MAKING A MUSEUM: Materializing Regimes of Value with the NYC Department of Sanitation

Continuing our discussion of marked and unmarked, I wanted to draw the classes attention to the work of Mass Observation, a British archive, founded by a group of anthropologists, poets and documentary film-makers in the 1930s to create an archive of every day life in the United Kingdom. Exploiting anthropological methodologies of hanging out and being there, as well as their own skills with photography and film-making, the members of Mass Observation created an invaluable documentary record about the life of the non-studied, and non-reported. As well as conducting surveys and studies of their own, they co-opted hundreds of everyday Britons to keep diaries and submit commentaries, compiling valuable archives about the everyday experiences of World War II, the crisis around the abdication of Edward VIII, British humour, thoughts on the royal family and so on. Their work continues into the present day and they continue to maintain a network of mass observors who respond to regular directives on topical themes such as responses to Princess Diana's death, thoughts about climate change and so on.

A comprehensive history and digital archive can be accessed through the website:

http://www.massobs.org.uk/index.htm

Can anyone else think of other archives that specifically focus on the everyday, and often overlooked?

Here are some guidelines for how to name, and save, the files you will be creating (sound, image, and text) and uploading into the digital archive. Each record in the archive has its own unique handle which refers to the file uploaded plus the metadata attached to it. This handle should be used when referring to specific archive entries. However, each digital file that you upload should also be thought of as its own unique object and we need to make sure that each file has a non-duplicated name that locates it within our collection as well as the FDA.

Filename guidelines:

1. Filenames should not include spaces and should only include lowercase alphabetical characters and numbers and dashs (-).
2. All file names should start with the letters DSNYM (DSNY Museum)
3. Then each item has it's own unique number which is the date you made the object followed by your initial (e.g -20070919-HG)
4. If an item is double sided you append "-r" for recto and "-v" for verso.
5. If the item is one of a series make sure you number the series
6. Make sure that the file extension is appended e.g .tif (for images), .wav (for sound files), .doc or .rtf for text files or .pdf.

WE WILL ONLY USE TIFF (IMAGES) AND WAV (SOUND) file formats to upload to the archive (and JPEGs for the blog).

So - an image (right side up)
DSNYM-HG9192007-01-r.tif

Or an image as part of a series of digital objects you created that day:

DSNYM-20070919-HG-01.tif
DSNYM-20070919-HG-02.tif

Please just add your initials in brackets to after your name in you post for the blog (ignoring middle names unless two of you have the same two initials) e.g.
Alex Starace (AS) so we can keep track of who is who.

I came across this article today that I thought brought up a lot of good points about the "danger" of not providing an accurate description of the nature of oral history projects (thus leading people to believe it can be used for historical FACTS.)

The link is below

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20853588/

As a quick overview- A Library of Congress collection of Vietnam Veteran's oral histories has come under scrutiny (and indeed is being altered) after it was discovered that some interviewees lied about honors received, and in turn were incorrectly listed at Medal of Honor Recipients.

The question of why there wasn't more "fact checking" before the site went up was met with some explanation about the nature of oral history projects (within the msn article at least)

“There are 50,000 oral histories that are involved in the Veterans History Project, it’s got a very small staff and it gets at the philosophical underpinning of what an oral history project is. … It’s not intended to be a historical record. They are personal, firsthand accounts.”

In our work this semester, it will be interesting to see how much of an issue fact versus memory becomes.
What is the best way to present an oral history account containing "misinformation" in conjunction with listed facts (as the Library of Congress website had to)? In this case, it seems the error was in not fact checking the actual Medal of Honor recipients against the account of those they interviewed, and not putting enough emphasis on oral history as a HUMAN account of an event, not a database to be mined for absolute truths.

At the end of the article, there was advice on how this might have been prevented:

"The Library of Congress could easily require participants in the Veterans History Project to fill out paperwork authorizing release of their entire service records in the event that questions are raised about their accounts."

