Evolution of Prospects of Mankind

    In the beginning, I was thinking about the development of digital collection for Prospects of Mankind, but I realized I didn't want to research on it because I felt like that it may limit me to research on a digital collection itself. I changed my focus from the development of the digital collection to the exhibition development process where I am very motivated to explore the exhibition elements and observe the appropriate interpretive media in order to understand its consequences and how those affect the visitor engagement. Of course, it gets difficult to narrow down on particular tools for the exhibition development. Therefore, I then chose Prospects of Mankind that I worked on transcribing the transcriptions as an intern last summer to use for the exhibition. Thanks to people who helped me get through this difficult task, I managed to find many sources regarding exhibition development process and Prospects of Mankind. Right now, I know I am in right path in process!

Audience Engagement with high school student

My thesis focus has changed so much since first few weeks of the semester. While working with Professor Carroll and Dr. Kitzel, they both helped me realized that my thesis were too broad and might be difficult for me research on. I decided to shift my focus from digitalizing Laurent Clerc Collection to a consortium to Audience engagement with high school students.

My thesis focus to discover a subtype pilot program as extracurricular program for high school students to participate in digitizing history archives. The goal is to show that archivists, educators, and students could work together in participatory audience engagement  in museum and archive. My part would be developing surveys, assessment and meetings with professionals.

Evolving Death and its otherness

My topic has only evolved so much that it has been added to. While studying with Dr. Brown--also my thesis adviser--it has come to my attention that much of Dark Tourism, and the places I am researching form my topic deal with a certain kind of otherness. We do not relate so we can spectate in many a place without being impacted so much that we can head home and feel good about ourselves once more. If we make a place more relatable, people begin to think heavier. It is one thing I am bound to bring up in my thesis now.
I have also decided to eliminate Salem from my list of case studies. The Lizzie Borden house and Salem are very close on the list of being very 'gimmicky'. Therefore, it is not needed. Instead I will use the extra space to delve further into all of my places. I discussed my thesis outline with Dr. Brown last week since I was not able to stay for the peer evaluation of them. We came up with many changes, and overall I feel like I am headed in a great direction with my thesis.

Evolution of Thesis

My thesis has not changed much since I first came up with the idea of creating a project around baseball, but it has certainly evolved. I began with a very broad idea of what I wanted to research -- baseball. I played with the idea of creating a project around the Rochester Red Wings, but quickly realized that that wasn't the route I wanted to take. From there I spoke to my professor and my primary adviser, conducted research on baseball to get an idea of what kind of literature was out there regarding this topic, and was able to narrow the scope based on my discussions and research. It was through my primary adviser that I discovered my research question; she shared with me a list of questions that the NCPH was asking in regards to sports and sports museums. I modified one of the questions that I found interesting to create this research question: How are marginalized groups being represented in sports museums? Since I live near Cooperstown, NY I decided to use the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum as a case study for my research. I will most likely focus on one minority group -- African Americans -- and observe how much space the museum is devoting to this group. I plan to conduct interviews with the staff members to get their take on the representation of marginalized groups in sports museums. From here on out I definitely need to do more research on the history of baseball, Negro leagues, sports museums, etc. I will most likely create a list of questions, as well, to aid me in conducting my interviews.

A Swiftly changing topic

One of the biggest changes that has happened in my project since its' inception is related to the people I'll be working with. Initially I was planning to work more heavily with the GCVM, and doing a lot more research focused on specific areas. In the recent weeks I've been focusing more on specific breweries in Rochester, and the culture revolving around them. Along with this, I've also been in contact with various breweries and even a few people doing research similar to my own. 

Swift Water Brewing logo

The brewery I've made the most progress with is Swift Water Brewing. I've set up a meeting with them to discuss possible things I could work on with them. This will be shifting my project away from the past, and more into the present culture of brewing and its' relation to the past.

The Evolution of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

When I first started looking at the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in the early summer I at first only wanted to look into the printing history. Once I learned more about the reader response found in the Cary's edition I knew I wanted to focus on reader response. That summer I really dedicated to researching different copies to see if there were any similarities in what the owners were saying or when they were writing. However, this project has really come to focus on the provenance and the colored woodblock illustrations (69/172 are colored in some way). My new focus is to bring in multispectral imaging and piece together when the coloring was done, using what method (I think its watercolor) and by using the provenance - determine who did it - if possible. My research has turned more experiment based and that it something I never saw happening. I hope that I can get this experiment done during intersession that hopefully will come to some conclusions.

An example of a colored woodblock illustration found in the 1499 edition at Columbia University.

