The next few days you’ll be meeting lots of people and getting lots of advice. Some of it will be general, like “work hard.” Some of it will be very specific: we’ll talk later about what courses you should take. I’m going to try to give you some in-between advice, mostly focused on helping you think through what you want to get out of grad school. About the Public Humanities Program You are the seventh class to enter the program….
We’re not quite done pulling CultureLab together, but the semester has begun, and classes have begun to use the space! One of the wonderful things about museum spaces is how they change once they are full of people. Designers and curator, I think, tend to imagine spaces without people, pristine in their displays, objects on the stage, words there to be studied. It’s much harder to imagine a space full of people, each at least as interesting as any object…
CultureLab is almost done, and we’re refining the activities we’ll start off with. We’ve got artifacts for a half-dozen courses there, ready for students to study. And we’ve got a few hands-on kits in the works. And we’ve been exploring the possibilities of cataloging-in-public. We’ll bring uncataloged materials from our Collections Research Center in Bristol, 20 miles off campus, and have staff and students catalog them in the CultureLab. It not only saves them a trip to Bristol – it turns the…
The last six weeks have been winter break at Brown. And it’s been an incredibly busy time at the Haffenreffer Museum. Good? Yes, in terms of product. We’ve accomplished a great deal. Two new exhibits installed, a lot of design completed. It’s easier to get things done when there are no classes to teach and no students around. But not so good, in terms of process. After all, with no students around, we’re missing our most important goal: to give…
