Refocusing....

I have decided to completely start over my research, with the same topic and thesis question, but a more focused point of view. I met with Lara the Liberal Arts Librarian (sounds like a children's book character) and she helped me to learn how to research and research WELL.

Main points are:
-FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS!
-What question am I trying to answer with what I am searching?
-How is this relevant/helpful?
-Have CONFIDENCE in your research!

These are all helpful points to acknowledge when I am researching, and I am excited to start with a clean slate to make the most of my thesis paper!

Finishing Up and Web-based Apps

The majority of my thesis is now complete and I am getting down to re-arranging, adding more research and citations and then creating some visual mockups for application and database design. While adding some additional research I ran into an interesting article in Mobile Apps for Museums, chpt 3 by Ted Forbes.

This article discusses why making a website that works like an application instead of an actual app you download can be preferable in a lot of ways especially with the advent of HTML5, a new web standard that allows embedded video and audio files and makes a page run much faster and simulate an local application. I already had a section on having a webversion of the app that would use HTML5, but he brings up some good points where just the web version alone could be the best way to go.

I still plan to have both native apps and a web version for ease of use and peoples preferences, but it is always interesting to run into some research that supports an idea you already had, but then goes into more detail that makes you think, hmm this is really on to something.

Progress: Slow, but Steady

Lately I have been contacting local businesses and setting up interviews with members of the Rochester Deaf community. Over a week ago, I had an interview with Patti Durr. She teaches Deaf Art & Cinema for RIT/NTID and has been involved in multiple local Deaf organizations in the past, although she currently is more involved with Deaf organizations on a national or international level. She was able to point me in the direction of a few new locations - a church, a specific building owned by Kodak that employed many Deaf people, and a Deaf-owned yoga practice.

I was able to quickly get a response from Dorothy Wilkins, the owner of Deaf Roots & Wings. She has taught yoga for more than 18 years at various locations, but for the last 5, she has been renting out Molly's Yoga Corner from Molly Huff off Monroe Avenue. It used to be an old firehouse, and Dorothy was kind enough to provide me with a photograph: 

Hopefully no later than within the next couple of weeks I will have a complete (as it is currently near-complete) list of locations, along with an image for every one. I'm still waiting to hear back from more people, so I may need to contact more as alternatives if I do not hear back from all of them soon. 

nearing the end

With the completion of a formal condition report that I created with the help and feedback of Dr. Decker, I can finally place all my notes that I took for the assessment of the collection and start putting them into formal documents. This will allow me to easily sight and of the objects that I may refer to in my paper, will show my thought process while looking at the pieces, and in the long run, will give the RIT archives a consistent way to evaluate pieces. There may only be one small problem with my form, and that is that there is a scale present ranging from 1-5 which notes the severity of damage done to the piece. The issue with the scale comes in the form of subjectivity from person to person; meaning that one person could think a piece that several surface cracks is in worse condition than a piece that a large chip missing. Dr. Decker and I talked about possibly making a short (maybe 1/2 - 1 page) note stating the methodology behind how I rated each piece and how to judge what is harmful to the overall life of the piece.

It turns out that my outline has changed more than I would have liked it with the removal of some of the secondary aspects, and the addition of pieces that I never would have thought about including. Most of those changes are coming in the second half of the thesis, where it focuses on the hands-on aspect of project.

As for the how the writing of the second half of the thesis is going. There seem to be a few hick-ups. The major one is trying to balance or match the tone of the first half. Since the first part is all research there is a more assertive tone to it, but because now I am writing about my work and my experience it seems a little passive and almost like a reflection of what I have done. I'll try my best to fix that issue before the final draft, but right now its all about just getting the information out and onto the page.

Research drives me crazy!

Hi guys!

I have been working on my research (slowly.. but surely..) and I am still running into issues of finding credible sources, as well as sources that I can learn from because all my thinking seems to be fairly original.

Has anyone else had this issue? Usually when I do research papers I am able to learn things from my research and tie that into my paper as well as support previous knowledge. But for this I am finding that there is not too much to learn from, and I feel like I could be coming across as totally clueless.

That is my struggle right now!

And this is how I feel when doing research:

Get it? Because its from the movie Clueless... Ha, Ha.

BUT ALSO! I have been using Zotero, which has helped dramatically to sort my sources, I don't know if any of you have used it, but its pretty great. I recommend downloading it... https://www.zotero.org/

https://www.zotero.org/

This spring I journeyed to Shillong, India with my grandmother and cousin to visit a church we were partnered with there. While visiting, we stopped by one of the major museums in Shillong, the Don Bosco Centre for Indigenous Cultures. The Centre, founded by the Silesians of Don Bosco and part of the Roman Catholic Church consists of seven floors with artifacts from hundreds of cultures all over Northeastern India.

As a visiting third-year student at RIT in museum studies from Mount Holyoke College, I approached the museum with a dubious eye. How was a religious institution going to accurately portray the uniqueness and beauty of cultures that they have converted (Christianity is now the largest religion practiced in Northeast India)? Would they engage their visitors in an unbiased appreciation of these cultures? My queries were resolved on many levels throughout the museum, though I left the museum with concerns too.

My fear that the museum would allude to these cultures as “people of the past” was very much resolved by the end of our visit. Similar to the Smithsonian American Indian Museum in Washington, D.C., the museum celebrated the livelihood of the native cultures in its café, serving food from across the cultures and had hands-on pieces in the children’s space from across the region, like a wooden drum. On the panels by each artifact, only an acquisition number was presented to the visitor, not a date of creation like in most museums. Although this is concerning from a collections perspective, from the visitor engagement viewpoint this creates a sense that these artifacts are not a thing of the past, but still being used today in their cultural context.

