Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 1
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Archives, Museum Objects and Digital Humanities: Supplementing Exhibits with Aural Object Contexts / Jennifer Ware
Abstract: This hybrid work uses examples of audio history profiles from an undergraduate introductory radio and TV news course to illustrate how audio storytelling can supplement museum exhibits to provide the functional context of items in an archived collection. Broadcast journalism students in the course researched, designed, recorded, and produced audio histories of museum objects from the 1920s "Stanley's General Store" archive exhibit at the Michigan State University Museum. The final audio files can be attached to the objects and displayed through a digital interface, which museumgoers access with their smartphones.
The project enables students to blend their traditional research and reporting skills in expansive, flexible ways, and connects physical archives with digital humanities works. I argue that journalism students at the early undergraduate level should be presented with praxis-based assignments; doing so, I assert, helps students re-engage and re-apply foundational knowledge, learned in other academic disciplines, of how to search and use archives and library sources in order to help them conceptualize and expand what "radio reporting" with multiple sources means for different audiences.
Keywords: communication, education, media.
"After this project, I've realized that storytelling can be as audible as you make it. The slightest two to three-second sounds can make a huge difference in what you are trying to convey to your listener. I've also learned to hear the story instead of just picturing it. Adding that audible element brings an extra sense into the mix and allows the listener to fully engage in the piece." - Lauren, undergraduate student, personal communication, May 25, 2015 [1]
<1> Lauren, the student quoted above, learned the value of audio as a way to set the stage and tell the whole story through her experiences in an Intro to Radio and TV news course. Lauren's statement echoes Jennifer George-Palilonis' sentiment about the power of stories that are built with sound, and the ways that stories can be expanded with or supplemented by audio: "Sound can paint pictures of the human condition that reach listeners on deep emotional levels. And although audio storytelling is most commonly associated with radio, audio is a versatile story form that can add depth and dimension to other types of stories as well" [2]. For the final audio assignment in the course, the students had to choose an object from a museum exhibition and research and report about the importance of the item to early Michigan residents. The audience for the students' reports was defined as both the in-person museum patrons [3] and online readers who wanted to know more about the General Store display in the Michigan State University Museum (MSUM). The students gathered information and researched for half of the semester, ensuring that they had time to research their materials, find sources, and visit the museum multiple times. Lauren focused on a set of horse reins that were hanging from a large nail on a wooden beam of the store exhibit's ceiling; she used the sounds of cars, trucks, trains, and horses to tell the story of the importance of the horse to Michigan farmers. She provided what Joan Schwartz described as the "functional context" for the materials [4], enabling patrons to see beyond the image of the reins for sale in a store and envision the horses and the farm fields in which they were used.
<2> In this article, student works from a journalism Introduction to Radio and TV News course, taught in the spring of 2015, are presented to illustrate how archives and museum exhibits can be used to ignite students' archival research skills and deepen their storytelling capabilities. This course, built upon a process-based approach, taught styles of audio storytelling through increasingly difficult genre-based assignments. Each assignment focused on teaching the craft of audio storytelling while helping the students to recognize and understand the commonalities between the basic elements that are the building blocks of various genres of audio compositions; for example, in radio news stories, these building blocks are crisp, clear audio; a grounding in research about the topic; and expert interviews and factual information. The course's final audio assignment, the museum object profile, provided students with an opportunity to expand their audio storytelling skills to new audiences. It also placed their reporting at the crossroads of two different contexts: textual archives and geographically constrained museum exhibitions of physical objects.
<3> The benefits derived from such a project are twofold: (1) the students learn to use and expand their research skills and find new value in using audio and archival sources to create complex stories, and (2) the visitors to the museum have the opportunity to learn more about the functional contexts of the exhibited items. The museum's general store exhibition contains neatly catalogued items displayed on shelves and counters, as they might have been in a typical general store from the nineteenth century-in other words, it is a multimodal archive.
