First Post

Hello everyone,

My name is Rebecca Jarrett, and I'm a fourth-year student. This is my second semester in the Museum Studies program. It's nerve-wracking to start the thesis process, but I am excited to see where it leads me. I love public history and am primarily interested in curation, education, and visitor studies. Conservation is also intriguing, but my hands are definitely not steady enough for that! I want to spread historical knowledge to as many people as possible because it teaches us so much about our world and is applicable to every area of life. In my free time, I like to write and watch video essays on YouTube.

I got my first experience in museum work this summer when I started volunteering at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. I worked in the Astronomy Education department, which runs an on-site observatory, as well as indoor hands-on activities. I worked with solar telescopes outside, and then inside with Discovery Stations about meteorites, spectroscopy (the study of the light spectrum from celestial bodies), and a black hole model. The position is year-long, so I will be returning there to volunteer during holidays. Below is a picture of the Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory, which is the main base for observatory volunteers if the sky is clear.

Image source: Observatory website

Blog post 1: a final beginning

Hello! I'm Taylor, and like almost everyone else in this class, I'm starting my final year of my Museum Studies degree at RIT. The past three years have absolutely flown by, and I find myself oscillating between excitement and terror, proud of what I've accomplished thus far, anxious about my future. I think that's fairly typical of any big life change though, and what could be more life changing than writing the longest paper I've written in my life just to top off my college experience?

Over the past three years I've been incredibly fortunate to have lots of different job experiences in the museum field. My first two internships were in archives, sorting, labeling, and boxing hundreds of cameras and Kodak paraphernalia on Ridge Road. During the school year I also worked at the RIT Archives, and at Paley Studios, however my favorite position I've held has to be the internship I had in the programming department of the MIT Museum this summer. Prior to the internship, I'd been leaning towards the public-facing side of institutions more than the archives, but this summer confirmed all those hypotheses I had been making about my future. Helping kids discover how to make a paper circuit, dreaming up events and then bringing them to life, just interacting with visitors daily - all these things made my summer great! Here's some photos from my whirlwind summer:

Cup towers - an architectural challenge!

These men were in Cambridge from Paris for a conference at Harvard, they're all PhD candidates, but that didn't stop them from playing with some toothpicks and gumdrops.

Catherine, me, and our boss, Jenny.

The interns! (Tara, Catherine, Me)

This semester I'm looking forward to exploring programs and how they can enhance a visitor's experience, as well as how those in charge of programs can help the museum to reach a larger audience. I can't wait to go through the year with everyone else in the class and to watch all of your theses grow and develop! Good luck with week 2 my friends!

Research Methods check-in

After reading the work of other scholars, I have learned more about ways of structuring a thesis. Although it may seem superficial at first, I never realized there were so many different approaches used to begin a paper. For example, in the article "What We Talk About When We Talk About Food: Using Food to Teach History at the Tenement Museum," Adam Steinberg opens with an abstract, then jumps right into the narrative.(1) There are no subheadings to segment the piece, or otherwise interrupt the narrative work he presents. I believe this was done to preserve the format he wanted to present, but there were also requirements and expectations set by the publication, The Public Historian. Fortunately, we have some flexibility and can tailor the structure to our topic, research methods, and writing style.

For the same publication, Richard Rabinowitz uses an abstract and a preface before presenting the first part of his paper.(2) The abstract is a broad scope of the content, while the preface serves to tell the reader specifically what his goals are. In stating the goals so clearly, one would think the paper would be easier to follow, however, his use of subheadings, sub-subheadings, and sub-sub-subheadings does not have the kind of flow Steinberg's article had. While I have not yet determined the structure for my own paper, I hope to use the best methods from each; I will state my goals clearly and use subheadings judiciously. I can see how it might be easy to use subheadings as a crutch, or a poor substitute for proper transitions. In Rabinowitz case, however, his use of subheadings appears to reflect a step-by-step process (vs. a narrative structure).

In addition to examining the structure of various articles, it also became apparent how important it is to document processes, especially if a paper is project-based like Rabinowitz's article. This will go a long way toward establishing credibility and answering questions a skeptical reader may have before they even ask them.


1. Adam Steinberg, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Food: Using Food to Teach at the Tenement Museum,” The Public Historian (2012): 79.

2. Richard Rabinowitz, "Eavesdropping at the Well: Interpretive Media in the Slavery in New York Exhibition," The Public Historian (2013): 8-9.

Research Methods Thus Far

            In the first month of MUSE-489, Research Methods, I have learned a surprising amount about how researchers employ a plethora of research methodologies, how they create research questions, and what types of evidence they collect. All of the authors contribute and craft their narratives in differing ways. Two readings in particular have stood out to me this semester in terms of how research methods– “Preserving the Voices of Revolution: Examining the Creation and Preservation of a Subject-Centered Collection of Tweets from the Eighteen Days in Egypt” and “ ‘I Know I’m Home When I Have One:’ The Cultural Significance of the Garbage Plate of Rochester, NY”. Both articles broke down the barriers of what I had believed a scholarly article could be. Both approached new topics of interest in the 21^st century, digital curation and food culture, respectively.