Vogue Magazine from 1955-1975 and How My Senior Thesis Has Evolved

     At the beginning of the semester, my proposed thesis had a much broader scope. I was seeking to examine how fashions were depicted in various mediums as well as how they were tied to historical happenings. In retrospect, I have realized that my earlier proposal would be nearly impossible to complete in a thorough manner. My current thesis proposal is to examine how Vogue magazine depicts women’s fashions in regards to the historical, social, political, and cultural trends from 1955 to 1975. This time period is content rich in regards to evolving fashion and historical happenings, such as the Civil Rights Movement and second-wave feminism. I have chosen this time frame to have a more narrow focus. Since I will be looking at magazines from all of these years, the time period of 20 years rather than my previously proposed 80 years provides a more realistic number of magazines for me to look at though my case study at the RIT Archive Collections.

     I know my project will continue to evolve in the upcoming months. I still need to determine whether I will look at each issue from 1955-1975 or if I will choose specific months to examine throughout this time period.  I believe that my project will become more refined and focused when I make more headway in my research. I currently have 20 books sitting on my desk that pertain to gender roles, fashion styles, feminism, and self-presentation. Unfortunately, I have only gotten the chance to read 2 so far. As mentioned in this post, I am still entertaining the idea of potentially including a virtual exhibition on Wordpress that draws upon themes of my thesis.

Here are some of the books I have on loan from the library and Professor Carroll.

     Also, I would like to announce that I have found my secondary advisor. Jody Sidlauskas, the Associate Archivist at RIT Archive Collections, will be my secondary advisor for my senior thesis. I am incredibly honored for this opportunity. 

Will There Ever Be a True Pinball Renaissance? (M. Fanton)

It has been about two weeks since I switched topics and it has not evolved much since my last blog post. I posed many questions, but I still need to ask the big question to reveal what is driving this research in the first place. What purpose will it serve? Why is it important? Or, put a different way, "so what?"

I have an affinity for pinball, so I would like to see it thrive. I don't believe there is a single player that would disagree! From 2001 to 2013 Stern Pinball was the only major manufacturer producing new machines in the United States, so they steered the industry, shaping the content and artwork of all games produced in that time frame. In 2013, a new company with high visibility, Jersey Jack, released their first pinball game, The Wizard of Oz, introducing a new LCD backbox that had never been used commercially before. Perhaps more importantly, Jersey Jack also chose a well-loved property with wide appeal. While Stern continued to make games for a predominantly male audience, Jersey Jack's first game enticed entire families to play, and play together.

Once little more than a mono-colored surface with pins under glass, pinball machines have playfields and backglasses that bring illustrations to life, and even give the player the feeling of interacting with them. Although devoted pinball players may rank the game play highest in importance, content matters. The artwork is what sells the machine on paper and online before a person can launch a ball. Is it catering to a select audience, or inviting a wider audience? Does it have to be a niche market to remain successful?

Like the success of  Nintendo's Wii console, if a company can bring in a new demographic that had never even considered pinball before into the marketplace, perhaps the pinball industry can change from "surviving" to "thriving" once more. Pinball artwork and creative content is a crucial element in doing just that.


Other avenues to explore:

Virtual pinball machines replace most mechanical and electrical components with LCD screen playfields. With a virtual pinball machine, a player can choose to play a game from an entire library of games-- a library of new games with a wide variety themes and concepts, or even digital versions of their old favorites. The lower production costs in designing a single game for a virtual machine allows for more experimentation in artwork style and content, and can incorporate story elements that many video games capitalize on. (But is it still pinball as we know it?)

Making a Transition, What I Have Learned So Far (M.Fanton)

After much careful thought and a meeting with Professor Carroll, I am choosing an entirely different path for my thesis. I had even written an annotated bibliography for the old topic, so it was hard to commit to starting over. I'm glad I did, because it has changed the outlook for my entire thesis for the better. 

For my new thesis, I will be researching historical (and present) representations of women in pinball art as it relates to popular culture and women's studies. I hope to reveal truths and misconceptions about pinball culture as a microcosm of popular culture (although the argument can be made that pinball is more of a counter-culture).

Below is what I learned about the early years of pinball, and how it shaped the market to resemble what it is today. I will need to connect this with how the pinball audience remained primarily male, and how that impacted artistic choices over time to create norms we see today.