Thoughts?

Here is a slightly revised copy of the Manual of how to submit to the Faculty Digital Archive.

Download file

One conceptual issue which would be good to think about that a number of you raised in class was the ways in which an object is defined by the archive. As you'll see the archive creates records which unite a digital object (an image or sound file) and contextual information of different kinds. This then becomes 'the object' in the database. I think it's useful to think of a photograph as a philosophical model for the presence of the 'object' in the record: a digital scan of a paper photograph could be thought of as many different kinds of object: there is the object photographed (e.g. a man with a dumpster), the paper photograph as object, the digital file as object and finally the record uniting the digital file with the catalogue information as an object. Think this through and make sure your descriptions (both the abstract summary and the more detailed 'curatorial notes' description address the question of 'what' it is that you are describing!

Remember - the abstract (description) is for a short summary of the object you have uploaded. Longer, more detailed information, and anything you think is important that doesn't fit in other fields should be put into the Description field - which we are using more like curatorial notes.

Also for those of you who are interested: here is the list of metadata (the fields to be filled in) that the makers of DSPACE have created, with definitions of the fields (you'll see that there are many ways to interpret these fields according to your needs):

http://www.dspace.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=141

For those of you who are interested in pulling images and other kinds of document off the web for use either on this blog or in our assignments, it might be worth just familiarising yourselves with the idea of fair use.

From the wikipedia entry:

Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. It is based on free speech rights provided by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The term "fair use" is unique to the United States; a similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright.

For some more detailed discussion:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/

For an interesting argument (both in the courts and in the press) between an artist and a documentary photographer around the use of the latter's image in the work of the former see:

http://www.firstpulseprojects.com/joywar.html

I'm taking a class that is specifically about visual records and visual history, and we had to read part of a book called Photographs: Archival Care and Management. I wanted to share this reading with you all, because I think might be very helpful in terms of researching and "reading" any images we may come across.

Due to the current space constraint on the blog, though, it is currently residing in the "Course Documents" section of Blackboard. Enjoy!

I was browsing through some of your practice entries into the Faculty Digital Archive and wanted to make a posting about what should be in the description field. I thought it would be good to see a catalogue entry for a project I worked on at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to illustrate the kinds of information you should be thinking about:

Here is the image that the entry refers to:

Here are some snapshots of the catalogue focusing on the description and notes fields:

In the notes field, there is too much text for me to take a full snapshot, but the information reads:

On catalogue card, top right hand corner: “Taken and given by J. W. Layard.”

Layard’s handwritten captions says:
“3. Atchin, R.C. Mission house lent to us.
L-R Top Row: Malpuraim, Meltekshulü, Nalekon (with hand on Meltegewetpue, sone of M-shulü), Meldektaus.
L-R bottom row: Kalerib, Nale, Maluarasi, Malteris, Meltegele, Rivers, Maletelauli, Tipe (Franky)”
Handwritten “List of photographs (original). UCSD Mandeville Collection, MSS 84, Box 31, Folder 10.
[H. Geismar 20/04/04]

The notes below are taken from the ‘Biography’ Database entry on Layard:
“Layard was a pioneer in the application of psychology to anthropology. W.H.R. Rivers had just finished his History of Melanesian Society, and wanted to investigate further some of the problems that remained outstanding. Took Layard to Atchin, off the coast of Malekula and left him there after a week without any adequate training for his research or guidance on how to cope with a trying tropical climate and tribes only recently tamed. It may be that some misunderstanding, or the outbreak of war, was the reason. Anyway, Layard returned to Australia to enlist in the war, but rejected, and ill, he now realised that he was so engrossed in the life and culture of the tribesmen that he must return. The twelve months or so he spent altogether in the field were probably the most rewarding time of his life; but in 1915 he returned to the UK suffering from serious nervous exhaustion. For the next 25 years, soon becoming an ethnologist to be reckoned with, he worked on his filed materials and on the comparative ethnology of Melanesia.”