Stanley's General Store: An Archive of Michigan's Daily Life
<4> Visitors step into the general store and experience a piece of Michigan's history. The exhibit was built with pieces of an actual 1880s general store, once owned by John and Kathryn Rykala, from Eastlake, Manistee County, Michigan. The front porch and many of the interior displays, including the post office and front counter, are original items that were used in the town's daily life. The store itself holds a collection of objects representing typical items stocked by general stores from the 1880 to 1920s. The museum display is named after the Rykalas' son Stanley. Its original floors creak and squeak as museum patrons walk through the store, and children can turn the wheel of the industrial size coffee grinder to hear and see the grinding of whole coffee beans.
<5> This store exhibit is what Wood and Latham describe as an "experience-driven exhibition," one that connects audiences with representations of local memories through physical interactions [5]. These types of exhibitions are physical and tactile archives with which patrons can interact to better understand details of past communities' lives and practices.
<6> The store exhibit is also an archive of local history-a collection of materials and objects that represent what a general store from Michigan's past might have looked like [6]. It stands as a synecdoche of local daily life from the past, bringing it into the present for the modern-day museumgoer; it is also the ideal place to connect student's journalistic storytelling processes with archival research. Each object within the museum has its own unique uses and histories that student journalists can independently research and discover, and the students' discoveries become the basis for storytelling-a retelling of the past that simultaneously makes new knowledge for the museum's audiences using the student-created audio profiles and sounds.
Figure 1. Students examine objects in the MSUM Stanley's General Store exhibit. (Photograph by the author.)
Student Journalists As Researchers
<7> Student journalists are used to interviewing sources and finding experts to speak about timely topics, but the historical objects in this assignment required students to find experts on processes and cultural technologies from the past. They also had to use other archive collections, both online and held by the library, to discover the larger role an object played within society; students were metaphorically challenged to take their object "off the shelf" and embed it within the home or functional cultural context. This forced the students out of their comfort zones and required them to find and utilize outside sources and experts of a caliber normally only accessed by professional industry researchers or students at advanced graduate-level training.
<8> Some scholars posit that the archival process alone-cataloguing an item's date of manufacture, its contents, and its place of origin, all according to a standardized set of cataloguing processes-does not take into account the reason the items were produced, nor their varying cultural uses [7]. These unrecorded uses and motivations value the function of a document or photograph outside of its place as an object in the archival collection [8], instead locating its meaning within the larger functional network of everyday activities. The same is true of catalogued items within an experience-driven exhibit such as the general store. The items are first catalogued and marked according to well-established archival processes, and are then placed by curators in rhetorically appropriate physical locations in the general store: medicines in a medicine cabinet, bills of credit behind the cash register, candy jars filled with sweets at a child's eye level. Together, the items, and their specific placements in the exhibition, collectively envelop the patron in a shopping experience similar to the experience one might have had in the original general store [9]. Yet this exhibit's snapshot of one moment of the life of an object-its static placement on a store shelf-tells only part of the objects' life stories [10].
<9> According to Berger, stories about photographs' function and purpose are external to the photograph itself; for him, images or documents from the past are valuable primarily because they document their own production and use, not because they record a vanished moment [11]. In the student journalists' museum projects, stories of the general store objects' uses broaden the objects' reach beyond the store shelves into the historical home and the larger social and cultural environment. Who used these kinds of objects? Why are they here in the store? Why did a person need choices of different types of horse reins? These questions move the patron toward additional stories and other functional contexts and helps them envision the lives of the people who used the items stored on the shop owner's shelves.
<10> Now this is not to say that it is plausible to document each and every possible use of an item; the archival research and audio storytelling assignment is meant to engage students with archival research practices that enable them to shed light on some of the uses and histories of objects. Once those stories are researched and recorded, students then play a role in creating new knowledge by making the audio profiles. The visitors to the exhibit are the beneficiaries of the students' intellectual work. Instead of merely walking through and looking at the exhibit, visitors can see and hear how the items displayed on the shelf of the general store were used in their historical context when they were purchased and taken home by the store's consumers. Connecting the items to the "broader functional universe in which (an item) circulates and acts" [12] creates new knowledge for both the patrons and the students; the former learns about material history beyond that encapsulated in the store, and the latter finds not only that that every object has a story to tell, but also that a wide range of journalistic and academic research practices-and an even wider ranges of sources, including audio, video, and alphabetic documents-can be used to find and tell those stories in a variety of ways.