The concerning parts of the museum revolve around the facets of religion described in the museum. No mentions of native cultures’ religions were present, leaving a big gap in discussing different cultures. Instead, the Catholic Church had two floors that talked about their history, projects and beliefs. As the rest of the museum was stacked chronologically, beginning with Neolithic life in India at the bottom floor, it would have made sense to have the church be at the top floors, because they came in the last 600 years to India. The church floors felt so out of place with the rest of the museum and I think the experience would have been more enjoyable without proselytizing interspersed between the exhibits.

In the United States, there are hundreds of museums set up by religions to spread their beliefs and discuss their history. People go to them knowing that this is their backgrounds and may go to another museum in the area if this bothers them. The challenge in Shillong with the Don Bosco Centre is that there is not another museum that focuses around the history of the native peoples in Northeast India. Most of the visitors while we were there were either tourists from India or locals. No matter the religious backdrop to the museum, if people want to learn about their history or the history of their neighbors, the museum’s informative platform is where they are likely to turn to-a place where their cultures have been intermixed with religious history. Museums are meant to educate people, to leave a lasting impression about a topic. If the Don Bosco Centre is the only place discussing cultures of Northeast India, will the telling of history for these cultures change in the years to come?  The Don Bosco Centre represents the power of a museum to manipulate the past to tell one side of the story.

Un-Cooperative Hyena

This week marks a pretty good step in my thesis project. I've gotten about half of my content on paper with a good plan of what is to come next. Also, this week I am beginning my internship at the Seneca Park Zoo. I attempted to go watch a program in person on Tuesday, but unfortunately the hyena in question chose not to come out for its feeding demonstration. This being said, I was able to witness some of the camp counselors interact with kids and so far I am very happy to be heading to work in such a good environment. I have been able to find many examples of completed evaluation plans since my last update, and the materials I've been able to find seem very applicable to this project. Going back to the hyena for a moment. As I watched the campers and other visitors pass by the-no-longer-occurring demonstration on Tuesday, I was reminded how the behavior of an animal can affect visitor's perception of an exhibition. Many visitors simply passed by the exhibit without even reading the panels presented after realizing that the hyena was not visible, and some only stopped to identify what animal should be visible after a child in the group asked where the animal was.

Thesis update

Survey has been written and is being prepared to be disseminated to  the 4 organizations. Annual reports and 990's have been looked over and examined.

The tough part is making sure that the organizations are able to understand and answer the questions with ease and without having to  contact them for to much follow up and explanation to their answers.

The biggest hurdle that I will be running into with the survey is that a couple of the organizations do not have a full time 1st person that will be taking the survey. The survey will be going to a person that is  doing membership as a secondary task.

Rochester Voices Stats

For my fourth post, I am choosing to write about my experience collecting data from Google Analytics back end for Rochester Voices. I met with Michelle Finn at the library before break and we did a walk through of Google Analytics, something that she was also new at and didn't quite understand how to use. I was very thankful I went in person to the library-for having only emailed this information back and forth, neither of us would collect the correct data. We looked at the Rochester Voices visitor statistics to find very interesting information. There was information regarding logging onto the website from different countries, using different platforms (which is very important when analyzing the accessibility) and how long each person from any country spent online. I am unsure how to input this information into my thesis-through descriptive paragraphs, creating charts and sticking them into my appendix, or even just copying the PDFs into the appendix for easier and possibly clearer reading.

Post #5

Over break I was able to finish four extra pages for my senior thesis, completing the 'draft 1.5' as Dr. Decker calls it. In this draft, I had taken comments and edits from classmates and Dr. Decker on my first ten pages into consideration and edited this part of my draft. The rewrite of this section still needs work and there are still questions on what more I should add including links to websites and appendix information. I introduced a second part of my thesis, and going off my outline, this section was small. I wrote a few paragraphs explaining what other libraries and institutions do in order to provide online access and digital information to the public. The three I've chosen to write about, again, with recommendations from Dr. Decker, were the Smithsonian, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the Library Company (LC) of Philadelphia. The Library Company of Philadelphia seemed to be the more interesting, considering Benjamin Franklin was the founder of this institution, which was a physical lending library at his time.

The Digital Public Library of America hosts photographs and documents scanned onto the website and is not a physical place for people to explore. The Smithsonian and the Library Company of Philadelphia are also physical spaces along with digital libraries. All three, along with the Rochester Public Library, are all working to continue to digitize artifacts, documents, and materials for public use online.

DPLA homepage
http://dp.la/

The Library Company of Philadelphia homepage
http://www.librarycompany.org/index.htm

Progress!!!!

I have finally made some substantial progress. The spectral testing has begun and it is such a relief. With the help of Professor William Ryan, we built a spectrophotometer to fit our needs and visited the George Eastman House. We met with the conservator at the Eastman House, Nancy Kauffman, who brought us three boxes of test dye strips created by John Andreas. We spent the day there and troubleshooted our spectrometer and began collecting spectral information on the 25 test strips. We collected great raw information that we'll review and calculate into absorbance and transmittance data. Another visit or two will be needed to gather spectral information on the Technicolor and Eastman Color film reels. It's been challenging to work with a variety of schedules to coordinate a time to complete this testing. I still need to figure out an additional day or two to complete my testing. All the testing will get done, but what I have completed is very exciting.

                                   This photo was taken by the author on 4/2/2015 while completing testing