A reproduction of this image was displayed in Collected Sights in the section Fieldwork and Scholarship with the descriptive label:
“William Rivers and a local teacher from Erakor (left) with a group of young men in front of an abandoned Roman Catholic Mission house. Rivers accompanied Layard to Vanuatu, staying only a few days before continuing survey work in island Melanesia. In contrast, Layard conducted intensive fieldwork on Atchin for a year.”

[Sudeshna Guha 27/11/02]

You can search the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology catalogues and see the front end of this catalogue at
http://museum.archanth.cam.ac.uk/home/catalogue/index.htm

Please note a few things:

There is no first person or colloquial writing in the catalogue
All notes are sourced and referenced and authored
You might want to think about putting the following into the description field:
Source
Dimensions of object

any other ideas?

One thing I would like you to be thinking about as you work on the archive is what your 'ideal' museum catalogue would look like -what fields would it contain? How would it organise information. Please put any ideas into the comments section of this posting...

If you are really into interviewing you might want to participate with a friend or a relative in storycorps:

http://www.storycorps.net/

On the website you can listen to "extraordinary stories from everyday people" and find out about how to participate. They have a booth at Grand Central station for example where you can go and record your conversation or interview as well as tips on how to record your own interviews...the interview checklist is quite useful (even though they recommend different equipment to us): http://www.storycorps.net/participate/do-it-yourself_guide/interview_checklist/

ICHIM07 - International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting digital culture and heritage
Toronto, October 24-26, 2007
http://www.archimuse.com/ichim07/

ICHIM07 Papers are now on-line
http://www.archimuse.com/ichim07/speakers/index.html

The first group of papers to be presented at the International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting are now on-line.

I recently analyzed Harvard Library's online collections for another class, but it's a pretty amazing tool, and is worth checking out to see how they use keywords (or subjects I believe they call them) and what information is put into what field in the record details. Here's the link:

http://digitalcollections.harvard.edu/

Enjoy it!

The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum:

The Smithsonian has one of the best online catalogs I've seen in regards to our project. They offer a list of keywords (they call them object collections) with a thumbnail image for each one. You can pick your object collection and then you are directed to a page with thumbnail images of the objects in the collection, along with a brief description. Then you can click on the object of your choice to view the larger description. It's very clear, concise, nicely formatted. What's more, they have an oral history project online that describes in detail the oral histories they have recorded!
http://collections.nasm.si.edu/code/emuseum.asp

The Oral History project of the Smithsonian Air and Space:
http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/dsh/oralhistory.cfm

The Art Institute of Chicago:

Besides the Smithsonian, by far the best online collections I've seen are from the large art museums. Their pages are always easy to navigate and the ease with which you can either browse by category or find a specific work is much appreciated. With every object there is always a thumbnail image which is very helpful. It also adds an aesthetic dynamic to the page that is important. In other catalogs, such as the British Postal Museum, there are no images of the archival material. The Art Institute of Chicago is an especially nice example.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/

Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)
This online collection is probably one of my favorites (but I also may be a bit biased as the MoMA is my favorite museum!). The MoMA offers the visitor a variety of ways to search through their database and it is easy to navigate through. You can either select a genre, and within each genre you can choose to browse all of the works, highlights of the genre, or recent acquisitions. Or you can choose to browse the entire online collection where it will prompt you to search by artist, title, date, keywords, department, or classification. Once you select a work, a thumbnail of the image pops up and includes important information about the object, as well as if there are any related items in the gift shop!
http://www.moma.org/collection/

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
The LACMA online collection is another great database that I found to be easy to search through and very informative. Just on the opening page you can choose to browse the different departments within the permanent collection, browse the artists by last name, or do a quick search by typing in a keyword. I tested out the keyword section and found that if you use a general term such as “costume,” it will tell you your word is too broad (and comes up with a large number of works it is tied to) and needs to be refined. Each work has a thumbnail, just like MoMA’s website, and contains all the information of the work you are researching.
http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/