The earliest designs of coin-operated pinball machines were made in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression. Game designs were (by today's standards) gender neutral. A proto-type for one of the first coin-operated pinball machines was created as a gift for the creator's daughter[1]. Early machines were marketed toward wealthy customers to use inside the home and had a high unit price. Soon after, inexpensive machines promising the same thrills were offered at much lower prices, and became hugely successful. Machines were soon found in drug-stores, bars, and penny arcades and offered an inexpensive way (one cent) for financially strapped people to find some enjoyment and forget their troubles for a moment or two. In order for newer machines to compete with current favorites, designers were constantly innovating, and the art had to be increasingly eye-catching. Pinball artwork became very colorful in the late 30s and early 40s and began to include figures. (It was during this time that women in bikinis and racial stereotypes leaped from the machine into the player's consciousness through its artwork, to captivate its predominantly male audience. Playing pinball became morally objectionable in the 30s as people criticizes frivolous Depression-era spending and started to associate it with gambling. Local and federal taxes and laws placed restrictions on the industry. The stigma of pinball as a gambling device and immoral activity increased with city-wide bans in places like Chicago (where many machines were produced!) and New York City. 

It is important to understand the cultural and historical context around the creation of pinball art and perpetuation of specific themes, so I have included further questions to get the ideas flowing:

How does the continual drive to advance pinball technology contrast with art assets continually reasserting archaic gender assumptions? How and why do writers conflate nostalgia and history in writing about the subject of pinball art? What is nostalgia, if not the imaginary ideal point in space and time that celebrates the status quo the nostalgic party wants to preserve in the present day? How does this manifest itself in modern pinball artwork? What makes the history of pinball art good vs. bad history? What stories aren't being told? Would more women designers lead to more diversity in the content and purpose of pinball art? Do women care? Are the attitudes of players changing, and is the industry responding to potential changes or maintaining the status quo? How does advertising impact the interpretation and reception of pinball artwork?

"Body" refers to the wide-body machine, a machine with a wider cabinet than the standard pinball machine. Of course, it also refers here to the woman depicted. Advertisement copyright 1979, D. Gottlieb & Company.

1. Bueschel, Richard M. The Pinball Encyclopedia. LaGrangeville, NY: Silverball Amusements, 1998.

Accessible Attitudes, Ruth Starr

“ If access is no longer relegated to the education or visitor services departments of an art museum, and spreads not only through the curatorial department but through every department, wall, door and window of an art museum, what would that mean for the art museum? Perhaps access would no longer be an add-on to a museum budget or as an after-thought for a curator when installing an exhibit without large-print labels. Perhaps programming material that is accessible will no longer be considered unattractive, but can be treated with more aesthetic potential, care, sensitivity and intelligence. It might be embedded into all exhibition planning in the future as a matter of course, rather than as a last-minute addition. Access can be approached as a tool that will widen perspectives and thinking around practices that are in need of reinvention and revision. 

"Stories of Inclusion: Universal Design in Cultural Institutions" Museum Access Consortium, 2015.

Ultimately, if access is to be made radical and controversial, as these scholars have called for, the very concept of access also needs to be re-visited in order to develop new attitudes, perceptions, and language that counter its stigmatized status.” [1] - Amanda Cachia

In the past several weeks, I have continued to collect resources to support my thesis project. At this point, I’ve divided my research into three subcategories: museum practices in addressing challenges of accessibility for visitors with disabilities, contemporary issues in disability studies, and physiological studies which aim to ascertain implicit attitudes surrounding public perception on disability, inclusion, and accessibility. It has been exciting to continue to see my project evolve into a synthesis of many of my interest areas. In the inception of this thesis, I was unsure about what particular framing I was intending to look at regarding the topic of access within cultural institutions. Over the course of the past semester, I have been able to develop the project into work which will bring together related content disciplines in a way that I have not seen done in the field before. 

I believe that the intersection of implicit attitudes, perceptions, and mindsets surrounding issues of disability, inclusion, and accessibility is essential to improving equality within contemporary museum practice at the core of institutions. This work is consistent with the current dialogues happening in museums focusing around partnership and the social model of disability. I hope that this project continues to support, even in a small way, the development of the field to improve cultural access for diverse populations. Looking forward, I intend to continue the research I've begun in these areas, as well as create a survey instrument which could be utilized in museums to assess the current status of accessibility within daily practices. The survey will target both staff and institutional values, biases, and additional potential barriers limiting the development of accessibility in current museum practice.  

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[1] Cachia, Amanda. “Talking Blind: Disability, Access, and the Discursive Turn.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3 (12–5, 2013). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3758. 

Archival Deaccession and Preservation

In my senior thesis project I'm going to be working with the Mark Ellingson Collection in the RIT Archives. This collection is a large one and until I talk to Becky, which will be soon, I won't be able to know what the scope of my work in this collection and what is actually feasible for me to accomplish. However when I spoke to Becky about the collection what she said she wanted done was that she wanted the boxes combed through to remove ancillary materials that aren't related to Mark and Marcia in a discernible way and try to contact relatives that may want it back to try to return these materials. She also wanted to rehouse the large scrapbook collection to protect it from damage from its current housing.