Sources of Information That Share Stories
<11> Student journalists who are familiar with beat reporting (the covering of a specific area or topic repeatedly over time) assume that their main sources of information are people: people with a timely connection to a story [13] and experts, typically in positions of authority. This assignment prompts students to think also about academic and scholarly items-databases, archives, and books-as journalistic sources; it helps them recognize as experts people who are knowledgeable about a topic or item, whether or not they hold an official government, scientific or administrative title authorizing their expertise.
<12> During brainstorming sessions in class, students worked together to evaluate information on sites like archive.org; they also searched their local library collections and the Library of Congress for a diversity of sources, including books, sounds, and videos, that might explain or describe their objects. By providing concrete details and information about the uses of everyday objects found in exhibits, the students add to the archived museum collection; they provide an aural context-a historical soundscape, conveying perhaps the sounds of a local farm or a baker in his shop-for one or more of the ways the museum object might have been used. Asking students to locate, select, and integrate sounds into their compositions allows students to expand how they define a source; learn how to search archives; and learn to supplement an archival exhibit with additional materials discovered through research. This storytelling approach asks the students to recognize that audio journalism is not limited to only the types of information used by daily radio news broadcasts. The storytelling approach thus brings together theories of archival research and knowledge production and connects them with the practical, hands-on creation of stories for public audiences.
Radio Reporting as Audio Storytelling
<13> According to some critics, journalism is always already dying. Sometimes it's called the "death of print" [14] sometimes "the passing of radio" [15] or "the downfall of broadcast" [16]: even, recently, "the death of the home page" [17]. But journalism can also be seen as a field undergoing constant reinvention [18] and consistent change. One reason for the perpetual sense of journalistic peril is the multiplicity of journalistic mediums: news reporting relies upon current technologies to publish and present information to various audiences using different mediums and different platforms. But, I argue, journalists always report the history of today, capturing important timely events and relaying that information to listeners, readers, and viewers.
<14> Teaching in this liminal environment is at the same time challenging and exhilarating. For some, teaching a student how to be a journalist is medium-centric, and involves learning how to master a certain technology [19] through which they then report the news. While this approach is certainly effective and valuable for learning a specific technology or medium, teaching students how to create a communication form solely for the sake of the specific reporting output channel is an end-product-based approach.
<15> Some teacher-scholars instead recognize a process-based approach, in which multimedia communication forms are learned through research, drafting, peer-review, and revision, all treated as parts of a cyclical and simultaneous procedure [20]. Students are taught to make different choices for an audio story than a written one, and make these decisions based on rhetorical principles: the intended audience(s), the storytelling mode, the available sources, and the purpose of the story. This composing process is used to iteratively build students' knowledge of the language of media forms that are found across and within different mediums, and students learn how these variables-language, form, medium-interact in a variety of industries. This process-based approach focuses on how storytelling takes shape and form through the use of the current technologies for different audiences and platforms.
<16> For this museum project, the teaching emphasis was not on communication in a specific broadcast news reporting style for radio, but on how we can communicate through audio means using a variety of sources. Instead of teaching students only how an audio history profile should be created for a specific segment of a radio show for air during one broadcast, this approach adjusts the creative avenue, taking into consideration how we might use audio to report a history profile for a museum audience that is either physically present in front of an object or reading about the object online. Now more than ever, students must learn to be flexible and use their traditional skills in a variety of ways for different platforms and audiences.
<17> It is important to note here that while students are still learning the core skills they need to succeed as future communicators, the approach to learning the styles and affordances of audio stories is somewhat different, and the writing style required to present historical information in a timeless fashion is also different from writing for broadcast news, which is a timely, one-time listening experience. I assert that providing early-undergraduate-level students with these types of archival projects can help to expand their understanding of how their audio, video and research skills can be used in a variety of changing industries and for audiences with different needs. For example, in a history profile piece, the student might use archival materials from a separate document collection about an object, and write a narrated story to be displayed alongside the object itself; alternatively, they might appropriate elements from a sound archive to illustrate key concepts or moments from the object's history, placing the listener into that context through the use of sounds actually recorded during the time period. Other situations might require the student to recorded sounds of the materials or contexts of regular use in order to bring the object closer to the viewer. Items behind the counter, for example-parts of the exhibit that are not touchable or moveable-can still be heard and experienced through the audio profiles. This project thus enables students to understand the differences and similarities between a news radio report and a history profile, and also enables them to hone their research skills by doing library and online-archive searches for sounds and artifacts that will supplement existing physical exhibits.