The digital collection of The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco combines the collection of The Legion of Honor and The de Young museums into one digital archive. The database is home to over 85,000 objects. What I like most about this archive is the ability to zoom in very close to all of the pieces. The resolution for all of the digital pictures is of very high quality, making it easy to see the detailed brush strokes, artist signatures, and even object damage. This is simply a great site, home to two of San Francisco's wonderful museums of fine art.

http://search.famsf.org:8080/search.shtml?keywords=

A quick google search revealed something quite nice:

The Museum of Online Museums!
(For even more redundancy, they could go by the name "The Online Museum of Online Museums," and then their catchphrase could be: "Hey, we're meta!")

I thought I'd explore a few of their recommendations, starting with Mr. Bali Hai's Sixties Soviet Postcard Collection. Mr. Hai's site itself is fairly simplistic and the information it gives per image (nothing more than a caption) is very minimal. It's just the faces of postcards, all of which were acquired by Mr. Bali Hai's father during a trip to Moscow in 1966. Really, the site is neither "educational," nor well-organized. But to criticize it for this is to miss the point entirely. It's for people who've been to Moscow, or have some other connection to the city. As someone who studied in Moscow in 2001, seeing these images is a pleasurable mixture of recollection, nostalgia, and curiosity. A sort of, "Oh, yeah, visiting Red Square was great! ... But in 1966, they hadn't even built the hotel next door! ... Man, remember the time when John and I..." Plus, for people who are interested in all things Soviet, the ideology and architecture manifest in the postcards are fairly worthwhile.

AMNH /Anthropology online collection

The first digital space I explored was the AMNH anthropology online collection. Although the site is problematic because not all the collections have been digitalized and the search criterion for each collection is not homogenous, the AMNH site developed a useful search tool for their online visitors: The Anthropology Thesaurus. This search tool was developed to provide a “controlled vocabulary” so that online searching becomes much easier and successful. It made me think about our key word list and how useful it could become for people that might not be familiar with the contents of our collection.

http://www.coudal.com/moom/

Really interesting metamuseum of sorts – has links to a bunch of different online museums and collections. It’s received lots of accolades, including being “featured recently on NPR's All Things Considered and selected as one of Time Magazine's 50 Coolest Websites for 2005.” What I liked most is that it puts all these different sites under one “roof,” making it really easy to explore lots of different museums and collections at once – and the sites they feature are all really intriguing and seem well-designed.

The home page features three categories. The Museum Campus includes a lot of links to several renowned traditional museums’ online sites, including the Met, the National Gallery, the Rijksmuseum, the Smithsonian Art Museum Weblog, and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as some more eclectic/interesting collections and museums: The Museum of Useful Things (located in Massachusetts) (Katie, I thought this was interesting in light of last night's Patronage comments on Americans and utility) and the American Package Museum. (These two are actually really interesting and I had to take more of a look at them individually.) The Permanent Collection includes many more such museums, both eclectic and “serious.” (Exploring some of these sites actually made me question where you can draw the line between “serious” museums and those which don’t qualify.) A long listing of online Galleries, Exhibitions and Shows includes The Gallery of Skatepark ID’s (sic), both the Museum of Old Soviet Radios and Mr. Bali Hai’s Sixties Soviet Postcard Collection, the Seventies and Eighties Leisurewear Museum, and a Gallery of Nebraska Pay Phones. (Most of the collections in this category seem kind of silly, but the galleries are actually intriguing and some of them are quite well-done.) Robin . . . there's a knitting museum. Just thought you should know.