With these two focuses in mind I delved into research on deaccession and preservation in archives. There are many ideas and opinions about deaccession across the archival field. There are also many opinions about when deaccession is or isn't acceptable and also many theories about collections management that revolve around this issue. These opinions range from archivists that refuse to remove anything from their collections to those that arguably remove too many items from their collection. I've been looking at ideas and ethics surrounding these issues to help inform my later work with the collection.

I still have to look more deeply into preservation as well, as all of the work with the scrapbooks will be that of archival preservation.

Prospects of Mankind + Exhibition = WHAT?

As I’d researched on Prospects of Mankind, I found a very few resources about the TV show itself, and to make the matter worse, they lacked the transcribed documents, which was an atrocious challenge at my part. Fortunately, I managed to ask Christy Regenhardt and Mary Jo Binker, who are the editors of Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project and whom I had also interned with last summer, to email the transcribed documents that I worked on even though I only transcribed about ten documents, and it was not that much as I had expected. But at least, they provide the unique documentation on the most important figures and events that shaped twentieth-century history at home and abroad.

Despite, I am focusing on the framework that consists of the structures of exhibition design and the development of visitor experiences, too. I intend to “develop” a history/narrative exhibition of the Prospects of Mankind, where I am researching on the structures of a history/narrative exhibition and visitor experiences/expectations right now.

A History of Rochester's Culture and Immigrants

A reoccurring theme I've been coming across in my research is how brewing is connected, in some shape or form, to everything else in Rochester's history. For example, Rochester was called the Flour City (now called the Flower City), due to the massive number of grain mills they had created on the river. However, in the late 1800s there was a spreading wheat blight that greatly reduced their flour production. Farmers, looking to replace their lost crops, decided to seek support from the quickly growing brewing community, and began growing barley instead. This allowed the brewing industry to continue to grow up until the 1918.

Rochester : a pictorial history, by Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck

Despite knowing so much about Rochester history, and brewing history in a general sense, I am still lacking specifics about the local breweries. An example of this is I've heard about the Bartholomew Brewery. It has been mentioned in various papers and documents, but I know next to nothing about it besides that it resided in Rochester. However, I don't lack sources where I can search for this information, due to a constant influx of sources/ideas of where to look being given to me.

Sports Museums

    At this point I have just about figured out my research question. I would like to take a look at how marginalized groups are represented in sports museums, using the National Baseball Hall of  Fame in Cooperstown as a case study. From my research I have learned that the study of sports, and sports museums, is a fairly new field that is receiving more attention from scholars. Sports can provide insight into different cultures, and their values throughout history. For example, one can learn a lot about the history of African Americans in the United States by taking a look at how they were represented in baseball. Baseball in particular has the most literature available because it is considered to be America's pastime.
     I still need to do more research on the history of marginalized groups in sports, particularly baseball because I am using the Hall of Fame as a case study. From this additional research I will be able to conclude which groups are considered to be marginalized, and then decide which groups I would like to focus my paper on. I would also like to have a good idea of how much space sports museums typically devote to these marginalized groups.

Fashion and Feminism, Research Update

            Originally upon looking at my topic, I was focused on the depiction of women’s fashions in a variety of mediums and how specific clothing styles were tied to historical happenings of the time. My scope has narrowed considerably as I developed my thesis topic further as can be seen in this blog post. I am examining how women’s roles are depicted in fashion magazines. Through my research of various journals and books, I have learned a lot about how tied the feminist movement and its waves are to examining gender roles in society. While I suspected that first wave and second wave feminism would influence how women were represented in Vogue and other fashion magazines, I did not expect that it would be as integral to understanding these depictions. I have also learned about the impacts that the politics of race, class, and culture have on self-presentation.

            While I have delved into sources accessible online and at the RIT Archive Collections, I have yet to examine books published on my field of interest. A majority of these books are not available at RIT’s library. Only a few are offered through Interlibrary Loan. I will be purchasing some of these books soon to further my research. I need to learn more about the feminist movements between 1920 and 1980 – the 1^st and 2^nd waves of feminism – as well as the role of media in determining women’s roles in society. I need to delve into my case study of the Vogue magazines at the Archive and set up weekly research times to examine my materials. My research process has led me to various lens of examining women’s fashion; however, I believe my current focus is one that has staying power.

Linda M. Scott's Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism is one of the books I plan to purchase for my research.

            As previously stated in the aforementioned post, Dr. Tina Lent is my primary advisor for my thesis. My secondary advisor is to be determined at the moment. The person I have in mind is currently on vacation and unable to be reached until Monday, 11/09.