Journalists as Storytellers of Today's History
<18> Journalists, I argue, can be considered to be historians of the now-they research timely events, gather details from experts, and relay that information to readers, listeners, and viewers. They report the daily history of local and global communities to audiences. Through the museum object-history project, journalism students learn how their research and writing skills can be used to find text, audio, and video archival materials; they then connect those materials with physical objects from the past by creating audio stories. This culmination activity of the course brings new depth to their research processes and also connects the museum patron with more information about the objects within a defined physical space.
<19> The final product that each student produced was a one-and-a-half to two-minute audio history profile of a museum object from a 1920s general store. When the patron walks through the museum display, a free smartphone application can be used to scan the objects, triggering the related audio profile to automatically play on the smartphone speakers [21]. The profiles can also be played by remote online audiences via a Soundcloud link on the exhibit's information page. The audio profiles give the patron more contextual history and information about the item; the archived exhibit is thus complemented by scannable objects and aural stories. The stories were not built to play through one particular medium at one particular moment; instead, they were built for imagined future audiences-anyone who might come into contact with the museum objects. These scannable museum objects connected to audio files are updated versions of the cassette tape audio tours that have been used in museums since the 1970s [22]. While the scannable interface allows students to reach their audiences using a new, interactive process, it does not restrict how the students compose or construct their stories. In the next section I describe examples of three audio profiles and discuss each student's research processes, illustrating how each was able to synthesize their journalistic and academic research skills to discover and report the history of an object in the context of past daily life.
The Icebox
Figure 2. The McCray Icebox. (Photograph by the author.)
<20> Finding an expert on a unique, single artifact like the museum's 1930s McCray icebox was a different challenge from interviewing a city official about local government issues. Because the item was an antique, Darren first asked the museum's curator of history, Shirley Wajda, for the museum's recorded information about the icebox, and then searched online for phone listings for antique shops and malls. He made a list of antique dealers in Michigan and began calling them all in order, looking for an expert on iceboxes; he eventually found one at the Williamston antique mall.
Darren's expert helped him understand the full context of the icebox, and this understanding informs the audio piece; he directly addresses the audience, saying "If you purchased all those items, by the way, you would have probably spent no more than eight dollars." He makes a connection both to the physical space of the museum exhibit and the cost of the items that an icebox historically might contain. In this way, Darren provided new information, inviting patrons to experience the museum space as a gateway to the past, and bringing that past to life through words, sights, and sounds while also connecting them to their own daily expenses. Darren's icebox profile also discusses the ice man's role in relation to the topic of general store upkeep, thus shedding light on the daily activities of a particular community and how they experienced the world around them.
The Cheese Dome
Figure 3. The cheese dome. (Photograph by the author.)
<21> Anne visited the General Store exhibit multiple times in order to record the sounds of the store's cheese dome lever and pulley system. She wanted sounds representative of the action of a shopkeeper using the dome, and felt that going straight to the source was more credible than trying to verify the authenticity of online recordings of cheese pulleys (of which she did find several).
Her addition of the packaging expert's voice to the story, and her incorporation of new details about the glass dome's function as a marketing device, provide new context for the object's purpose and its specific placement on the shopkeeper's store counter. Anne recorded sounds from the actual store exhibit to add to the story; the docent used the cheese lever pulley system to raise and lower the dome while Anne recorded the sound of its movements, and Anne also recorded the store's bell and creaking floors, thus adding to the story's ambiance. However, the music style Anne chose was in keeping with neither the time period nor the object. Through this project, Anne learned that (1) the object itself, rather than pre-recorded materials, was the best source for the original sounds, and (2) music, as an important part of the story design, can also add to or detract from the piece.