http://forgottenoh.com/page1.html
http://illicitohio.com/illicitohio/index.htm

http://www.forgotten-ny.com/

So I'm fascinated with old buildings and abandoned buildings. I found these sites a few years ago and spent hours of downtime on them at work. The first two are from Ohio -- the guys who made the sites are buddies and like to do "urban spelunking," which basically translates to sneaking into abandoned buildings and checking them out. They take pictures, upload them, and actually do research on the places they check out. Some of my favorites: urban decay in the Rust Belt of Ohio, a partially-completed but never used subway system in Cincinnati, Mud House Mansion (an old farmhouse in the middle of Ohio) . . . and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA themepark (which has nothing to do with Ohio, but it's cool). I love that they actually document these places and post new information on whether they've been remodeled, demolished, if there are plans underway for restoration . . . I feel like many Americans undervalue these old buildings and sites, and I think these websites could draw useful attention to some of them.

A similar site, http://www.forgotten-ny.com/, includes a lot of New York buildings and places. I've had the chance to check some of them out myself -- maybe some of you have seen the site or been to some of these places, too. For those of you as obsessed as I am, this event looks interesting: an "open house" of buildings and places in New York. http://www.ohny.org/

The Cisneros Collection, which comprises works of art ranging from European modern art to ethnographic objects produced in the Orinoco region, specializes in Latin American modern and contemporary art. The site is interesting because, although its classifications are evidently curatorial, hierarchychal, and sometimes a little bit obscure, the educational intent is skillfully interwoven into the unorthodox structure of the site. Also, there are some traditional and straightforward scroll-bars in order to search for artists or works, but also unexpected links that relate works, movements, and chronology.

Another plus: it is available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese

http://www.coleccioncisneros.org/home.asp

While the digital collection of the New York Historical Society is rather rigid and seems to be permanently incomplete (a good percentage of the objects do not have an associated image), there is a "special project" about the American Revolution that enhances the interactivity and learning opportunities of the user. You can send secret messages, create your own collections, ask questions to a historian, or pick a game or an activity for your class. Check it out at:

http://www.amrevonline.org/museum/

I browsed the online component of two museums in the Baltimore area- The Walters Art Gallery and the American Visionary Art Museum- to see how they handled their collections and presented their material.

The main links are as follows
For the Walters-
http://www.thewalters.org/
with their collection link
http://www.thewalters.org/works_of_art/worksofart_overview.aspx

For the American Visionary Art Museum
http://www.avam.org/

I came across the digital collection of the Hermitage, and what immediately struck me is the homepage's detail about what technology can be employed to search the collection. In addition to a standard search function that allows a user to search by artist or title, the Hermitage has invested a QBIC tool that allows users to search by color palette or even by creating a sketch! I attempted to try it out on a PC (which is old and slow) but I guess it didn't have the necessary plug-ins or whatever it is that you need, because I couldn't actually perform said QBIC search. However, I feel like this capability opens up a lot of doors for amateur and seasoned scholars and researchers alike because it would in theory allow users to zoom in pretty closely and potentially observe the minutae of an item in the collection. And with a collection like the Hermitage's, which is vast and dates back several centuries, this is huge in terms of conservation and access.

The advance search is pretty great also and goes to a level of specificity that I haven't really seen with other digital collections. For example, you can search by artist's country of origin, theme of the artwork, and even by a specific person depicted in the artwork. It also seems, at least with what I can compare the few other online collections I've interacted with thus far, that there is far less metadata associated with items in the Hermitage's digital collection that with others, or is less consistent (the amount of metadata there is varies from item to item). Most digital archives seem to have more metadata including format, authorship, provenance, and detailed description of the actual item.


It's a pretty amazing collection so I'd recommend taking a look! Enjoy it!

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/fcgi-bin/db2www/browse.mac/category?selLang=English

The New - York Historical Society has an online database of the vast collection, called emuseum. N-YHS houses over 60,000 objects and works of art that may be viewed online through emuseum. Three million manuscripts, photographs, prints, maps and books complement these art and artifact collections and are accessible at Bobcat. Also accessible online is the Gilder Lehrman Collection, on deposit at the Society. This is a great digitization effort to make the collection more accessible to the general public as well as serious scholarly researchers. After working at the Society and using the database everyday, I find it useful to an extent. Many of the objects contain no image and little information. Also some of the entries had errors and often things were hard to find even when you had all the information, due to lack of cross listing and keywords.

