#hearst museum

[matagonia]

Poster for the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley by David Lance Goines ca. 2015. https://www.goines.net

[ancientegyptianfaces-blog]

I’m really looking forward to today’s class.  I’ve been wanting to look further into the other mummy portraits that were created.  I think it will be really telling to be able to compare them to our portraits and look at the similarities and differences more in depth.

-Jess

[museummaking-blog]

This Week in Museum Making

Grad school, I’m back for year 2! Now that I’ve settled into my new apartment and finally (mostly) figured out my class schedule, I’m ready to focus on thesis research once again. But first things first: during my brief hiatus, a couple of intriguing developments have been happening in the world of museums and creative technology…

The Portland Art Museum recently announced Online Collections Remix, a contest that invites participants to create their own version of the museum’s homepage. The tool of choice? Mozilla’s X-Ray Goggles, a technology that allows you move around elements on a webpage while simultaneously teaching you about the building blocks of the web. Contest participants are encouraged to add images and info from the museum’s collection. The Online Collections Remix strikes me as an interesting way to get folks to experiment with open-source tools while taking advantage of another freely available resource—a museum’s collection data.

UC Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology will be hosting a hackathon—tomorrow! From 4:30 to 9:30pm on September 10, attendees will convene to design applications using collection data, all available through the Heart’s API. I’m interested to see what kind of audience this event attracts—university students? local coders? a larger museumgoing community?—and what will become of the projects conceived at this event.

Yesterday, Newsweek published an article by Louise Stewart on the influence of the maker movement in education. From high schools that teach about the rise and fall of populations through feats of engineering, to self-directed students who build their own electronics cases, a hands-on, interdisciplinary ethos pervades schools, libraries, and museums today.  As Stewart explains, “It’s about teaching kids how to break down their big ideas into smaller components in order to figure out a plausible first step. It’s about helping students become familiar not just with makerspace tools but, more important, with the process of finding, accessing and using information to teach themselves how to do whatever it is they want to do, and make whatever they want to make.”