Flat Irons
<22> Located in the storefront window is a set of clothes irons made from different materials, including iron, glass, and wood; some of the irons contain coal boxes that heated the iron when filled with hot coals. Chelsea used the Library of Congress's online database to search for public domain books and manuals from the time period that described the process of ironing. She began her search using the word "iron" and then progressively narrowed her search to "laundry in America" as a way to more clearly specify her objective. After searching the online database using multiple different keywords and speaking with local experts about ways to narrow her topic, Chelsea found an 1868 laundry manual that she referenced in her object profile. Rather than simply describing the object, Chelsea's profile, enriched by information from the manual and the experts, provides context for the use of the irons within American clothes-washing activities.
<23> For Chelsea, using the Library of Congress database to find published books on laundry was a new experience. Chelsea, a broadcast journalism major, was used to interviewing experts for information, but her definition of "sources" was limited to people she could talk to about an event or activity. This assignment broadened her definition of "sources," prompting her to consider written texts as sources that could be brought to life through her own voice.
Figure 4. Flat iron. (Photograph by the author.)
<24> Each of these details-the description of the ice man's profession, the cheese-dome selling strategies, and the "getting up of linen"-brings new information in the aural dimension to the already bustling and interactive exhibit. The noises of the steam, pulley, and opening of the icebox are subtle moments that add to the soundscape of the life of the objects within and outside of the store.
Discussion and Conclusion
<25> Traditional hands-on [23] introductory radio and broadcast courses are, by design, meant to teach students the basic elements of audio and video for a particular final product or medium of publication: news radio or broadcast TV news. Course syllabi usually include some history and examples of radio and TV news and practical assignments through which students hone reporting skills specifically for radio and TV news broadcasts. In the practical assignments, students might write voiceovers for a daily news update, practice vocal diction and style, report on a local business, and cover a city council meeting. At this level of instruction, the students are also learning how to write for broadcast (which requires a more conversational style and tone than print news) while at the same time learning new audio-editing software like Audacity, Soundtrack Pro, or Adobe Audition.
<26> While students at this level might be novices to radio and broadcast reporting tools, forms, and technologies, they are already trained in the basics of researching and writing for news audiences. This museum-object audio profile assignment expands their understanding of what it means to "do research" by encouraging students to use their journalistic training in new ways. For beginning journalism students, conducting research rarely includes examining museum archives, finding and using relevant books, or using online databases like the Library of Congress. Yet these students know already how to dig through large online datasets for sports reporting or environmental-based reporting, and they regularly report stories that chronicle history in the making, the timely everyday news events that will one day be regarded by others as events of the past.
<27> The approach for the final assignment was met with some resistance from students, who challenged the idea of using what they referred to as "research paper" sources in a journalism course. After several discussions and encounters with several examples of audio journalism stories [24], many students ended by agreeing that source types can move fluidly from academic to journalistic content and that a variety of sources can provide value in new and different ways. For example, in a research paper, one might cite an academic book, summarizing a key point and then providing an in-text citation to strengthen a claim of a larger argument. In an audio piece, one can introduce the book by name and read a short passage aloud from the text to introduce depth and breadth about a topic. An example of this is found in the Flat Iron project described above. By including "the getting up of linen," Chelsea used written words from the time period of the iron to illustrate both the formal processes of ironing and the importance of the activity to most households.
<28> The initial disagreement about the appropriateness of particular sources for a news story illustrated that students were thinking deeply about what a journalism radio story should consist of, and attempting to match both their own and their audiences' expectations. Yet only through exercises like this-exercises that foreground how similar and yet divergent sources and story forms for audio storytelling can be-will early undergraduate students discover that their research and audio production skills can (like the general-store museum objects) be "taken off the shelf" and used in a variety of functional contexts. Through hands-on work with archives and research that engages multiple types of sources, this project enables students to combine their traditional research and reporting skills in expansive, flexible ways, and connects physical archives with digital humanities works.
Notes
[1] Student names have been changed
[2] Jennifer George-Palilonis, The Multimedia Journalist: Storytelling for Today's Media Landscape, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 155.
