For your final project in this course, you will put to the test the curatorial and historicizing skills you have practiced in the Explore & Curate and Micro-History assignments. You will create a full exhibit within the Museum of Communication Technologies.
A museum exhibit is typically organized by an origin-, need-, or theme-based structure. Constructing an exhibit requires that you do some curation of the artifacts within itthat you offer some detailed description of their significance or valueincluding the provenance, arrangement, and researchability of those texts or materials.
The materials or texts in your exhibit can come from anywherethey could be artifacts you have in your possession, texts you collect over the course of the term, and/or texts that come from your or other students contributions to the course museum via the Explore & Curate activities. You will need to provide brief descriptions (item labels) for each of the items in your exhibit so that researchers can easily identify them.
In constructing this exhibit, you will need to determine the arrangement of the artifacts (i.e., in what order are they meant to be viewed by a museum visitor?) and provide detailed information about each artifacts source and origin via item labels. You will also compose a curatorial statement, a 5-6 page (not including title or references pages) document that introduces the collection, and employs research to explain the significance of the artifacts and your overall exhibit. The curatorial statement should contain an overview of the exhibit; describe its origins, scope, arrangement or organization, purpose, and contents; and ideally, should give users a sense of its historic and actual significance.
Artifacts: **10-12** carefully selected artifacts that are relevant to your exhibits theme or topic. These artifacts may take the form of text-based files, images, videos, sound clips, or other media, depending on your exhibits theme and scope.
Labels for each artifact: At a minimum, labels should identify the artifact by its title or a descriptive phrase, provide its source, owner, and/or author, and briefly describe when, how, and why the item was created (in other words, its intentionality, materiality, and functionality). If your exhibit covers several time periods or communication genres/media, you may choose to use additional section labels to help introduce visitors to the different parts of your exhibit.
Curatorial Statement: An overall curatorial statement that provides an overview of the exhibits purpose, theme, and arrangement and uses research to provide readers with a sense of the exhibits significance. The curatorial statement should provide historical context for the exhibit as well as offer some window into your study of communication technologies. The curatorial statement should be 5-6 pages in length (not including cover or references pages) and should cite a minimum of three sources.
Your exhibit should be housed on The Museum of Communication Technologies (via BloggerTM). However, you have many options for constructing your exhibit within this platform. For instance, you might choose to create and upload a presentation, using slides to guide viewers through your artifacts, and using voiceover to communicate the artifact labels. Or, if you are comfortable manipulating HTML code, you might choose to create a responsive image gallery in Blogger. Whatever you choose should be in line with your goals for the exhibit. Your curatorial statement can be uploaded as a Word or PDF file or formatted within the text of your Blogger entry.
Questions to consider when writing the curatorial statement:
What do you want visitors to your exhibit to learn about your topic or theme? What histories do the artifacts in your exhibit help you to tell? What background and context does your reader need in order to understand the significance of the artifacts in the exhibit?
How does your exhibit contribute to or advance the study of communication technologies?
What do you think is the research potential for your exhibit? What questions do these objects or texts raise that have yet to be answered?
How do the individual artifacts in your exhibit connect to each other and to your theme/topic, and why were they selected for inclusion in this exhibit over others?
Why are the artifacts arranged as they are? How does the organization of the exhibit contribute to the visitors experience and to the exhibits goals and purpose?
artifact options below:
Cave paintings
Cuneiform clay tablets
Papyrus scrolls
Medieval illuminated manuscripts
Wax tablets
Graffiti or other forms of street art (yarn bombing, sticker art, etc.)
Monuments or memorials (e.g., Behistun monument; Vietnam War Memorial)
Tattoos
Silk scrolls
Early printed books (16th-17th centuries)
Clay/woodblock prints
Parchment texts (non-illuminated)
Ostraka
Tsunami stones
e-Readers
Message boards/online billboards
Digital videos (e.g., Vlogs, TikToks, or Vines)
Tweets
Telephones (landline or mobile)
Text messaging
Blogs
Radio
Music Video
Records/Audio Cassettes/Compact Disc/Mp3
Podcasts
VHS/DVD/other home technologies for viewing films
Animation
Video games (e.g., live online play)
