Random thoughts from following #chashc2018

Posted on 29 May, 2018 by Lauren Wheeler

This week is the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA). It is happening at the University of Regina and has the handy hashtag #chashc2018 so that those unable to attend can follow some of the conversations and sessions remotely.  I appreciate the time taken by attendees to share what they are experiencing through social media. It means people like me can use their lunch breaks to catch-up on what is happening at the CHA; which is what I am doing now.

At the Day 2 marker there are a two topics of conversation have me thinking – public history and pipelines. My thoughts on these two conversations are not yet refined enough for the word limits of Twitter but I wanted to put them out there anyway as a non-academic working in public history in a province demonized for wanting a pipeline.

Thought 1: Pipelines

The timing of the Trans-Mountain Pipeline decision with the CHA is flooding my twitter with a lot of comments and opinions and debate about pipelines. The environmentalists are all “no pipeline” all the time. The indigenous groups seem divided depending on where their lands are along the pipeline route. The politicians are politicking, so the usual there. The academics are starting to sound like the environmentalists — I am going to put that down to the historians I follow generally being environmental historians and the conference including a panel on carbon democracy. I am loving the comments from historians to that provide context to the current situation and debate. History does matter and it is important to understand the situations we find ourselves in today. Which brings me to the second set of thoughts around public history and the apparent explosion of references to it in the live-tweeting this year.

Thought 2: Public History

Public history is not just the act of doing history in public, it is doing history for the public. The new generation of academic historians came through grad school as social media, blogs, podcasts, and various other self-directed forms of communicating information with the masses were taking off. Many of them have integrated these platforms into their academic work as a means of sharing ideas they are working on, promoting their work broadly, or having conversations with colleagues far away.The website ActiveHistory.org is a great example of how academic historians are finding ways to do their work in public using a platform that can make their work accessible and useful for the public. All of this is great because it brings academics into the public sphere and quoted as experts in news articles or brought on programs like CBC’s The Current to provide context and commentary on contemporary issues.

I would argue that tweeting and blogs and commentaries are ways we can do history in public but are not necessarily public history in the sense of history that is  for the public. This comes from my own the very different experiences of doing history in public and doing history for the public. This blog is one of the places I do history in public. I got into twitter for the same reason, to engage with historians and conversations in public through live-tweeting at conferences. When I write for this blog I know my audience is mostly other historians, in the same way that I know most of my followers on twitter are connected to the academic practice of history. That informs how I write, the voice I use, the way I present arguments, and the level of detail I go into on certain topics. The way I write for this blog and twitter is a completely different way than when I write a text panel or tour script or exhibit summary. The platform of this blog might be public but I assume a pre-existing level of knowledge because my audience is a niche within the public. This is not how I approach voice and audience when I am practicing public history. When I write public history content I assume the base level of knowledge is a passing interest in the subject matter and consider how to engage and convey information to that broad segment of the public. I keep in mind that a subject matter expert will probably also read what I am writing so strive to ensure factual accuracy, but I am not writing with the level of detail or with the flourishes I would for a subject area expert. I am writing for the majority who are not subject area experts. I am writing to engage them with information and ideas that might be completely new to them. I am writing to make them want to know more, to pique their curiosity.  In short I am not writing for myself or to make my work public, I am writing for the public to provide them with an accessible entrance to a topic. I write differently for the public than I write in public.

This quickly got longer than I intended. Now my lunch break is over and it is time to get back to work on museum accreditation and emergency preparedness planning and deaccessioning.

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Museums and Environment

Posted on 28 September, 2017 by Lauren Wheeler

I spent most of last week at the Alberta Museums Association / Western Museums Association joint international conference UNITE. Over the four days of the conference there were many interesting conversations with other museum professionals and presentations that highlighted how similar Canadian and American museums are (also how different but that is for another post).

A topic that came up in a number of presentations and conversations was the environment and climate change, specifically what museums can do to educate and engage people on these topics. Many ideas bounced around and it was invigorating to hear museum professionals openly confronting the questions and problems that were the topic of many academic workshops in my years as an environmental historian. It was a full circle moment, but not without some frustrations.