[3] For an example of the museumgoer experience, use your smartphone to download the Layar app and scan the icebox picture in this article. You'll be able to hear the audio profile. Alternatively, you can play the profile using the embedded Soundcloud stories on the page. This augmentation feature will be available until 2017.
[4] Joan Schwartz, "'We Make our Tools and Our Tools Make Us': Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics," Archivaria (1995): 42.
[5] Elizabeth Wood and Kiersten F. Latham. "Object Knowledge: Researching Objects in the Museum Experience,"Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 9, no. 1 (2009): 2, http://reconstruction.eserver.org.
[6] Miles Ogborn, "Archive," in The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, ed. John Agnew and David Livingstone (California: Sage, 2011), 89.
[7] This is a very brief outline of the differing criticism of the archival process. See the following for a more in-depth explanation of the arguments related to archives, their contents, and functional contexts. John Berger, "Understanding a Photograph," in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1980), 294; Gillian Rose,"Practising Photography: An Archive, a Study, Some Photographs and a Researcher," Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 4 (2000): 555, doi: 10.1006/jhge.2000.0247; Joan Schwartz, "'We Make Our Tools and Our Tools Make Us': Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics," Archivaria (1995): 41-42.
[8] John Berger, About Looking, (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 55.
[9] Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 3.
[10] Joan Schwartz, "Negotiating the Visual Turn: New Perspectives On Images and Archives," The American Archivist 67, no. 1 (2004): 110.
[11] Berger, "Understanding a Photograph," 292.
[12] Schwartz, "We Make Our Tools," 13.
[13] Brian S. Brooks, George Kennedy, Daryl Moen and Don Ranly, Telling the Story: The Convergence of Print, Broadcast and Online Media, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013), 41.
[14] Mindy McAdams, "The Coming Death of Print Newspapers," Teaching Online Journalism (blog), August 24, 2014, http://mindymcadams.com.
[15] Vince Duffy, "Rumors of Radio's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated," RTDNA (blog), May 29, 2015, http://www.rtdna.org.
[16] Steven Barnett, The Rise and Fall of Television Journalism: Just Wires and Lights in a Box?, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 245.
[17] Derek Thompson, "What the Death of Homepages Means for the Future of News," The Atlantic, May 15, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com.
[18] George-Palilonis, The Multimedia Journalist, 11; Mark Jurnkowitz, "State of the News Media 2014: The Growth in Digital Reporting: What it Means for Journalism and News Consumers," Pew Research Center, March 24, 2014, http://www.journalism.org.
[19] Marie Elliott, "Composition Theory and Media Production Courses: Not So Mutually Exclusive," Journal of Media Education 6, no. 2 (2015): 70, http://en.calameo.com.
[20] Daniel Anderson, "The Low Bridge to High Benefits: Entry-level Multimedia, Literacies, and Motivation," Computers and Composition 25, no. 1 (2008): 43, doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2007.09.006; Jody Shipka, "Sound Engineering: Toward a Theory of Multimodal Soundness," Computers and Composition 23, no. 3 (2006): 369-70, doi: 10.1016/j.compcom.2006.05.003; Jennifer Ware, "Composing in the Dark: The Texture of Light Painting," Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture 14 (2012), http://enculturation.net/composing-in-the-dark; Anne Frances Wysocki, Dennis A. Lynch, and Susan Doyle, The DK Handbook, (New York: Pearson Longman, 2009), 1.
[21] See note 3 for details on the smartphone application.
[22] Chandler G. Screven, "The Effectiveness of Guidance Devices on Visitor Learning," Curator: The Museum Journal 18, no. 3 (1975): 235.
[23] Some introductory courses are lecture-based and include writing assignments on the history of the news. Others include fieldwork and hands-on assignments to teach the craft and form of reporting. Still others contain a mix of the two.
[24] For examples of journalism audio stories with the variety of sources mentioned, listen to Roman Mars, "The Port of Dallas," 99% Invisible, podcast audio, September 23, 2014, http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/port-of-dallas/ or Roman Mars, "The Devil's Rope," 99% Invisible , podcast audio, March 17, 2015, http://99percentinvisible.org.
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