The New - York Historical Society
emuseum

http://emuseum.nyhistory.org/

Hi Everyone -

I thought it might be helpful to see a blog used in a museum setting. My museum is hosting a blog in conjunction with one of our current exhibitions, and the text from the blog will actually be used as the basis for a print catalog for the exhibition. So I think it's somewhat comparable to our project in that you can see the style of writing that's used here, and how that reflects the mindset of this being a future, scholarly publication. It is somewhat more formal than our blog, and I think the public is interacting with it less than we had expected so perhaps the "voice" here is a little less organic. But interesting to look at within the context of what we are doing nonetheless.

http://queensmuseum.blogspot.com/

I was thinking about how when the museum eventually comes to fruition, how important it would be to have a children's section. Then, I remembered this clip I'd seen on Sesame Street that I adored as a kid and was truly my first introduction of what happens to our garbage. I was pleased that it was so easy to find! Take a gander! I bet many of you have seen it. But I thought I'd share it to show you how cool it is when things that are made to educate kids are entertaining and successful. I was surprised by how much it moved me- I think it's the nostalgia of seeing all those shots of NYC in the 80s. By the way, I'm pretty sure that's good old Fresh Kills in the video.

Check it out!

November 1st: updated again!

Note: October 18: I've updated the keywords. They are now all Capitalised and all commas have been converted to dashes. Please use whatever is on this list in the format it is on the list as your keywords! And add suggestions either as comments to this posting or as a new blog entry! [HG]

Keywords are words and short phrases that relate directly to the material/objects within a museum catalogue or other database. Whilst there are a number of standardized lists of keywords (for instance that of the Library of Congress which allows all libraries to organise their collections in ways that are comparable and searchable) museums generally need to devise their own lists which reflect the idiosyncracies and special materialities of their collection.

A key word should be conceptualised as a term, concept, name, place (and so on) that will link records together and that will provide a powerful cross-referencing tool for curators, researchers and visitors to search collections thematically. In short, key words are one of the main ways in which collections are organised conceptually - they are literal manifestions of what we think is important about the material we are working with. Key words also ensure that spellings and expressions are standardised (so we don't have The Department of Sanitation, Department of Sanitation and so on), again to facilitate cross-referencing and the connection of records within the archive or catalogue.

We will use this blog post as a forum to develop our list of key words for our own archive. When uploading content to the blog - you should have this list open in a seperate window as a reference tool and choose words from this list as a tool. If you feel that there are terms not on the list that should be added, note them in the comments section of this entry and we can discuss in class and add to the list as we go along. In addition there are other ways to categorise and classify the information and objects we will be cataloguing (especially tags)

Definitive List of Key Words (more to come):
If you have others you can add them to the comments and we'll review them and put them on the list:

On the Job, social
On the Job, work
History
Trash and Transformation
September 11
Mapping the City (through its discards)