One of the questions that repeatedly comes up when museums are asked to think about how they can engage with environmental issues, climate change in particular, is “my museum is about [insert really specific subject], how do we engage with environment / climate change when it doesn’t apply to us?”. This question is infuriating because no matter how specific the topic of your museum is, environmental issues and climate change are relevant.

Not convinced? Consider the following broad examples.

Historic House Museum

  • On the surface, these museums are about the personal history of the family or individuals who lived in the home and a smattering of design and architecture. These do not scream “GREAT PLACE TO TALK CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES!” do they. However, historic homes are an opportunity to explore past construction techniques, modes of heating, and how lessons from the past can inform adapting modern homes to be more energy efficient. Historic homes are also a chance to examine micro-history of the area around the home, this sort of location specific longue durée examination of place can provide a rich source of information about how human relationships with their environments change over time. Again this can help confront current questions about how do we change our relationship with the environment to adapt to climate change, environmental degradation, and sustainability.

Topic Specific Museums

  • There are a good number of topic specific museums in Alberta; rodeos, lamps, sports halls of fame, specific ethnic/immigrant groups, dinosaurs, carriages, to name a few. Like historic houses, it is not always obvious how topic specific museums can engage proactively with environmental issues but the potential is still there.  Dinosaur museums are rooted in science and can relate the dramatic environmental and climate change that underlie the evolution and extinction of dinosaurs to talk about similar changes happening in the modern world. Sports hall of fame can connect the sports their inductees participate in with the environmental necessities that make their sports possible; for instance shorter and warmer winters will make the snow and ice based sports harder to pursue outdoors. Ethnic and immigrant group specific institutions already do an excellent job of interpreting the pioneer experience and distinct cultural practices, it is not a huge jump from to re-frame those activities as lessons in reducing energy consumption and understanding how to live within what the land around you can support. Even a museum about something as specific as rodeos can engage with contemporary environmental issues by asking different questions. There might be connections no one noticed because no one was asking questions about the connections between rodeo and environment.

I could go on but the point of this brief post is that museums have an important role to play in engaging the public with pressing environmental issues, like climate change, and are important site of learning and education around these issues. Not matter how topic specific a museum is there is a connection to the environment and thus to our changing climate. This connection might not be obvious but it is there because all life on this planet – human, plant, animal, virus, etc. – depends on the environment and a hospitable climate to survive.

Museums matter and the environment matters. Museums must do more because the future of our planet and our ability to adapt to the changes a warming planet brings depends on it. Museums are a trusted source of information and they have a unique place in society as keepers of knowledge that can more that knowledge relevant to contemporary issues. All museums have to do is take a chance, engage deeply with their communities to find solutions to problems that face us all, and break away from the stereotypes of dusty storehouses of old stuff. Environment and climate issues are a prime opportunity to do this, museums just have to take the chance and become leaders for the future.

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5 Stages of Recovering from Academia

Posted on 9 September, 2014 by Lauren Wheeler

Hi.  My name is Lauren and I am a Recovering Academic.  It has been 2 years and 6 months since I was in graduate studies and I have a good full-time job in my field.  Yet, there are times, usually when insomnia hits or the weather is crappy or a question gnaws at my curiosity, when I breakdown and start researching again.  Sometimes, I get friends to pull PDFs from academic article subscription services for me.  Other times, I get lost in 140 character debates with academics on Twitter.  I try to stop, try to convince myself that the research, write, publish cycle is behind me because I got out.  I got lucky and landed a job in my field that lets me engage a bit with the topics I love.  But it was not easy to adapt to the world outside the ivory tower.  Sometimes I think of time spent living below the poverty line just to get a few more letters behind my name and feel ashamed.  For months there was a constant fear I had spent too long in the university and did not have the necessary experience to get the job I wanted.  There are bouts of anger as I hear about another brilliant, skilled person who didn’t get a job because they have too much education.  It is not all bad though.  I am coming to accept that I am a Recovering Academic and looking for a way to pursue the research I love on my own terms.