            A majority of research articles that I have read often employ similar methods of collecting data, such as surveys, academic research, and case study analysis. Timothy Arnold and Walker Sampson, the authors of “Preserving the Voices of Revolution: Examining the Creation and Preservation of a Subject-Centered Collection of Tweets from the Eighteen Days in Egypt” present an alternative method of collecting information and data in the 21^st century, Tweets.  The authors sought to document how to collect Tweets through Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API) and figure out the best way to preserve ephemeral artifacts such as Tweets. While social media has been thoroughly examined in relation to riots and political upheavals, it has not been documented. The authors pointed out that “few have conducted rigorous content analysis simply because the content is unavailable to scholars who do not have the ability to build tools to collect data from Twitter”[1]. I had never previously thought about Twitter as a medium to gather information from or a methodology for collecting data. It seems unconventional since social media is relatively new and its potential uses have not been harnessed entirely. It inspires me to use creative methodologies for my own thesis research though building an API might be a little lofty for my skill set.

An infographic by Safaa Hamed that illustrates the use of digital media in Egypt during the Egyptian Revolution as well as their daily lives (source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/11124497/Digital-Media-in-Egypt-(Infographic) ) 

            Research articles can either succeed or fail at hooking their audience with the abstract alone. Emily Fekete managed to catch my attention immediately given that her article,“ ‘I Know I’m Home When I Have One:’ The Cultural Significance of the Garbage Plate of Rochester, NY”, is about an area that I have become extremely fond of during my college years. As mentioned previously, food culture has become quite topical in our society. This shift has resulted in people becoming “foodies”, which means that people have an increased interest in what is on their plate, where it came from, and what its backstory entails. Despite Fekete’s article being easy to read, it lacked a sense of professionalism and variance in the research methodologies employed. Her research question was to figure out how the Garbage Plate was culturally connected to Rochesterians. This in turn means that her target audience was all Rochestarians of varying ages. By Fekete’s use of a Facebook survey through Survey Monkey and emailing those individuals, she is instantly skewing a bias towards those 50 and under. Older individuals do not frequent the Internet as often, let alone Facebook. Through these research methodologies, she is not properly gathering the opinions of a group that properly represents those that comprise Rochester’s demographics. Because of this, her results are illegitimate in terms of assessing the cultural value of the Garbage Plate to Rochester as a whole. Fekete even acknowledges, “the survey results likely reflect a younger generation”[2]. Currently my thesis idea does not require surveying individuals or emailing interviews to obtain data. However if my topic was to include these methodologies, this article has taught me that I would need to administer the survey in such a way that was reflective of my target audience.

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[1] Timothy Arnold and Walker Sampson, “Preserving the Voices of Revolution: Examining the Creation and Preservation of a Subject-Centered Collection of Tweets from the Egyptian Days in Egypt,” The American Archivist 77, no. 2 (2014): 512.

[2] Emily Fekete “’I Know I’m Home When I Have One:’ The Cultural Significance of the Garbage Plate of Rochester, NY,” Journal of Material Culture 46, no. 1 (2014): 34.

What I have learned...

           Through the readings assigned for this course, I have found that each author employs different methods of research. While most choose to use at least one case study to base their paper and research on, their methods are still quite different. Two of the readings last week -- "'I Know I'm Home When I Have One:' The Cultural Significance of the Garbage Plate of Rochester, NY" and "Eavesdropping at the Well: Interpretive Media in the Slavery of New York Exhibition" -- are good examples of this, and I have learned from them what good, and not so good, research looks like.

           Both authors chose to look at one case study. In the garbage plate article, the author, Emily Fekete, wanted to prove that "Regional foods are often an integral part of local cultural identity" (Fekete, p.25). Fekete chose to look at the garbage plate of Rochester, NY as an example of how food can be a part of one's cultural identity. In the 'Eavesdropping at the Well' article, the author, Richard Rabinowitz, based his paper and research on an exhibit he put together called Slavery in New York, in order to prove that interpretive media can help fill in the gaps left by archival and museum collections. The similarities end here, with both of them choosing one case study to focus on. The authors' research methods were very different. Fekete sent out a survey to her facebook friends, and then interviewed a few within the pool of friends who actually completed the survey. Her research should have been much more in-depth, and should have covered a wider range of people. Rabinowitz's research methods were very in-depth -- had to be because of the topic of the exhibit. Also, because he was planning an exhibit, which involves a deadline, he had to "find out where the goodies were"(Rabinowitz, p.17) by asking 'scholarly advisers' and checking every citation in scholarly articles about the early history of New York. Contrasting these two articles shows that less is not always more, in the case of Fekete's article, because she makes some big claims without having done enough research to support those claims. Rabinowitz's article is better in that sense.