Advertisements
Award (as in a ceremony or a special commendation)
Band - original
Band -Pipe & Drum
Barge
Benevolent society
-African-American
-Asian-Jade
-Emerald
-Columbian
-Hebrew Spiritual
-Hispanic
-Holy Name
-Latino
-Polaski
-Steuben
-Women
Bicycle
Blackout (2003; 1967)
(The) Bronx
Brooklyn
Building/facility
-garage
-stable
-office
-section station
-body shop
-lockerroom
-lunch room
-fueling station
-headquarters
Cart
Carry can
CFC removal
Chief (how many stars)
Civilian
Collection
Commissioner (deputy or full)
Coney Island
Cleaning
Cliff Street
Delury, John
Derelict vehicle
Department of Street Cleaning (can be abbreviated DSC)
Doherty, John
Dump
Emergency Response
Funeral
Garbage
Ground Zero
Hand broom
Hauling
Horse
Incineration
Landfill
-Athey wagons
-Fresh Kills
-Fountain Avenue
-Pennsylvania Avenue
-Pelham Bay
Litter
Manhattan
Mayor
Mongo
Officer
-sanitation police
-section supervisor/foreman
-garage supervisor/foreman
-superintendent
Oral history
Parade
Personal stories
Pier
Plowing
Tandem plowing
Popular representation
Queens
Recycling
Reports
Retirement party
Sanitation worker
Safety & training
Scow
September 11 cleanup
Sewering
Sewage treatment
Snow
Social event
Special event
Staten Island
Strike
Sweeping - hand
Sweeping - mechanical
Trades
-Blacksmith
-metalworker
-carpenter
-electrician
- mechanic
[there will be more of these]
Transfer station - marine
Transfer station - rail
Ukeles, Mierle
-Touch Sanitation
-Flow City
-Social Mirror
-Fresh Kills/Percent for Art
Uniform
Union
-831
-444
-chief’s
Vehicle
-collection truck
-alley truck
-car
-compactor
-cut-down
-front-end loader (FEL)
-hi-lo [fork lift]
-Payhauler
-roll-on/roll-off (RoRo)
-wrecker (tow truck)
-mechanical broom
-plow
-spreader
-flow & dump
Waring, George
Waste disposal
White Wings
Woman
World Trade Center

The New York Department of Sanitation has transformed their relationship with the community through art and popular representation. They have used these techniques to enlist cooperation from the citizens of New York and create a more positive image of sanitation workers and the Department as a whole.

Recycling campaigns serve as an example of the Department’s goals to transform citizens’ sense of responsibility and enlist their cooperation. Several images in the archive depict images of these campaigns. For the panel, “Department of Sanitation Parade Float, Clean-Up Coney Island” and “Sweep Magazine Articles, Summer, 1966, Volume 8, Number 2” will be used as examples of popular representation.

As Katie requested, this post summarises what is expected of you by the end of the semester. We would like a project report which contextualises your final text for the exhibition (to be included in the paper) in the light of your scanning, archival, oral history and other research. This should be 10-15 pages (co-authored together). We are looking both for an overview of your work this semester but, more importantly, for an analysis of the key intellectual issues you became interested in and a critical dissection of how working with the different media (interviews, archives, libraries, ethnographic research) helped you to develop your ideas. We would also like you to note here any commentaries you had about the functionality of the archive, the utility of the blog (including any criticisms) and the general contribution of digital media to the project. We also want to hear any ideas you might have about the future of the museum.

In short, this assignment should draw together all of your different work over the semester and link the museum based work to the intellectual investigations you have been undertaking into the DSNY.

A tenatative breakdown or structure for the paper which you might like to follow, but which YOU CAN ALSO CHANGE OR AMEND could be:

1. Introduction - to your topic and theme,

2. Overview of what you did during the semester

3. Critical analyses of what you learned from working with these different media (what you learned from the images, from the oral histories, from other research.

4. Discussion of the usefulness and limitations of different media and the digital domain

5. A copy of your final text for the exhibition, contextualised in terms of why you focused on these specific images and ideas (this can be based on your previous assignment of course - those of you who worked seperately please liaise)

6. A summary of your ideas for the future of the DSNY Museum (and some provisional ideas/summary of what you might like to put in a Kimmel window for next semester)

All of these sections should be included but please feel free to add more or less.

The due date for this assignment is: Monday December 16th.

(which will give you time to reflect on the opening of the exhibition

Following Anthony Grafton's New Yorker article on digitisation of libraries by google, he gives an overview at the New Yorker.com of digital collections and archives:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/11/05/071105on_onlineonly_grafton

Also see Kimberly Christen's discussion of creating an archive for an Aboriginal community in Australia from scratch -

http://savageminds.org/2007/11/09/archival-possibilities/