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Leaving academia is hard.  There are few places that allow you to work whatever hours appeal to you and worry primarily about a topic you selected then devote years to studying that topic.  This makes academia is a very sheltered and privileged place and adapting to the world outside the ivory tower takes some getting used to.

I left a doctoral program in the spring of 2012 and since then have watched many friends complete degrees or leave.  Each of our experiences is unique but there are certain feelings we have all struggled with as well as the realization we need to talk about what happens with you leave academia.  We are starting to address the exploitation of sessional, contract, and adjunct instructors but few are talking about the graduates who leave the ivory tower entirely.   In an effort to explain what happens when you leave academia, I propose The 5 Stages of Recovering from Academia.

5 Stages of Recovering from Academia

1. Fear

So you decided to leave academia for the greener fields outside the ivory tower but you have no idea what to do with yourself.  Inside the ivory tower you are an expert in your field.  Outside the ivory tower you are another over-educated person applying for whatever jobs match with your experience.  More than everything, you can no longer hide on a university campus.  You have to go out and interact with people who are not as obsessed with a single topic as you are.  You will have to convince people you have skills that go beyond writing and researching and navigating a library.  Your worth will no longer be gauged by how well you lecture or how frequently you publish and present.  Your worth is determined by following directions, completely tasks quickly, and working with others towards a common goal.   Your name will probably not go on the work you do and someone above you will likely get the credit for it.

All of these things and more feed the fear that comes with leaving academia.

2. Anger

You have multiple university degrees, a list of peer-reviewed publications, and ample hours in and out of the lecture hall.  You can edit like a pro, organize conferences in other countries with nothing more than an internet connection, speak fluent academia (maybe even a few additional living and dead languages), and Foucault and his like stopped intimidating you years ago.  But you are still working contract to contract or temping or in retail/service because hiring committees in the Real World are afraid of three little letters – PhD.

This is the anger stage and it will probably involve many nights out drinking and ranging against how unfair the world is.  The anger can motivator the Recovering Academic and push them to show the world outside the ivory tower the value of a PhD.  The anger can also eat you from the inside out so find an outlet for it.  Physical activity is a great outlet — running, contact sports, aggressive solo dance parties…

3. Depression

At some point the when the fear and anger have passed the depression will hit.

For those in the hunt for a job the depression comes from application exhaustion.  Months of crafting beautiful cover letters and CVs, hours searching for job postings, countless hand-shaking events in the name of networking, interview after interview, and still nothing more than short-term contracts.  If all this starts to get to you it is okay and nothing to be ashamed of.  If you find it is interfering with your daily life get help.  You wouldn’t ignore a broken bone so don’t ignore your mental health.

For those who find employment the depression often from realizing how much you worked without adequate compensation.  Think about it, most jobs will ask you to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.  There might be times when you work later or go in on the weekend to meet a deadline but the hours will never match the 18 hours a day, 6 days a week put in by the average doctoral student. A busy week at work is unlikely to match the weeks in academia when you had 50 papers to make, article revisions due, a book review to submit, two classes to teach, and a conference presentation to finish and present in another city.  Plus most jobs will compensate you when you have to work overtime or are going beyond the minimum requirements.  This type of depression can also quickly turn into anger or joy.  When it turns to joy you are getting close to Stage 4.

4. Acceptance

Leaving academia does not mean leaving behind the part of you that thirsts to acquire and share knowledge.  Accepting that your time in academia does not define you but is part of you regardless of what you end up doing can take a long time.  The odd things is, once you are out you will meet all sorts of people who left academia but remain interested in their areas of expertise.  Often you wont know immediately these people are also Recovering Academics because their past time inside the ivory tower no longer defines them.

