineteenth-century Indianapolis – the time in which the monument was constructed – were key to understanding the con-troversy surrounding the proposed artwork, yet were missing from public discourse. The art project was cancelled in December 2011. Using analyses of monuments by Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942) and art historian Kirk Savage as an intellectual frame-work, I utilized Flickr.com, an image hosting and online community fo-rum, and WordPress.com, an open source blogging tool, to curate and interpret primary documents from archives across the country. I de-veloped standards to organize and manage these documents with the goal of increasing public visibility on life in Indianapolis during the turn of the twentieth century. Monument Circle Project demonstrates how digital history can add valuable and rich commentary to contemporary issues

Starting with the Space: Integrating Learning Spaces and Technologies

Teaching introductory courses to college freshmen requires innovative pedagogies, which are often powered by new advanced technologies. In addition to the potential for increased student engagement promised by new technologies, instructors may also plan and deploy active learning strategies that first consider the physical spaces in which learning will take place. Effective pedagogies acknowledge both the impact that space has on student learning and the utility of both “low” and “high” technologies to facilitate such learning, merging the inherent power of each. The following case study provides the example of a themed learning community (TLC) as a vehicle through which instructors may maximize technologies and spaces to enhance the teaching and learning process. The case study highlights both the use of physical learning spaces (e.g., cutting-edge Mosaic classrooms; traditional classrooms; the off-campus settings of museums) and learning technologies (e.g., high technology tools such as image sharing software versus low tech white boards and paper-based pop-up museum exhibits) to illustrate the ways in which instructional teams collaborate to intentionally design meaningful learning experiences for their students

The Guantánamo Public Memory Project: Exploring the Pedagogy of the Curatorial Process

poster abstractIn fall semester 2012, two graduate classes in IUPUI’s Museum Studies Program participated in the Guantánamo Public Memory Project (GPMP). Each produced digital products and a panel for the GPMP’s traveling exhibition about the history of the United States’ relationship with the Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba. This exhibition is the product of a collaboration among 11 universities. The class “Introduction to Museum Studies” is required for all incoming graduate students in the Museum Studies program, produced an exhibition panel on “The Arts of Detention” as a semester-long project within the introduction to museum history, theory, and ethics.. The “Guantánamo Project” class focused wholly on the GPMP and was comprised of students in the Museum Studies and Public History programs. In this poster, the class instructors will compare and contrast how students in the classes learned and applied the basic curatorial processes of creating an exhibition—research, interpretation, writing, image selection. The classroom products that will be considered include the exhibition panel, blog entries, digital projects, and student presentations at the December 2012 “Why Guantánamo” conference. The School of Liberal Arts student evaluations and the Museum Studies programs’ evaluations will be used to assess student perceptions and learning outcomes. Although many have advocated using exhibitions as a form of classroom practice, there is relatively little scholarship in this area. This poster will contribute to that scholarship

Art, Race, Space

poster abstractArt, Race, Space is a collaborative research project that takes as its starting point E Pluribus Unum, a public art installation proposed for the Indianapolis Culture Trail by renowned artist Fred Wilson that was cancelled in 2011 due to controversy surrounding Wilson’s appropriation of a freed slave figure from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Art, Race, Space” goes beyond examining the visual legacies of racial bondage to explore how the public responses to sculptures, memorials, and archaeology reveal our society’s faultlines of race and inequality. Building on the ideas about race, class, visual culture, and democratic debate that emerge from the Indianapolis project, the faculty have designed a multifaceted program to advance scholarship and promote civic dialogue about these significant issues. The faculty members organized an interdisciplinary symposium in January, 2013. Supported by an IAHI grant, the symposium explored the complicated relationships between art, race, and civic space with presentations by Wilson, community representatives who supported and opposed the sculpture, and scholars from a variety of disciplines who examined historical and cultural contexts of the controversy that had revealed Indianapolis’ longstanding racial and class tensions. The dialogue was expanded with the presentation of historical and contemporary examples from other parts of the United States. In order to encourage public dialogue, the symposium provided opportunities for audience members and presenters to engage in conversations, and it deployed social media (Twitter and Facebook) to encourage broader participation. The project's goal is to further scholarship and encourage public conversation on race and materiality. To this end the faculty have created a website, a Facebook page, Twitter account, and are working on an open-access curriculum to support dialogue in schools and informal learning settings about the complex issues of art, race, and representation. The faculty are also collaborating on academic publications, including selected proceedings and an article on the symposium's "hybrid discourse" that combined university and community resources, expertise, and communication practices and brought together diverse voices in constructive conversation about the challenging issues surrounding E Pluribus Unum

Consuming Lines of Difference: The Politics of Wealth and Poverty along the Color Line

Commentators on African American life have often focused on poverty, evaded African American wealth, and ignored the ways genteel affluence and impoverishment were constructed along turn-of-the-century color lines. Documentary research and archaeology at the Madam CJ Walker home in Indianapolis, Indiana illuminates how the continuum of wealth and poverty was defined and negotiated by one of African America’s wealthiest early 20th century entrepreneurs. The project provides an opportunity to compare the ways in which wealth was defined and experienced along the color line in the early 20th century and how such notions of Black affluence shaped racialized definitions of poverty and materialit

Public Conversation and Closing Remarks

Recording available from: https://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/media/791s45x46bMuseum Studies Program, School of Liberal Arts and the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institutehttps://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/media/791s45x46

Introduction: The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook

An introduction to a selection of articles republished from The Inclusive Historian's Handbook. A free, online resource, the Handbook is sponsored by the American Association for State and Local History and the National Council on Public History. Its goals are to: (1) share a knowledge base that invites more people to engage in history projects; (2) provide concrete examples of how to make history work more relevant; (3) center equity, inclusivity, diversity, and public service; and (4) offer accessible windows into the many ways public historians work. inclusivehistorian.co