Once you have accepted you are a Recovering Academic you will find many subtle things change.  For instance, when people ask what you do the response will no longer include “I have a PhD in [insert obscure topic here]”.  You will simply say “I work in museums and it is awesome!” or something similar that keeps conversation going instead of killing it.  Another subtle change is research will no longer dictate where you go on vacation.  In fact, vacations will actually become relaxing because you wont be trying to squeeze in research and work between activities with friends and loved ones.  You will actually relax because the only reason you are away from home is for a vacation not justify going away because you have research to do.  This is not to say you wont go to places that pique your intellectual interest, because you will, but when you do it will all be for pleasure.

 5. Doing it on your own terms

This is exactly what it sounds like, getting to the point where you can pursue academic activities on your own terms.  No department or supervisor deadlines and expectations.  No fear of “publish or parish”.  No competing with friends for an ever shrinking pot of funding.  When you want to work on new research you can set aside the time to work on it as the time becomes available.  If a conference comes up you would like to attend, you don’t have to ask for travel funding, you can just go.  If you are lucky enough to work in an industry related to your field of expertise, you might even get your employer to pay for you to go to the interesting conference as part of your professional development!  Doing it on your own terms will probably mean an article takes longer to write but you also don’t have to put other things on hold to write it because you set the deadlines.  If you never want to go through peer review again you can always share your passion through a blog or connect with others in your field on Twitter (if your field is into that sort of thing like the Canadian environmental historians are).

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The “Trouble” with Wi-Fi Hotspots in National Parks

Posted on 30 April, 2014 by Lauren Wheeler

On Tuesday April 29, 2014 Parks Canada announced it will install Wi-Fi hotspots in National Parks.  The response from Canadians is divided; some welcome the ability to access the internet in remote areas, others see it as an unnecessary incursion of modernity into wilderness.   There are valid arguments and passionate pleas from the defenders of the National Parks as un-connected wilderness that generalizes and misrepresents the impact and extent these Wi-Fi Hotspots will have.  A quick read through the CBC’s “Your Community Blog” on the topic is enough to gauge the strong alarmist vein to the reaction the announcement has caused.

Nothing about the Wi-Fi in National Parks news story has surprised me because as a historian of mountain parks – and someone who grew-up on the edge of Banff National Park – I am well versed in the constant conflict between the modern amenities Parks Canada is asked to make available to visitors and the adverse reaction of wilderness purists against those services.  It was only a matter of time before Parks got enough comment cards mentioning the lack of connectivity to justify the expense of installing it in high traffic locations.  When I heard the by-line on the 6pm news I knew the immediate response would come from purists against the incursion of connectivity into the wilderness.  It is all very predictable because of the contested understanding of National Parks: are Parks spaces of untouched and preserved wilderness; or are Parks spaces of wilderness preserved and made accessible for the enjoyment and betterment of all Canadians.  The two descriptions seem the same on the surface but the implications of the two understands are very different.  The first brings about the “how dare you connect a space that is an escape from being connected.”  The second recognizes that alongside preserving wilderness for future generations is the need to give the current users certain amenities they want, like Wi-Fi.

The gut reaction against Wi-Fi in National Parks comes, in part, from optics and perception rather than reality.  Wi-Fi in wilderness threatens the idealized vision of wilderness as a place untouched by modernity, an escape for urbanites weary of constantly being connected and surrounded by man-made things.  This is the urge National Parks were established to fulfill, and the cultural importance of Parks remains shaped by the late 19th and early 20th century anti-modern movement.  The lingering connotations that wilderness means escaping from the man-made reflects the founding philosophy is much deconstructed by academics but it remains the selling feature of National Parks in North America and the illusion of leaving the man-made, modern world of 24/7 connectivity behind is what draws many to visit and explore National Parks.[i]

It is worth discussing in the aftermath of the announcement not that Wi-Fi hotspots will be in National Parks but where these hotspots will go.  Will you, for instance, be able to upload photos from the top of Mount Rundle and Mount Edith Cavell?  Or, will the hotspots be in the trail head parking lots and campgrounds?  This is a key question because the media and commentators would have us all believe this plan will turn Parks in to a giant Wi-Fi hotspot while forgetting to mention or acknowledge one very important thing – the National Parks are REALLY BIG!  Here is a little context of the area of a few national parks in relation to other places in Canada:

Elk Island National Park: 194 km²

Edmonton: 684.4 km²

Prince Edward Island: 5660 km²

Banff National Park:  6697 km²

Greater Toronto Area: 7124 km²

Jasper: 10 878 km²

It is impossible for the Parks Canada Wi-Fi Hotspot plan to turn the entire Parks System into a giant connected zone.  Remember that Arrogant Worms song about how “Canada’s Really Big”?  Well a really big country means really big protected wild spaces too.  Sure there are areas within the Parks that are currently connection-less that will suddenly be connected to the world wide web but there will still be huge swaths of wilderness that have no internet connect or cell reception, areas where you will still need to need a satellite phone to connect to civilization (and help you out of any tight spot you might get into).  The wilderness of Parks will not be obliterated by this plan just like building a highway from Calgary to Banff did not result in a completely paved park.[ii]

The location of the hotspots matters but given the areas described above I find it hard to believe that at any point on a 4 hour hike you will be able to stop, take a selfie, connect to the internet, and upload it before returning to your car.  The logistics and expense of building such an extensive network of hotspots is far beyond what cuts to Parks budget and existing staffing constraints would allow.   Taking a moment to think critically about where these Wi-Fi hotspots might go and it becomes immediately apparent that connectivity will not completely infiltrate the wilderness.  Speculating on locations for hotspots based on a lifetime spent in the Bow Valley I expect the hotspots in Banff National Park and others will be at already popular sites – trail parking lots, campgrounds, and maybe the odd remote tea house.  Thinking about the area around Lake Louise it would not surprise me if in the coming years there are Wi-Fi hotspots in the parking lots for Lake Louise and Moraine Lake, in the village centre,  the Lake Agnes and Plain of Six Glaciers tea houses, and maybe halfway up the Tramline trail.  Will there be a hotspot at the top of Mount Temple?  Probably not, the top is covered by a glacier and it is not as popular a hiking route to Lake Agnes or the Plain of Six Glaciers so it would not be worth the cost of installation and maintenance.

Parks Canada has not yet announced where the first 50 Wi-Fi hotspots will be but you can be certain that they are coming.  For the visitors to National Parks whom never leave the safety of the paved or well-maintained paths this plan gives them a little extra connection to the modern world.  It lets them post to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, FourSquare, and various other social media outlets where they are and what they are doing in real time.   For the users of the National Parks who go to escape modernity in the backcountry, this will have little impact on them.  The hotspots will not change how they use the wilderness within the Parks boundaries because they choose to use the space differently than the type of visitor the hotspots are poised to serve.

I find myself neither for nor against Wi-Fi hotspots popping up in National Parks.  The hotspots will not change how I choose to use the parks and they will not take away from my enjoyment of the mountain environment any more than weaving in and out of gawking tourists on Banff Avenue takes away from my enjoyment of finishing a good day of hiking with a delicious Eddie Burger before heading back home to Canmore.

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[i] At this point I could launch into a summation of William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness” but it is a great read that should be taken whole without mediation of another’s voice, and is available for free on his website.  Also, I am tired of summarizing that article every time I write about National Parks in North America so this time I am not going to.

[ii] There are critics of the Mountain Parks in particular whom would argue these parks are too paved.  To that I say go to the hikes that are not Johnston’s Canyon, Maligne Canyon, Fenlands, Lake Louise Shoreline, etc.

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Why Museums Matter – migrating and consolidating blogs

Posted on 18 March, 2014 by Lauren Wheeler

A few months ago I attempted to start a blog just about museums and my public history experiences.  However, I am a public historian and that means I work a regular job that does not allow the same time for reflecting and writing as academia did so instead of trying to keep up with two blogs I would expand CanEnviroRock in content to include my public history life — which it sort of did already.

To kick of the migration and consolidation here is the lone post to make it on to MuseumsRock so it is not lost to the ether of the internet when I close that page in the near future.

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Why Museums Matter

A museum is a place you choose to go to because of what it says about who you are (and who you aspire to be).  Visiting a museum is a leisure choice and all leisure activities are reflections of the perceived and desired identity of the individual as well as the perceived meaning of the activity.  This places museums in an odd position; as a sector it is undergoing a huge shift in what it means to be a museum and what a museum can offer to communities by expanding exhibits, programs, and services in new directions, but communities tend to think of museums as a stagnant storehouse for artifacts, as the solemn site of reflection and study museums were at the turn of the 20th century.  The great challenge facing museums is the long-term project of changing how museums are imagined by individuals in the process making them places more people seek out in their leisure time.

John Falk asserts that the act of visiting a museum is an act of identity formation and confirmation which means the perceived image of the museum is the greatest influence on the decision to visit a museum. He further unpacks this idea in Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience by breaking museum visitors down into 5 types; Explorer, Facilitator, Experience Seeker, Professions/Hobbyist, and Recharger.  These types are fluid – you might be an explorer one day and a Recharger the next – and are useful for museum professionals seeking to categorize and better serve their audience.  The types allow for quick checks of whether or not an exhibit will facilitate and attract a diverse audience then keep them engaged for an extended visit.  However, Falk’s typing of visitors does not explore how those same identity types inform the decision to not visit a museum, to choose a different leisure activity in order to meet the same identity-needs.  This is a point Nina Simons explored after the publication of Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience on her blog Museum 2.0 and what struck me when reading Falk and Dierking’s 2013 book The Museum Experience Revisited.  Museums are great at catering to the people who already visit but how to entice new visitors is a greater challenge and one close to my heart.

Now it is time for a confession: I work in museums and I love museums, but I do not often visit museums for leisure.  Based on the assertion that the choice to visit a museum speaks to an individual’s identity my avoidance of them in my leisure time would suggest I do not care for or value the institutions.  This could not be further from the truth – if you have met me it is obvious within minutes that museums are one of my passions – yet it takes often something completely different to get me into a museum on a Saturday afternoon.  I want to visit institutions that push the envelope of what a museum is and can do.  I want to see the space being used in non-traditional ways, exhibits about topics outside the conventional realm, collections so obscure you have to see it to believe it.  I want to see museums that breakdown the walls of preconceptions of what a museum is what it can do.  I want the weird and I want to see it done well.  This is not to say I don’t appreciate and enjoy a traditional museum, but what gets me really excited is the weird and wonderful of a museum trying something different and leaving its comfort zone.

The weird and wonderful and different is what makes me visit a museum.  Now I ask a question I put out on Twitter (@canenvirorock) a few weeks ago with an amendment; Why do you visit museums, or why don’t you visit museums?  Feel free to answer in the comments.

 

 

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Canmore, Floods, and Southern Alberta Museums

Posted on 22 June, 2013 by Lauren Wheeler

Thursday mornings I was woken by a 6:45am phone call from Canmore.  It was my mum to tell me the usually dry creek behind the house was a raging river and our neighbours with homes backing the creek had been evacuated at 1am. She described the sound of rocks tumbling down the swollen creek and the trees stripped of bark and branches from tumbling against the rocks.  By the time I arrived at work things were getting worse and my heart sunk at the sight of a Tweet naming the street I grew-up on, where my parents and brother still live, as on evacuation notice.  It was only a precautionary notice and they opted to stay at home – with the car packed just in case – and continue to keep me posted about what is happening.  I found solidarity with all the other Canmore Kids stuck in other parts of Alberta and Canada worrying over what was happening to our hometown and how our family and friends were coping with it all.

Cougar Creek June 2009, normal spring run-off

Cougar Creek June 2009, normal spring run-off

Cougar Creek June 20, 2013

Cougar Creek June 20, 2013

The flooding of Cougar Creek and the subsequent flooding throughout southern Alberta hit me on two very different levels.  The first hit came with a phone call from my mum on Thursday morning describing what Cougar Creek looked like and sending pictures and videos of the destruction.  For two days my parents and brother were on precautionary evacuation notice because the house I grew-up in is on the west side of the creek which is the slightly higher side.  I also worried about two museums and archives close to my heart; the Canmore Museum and GeoScience Center was the first museum job I had in the summer of 2002, and the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies where I worked for three summers and where I researched my Masters thesis.

The second hit came as I was walking to work at the Alberta Museums Association and realized how many of the member museums would be affected by a flood starting in the Bow Valley.  Before I arrived at work there was a preliminary list in my head: Canmore Museum and GeoScience Centre, Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum, Luxton Home, most Calgary museum (Glenbow, National Music Centre, Fort Calgary, etc), Museum of the Highwood, and Okotoks.  Over the next two days the list got longer until it stretched from Red Deer south to Lethbridge and from Banff to Medicine Hat.  This range includes nearly 25% of the museums in Alberta and for two days the staff of the Alberta Museum Association called and emailed these potentially affected museums to find out if they were okay.   The good news is most of the museums have made it out of the worse of the flooding unscathed.   However, the museums that were affected by the flooding were hit hard and will need help cleaning up.

It is easy to overlook the museums and archives when flooding takes out large swaths of a city but these collections are priceless and to properly dry out a museum or archive after a flood is very expensive.  In Alberta there are now a number of museums and archives facing the monumental task of drying out as the flood waters recede.  These include the Museum of the Highwood in High River, Fort Calgary, the City of Calgary Archives, Fort Whoop-up, Helen Schulare Nature Centre in Lethbridge, the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum in Banff, and from flooding earlier in June Heritage Park in Fort McMurray.  If the flooding is extensive some of these museums will have to close for the summer season to deal with the clean-up.   Heritage Park in Fort McMurrary has already announced they will remain closed for the rest of the summer due to the size of the clean-up job.

What the museums and archives affected by flooding need are donations to help pay for the recovery of artifacts and repairs to their buildings.   They also need volunteers with museum and archive experience to help with the clean-up work.  It is important volunteers know how to properly handle artifacts to prevent further damaging them.

Things you can do to help museums after a flood or other natural disaster:

1)   Donate.

2)   If you have museum experience wait until the imminent danger has passed then offer your assistance.

My thoughts are with everyone in the areas affected by the flooding in Southern Alberta.  The good news from the region is finally starting to out weigh the bad and I look forward to the Trans-Canada opening again so I can get home to Canmore and start helping with the massive clean-up.

Posted in Environment, Public History | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Public History, Pop History, Academia, and Jobs.

Posted on 16 April, 2013 by Lauren Wheeler

On the last day of the 2013 ASEH meeting in Toronto I had the opportunity to sit on a panel with two other public historians at a graduate luncheon and answer questions from graduate students about job opportunities outside academia.  The attendees asked some very good questions that ranged from “how do I get a job in consulting?” to “what skills do I have that could be useful outside academia and how do I market them?”  As panelists, we each drew on our personal experiences and, in the case of me and the other Canadian on the panel, spoke to the value of a Masters in Public History.

There was one question that has stuck with me because there was not enough time to adequately address it in the session and it speaks to a deeper disconnect between those with established careers in academia and the world outside the ivory tower.  The question asked us to address the tensions between university experts and public historians, which is a common enough inquiry, but the example given to illustrate the root of the question came from an American History Television program.  This showed a conflation of public and pop history that unfortunately plagues academic views on public history and is what I would like to belatedly address.

Public history can be defined in two ways.

1)      Public history is the presentation of historical knowledge to the public outside the confines of the traditional university setting.

2)      Public history refers to the historians employed outside the university in a position related to the field of history.

These two definitions are obviously connected and both allude to the places where public history takes place; museums, archives, websites, government ministries, tv documentaries, radio programs, etc.  Anyone trained as a historian and working in these fields is a public historian but that does not mean that all of them are trained in public history.  In Canada there are only a handful of universities that offer graduate programs devoted to the study and practice of public history – Carleton University and the University of Western Ontario are the most prominent.  This is important because the methodology, theory, and skills taught in public history programs is not the same as that taught in a traditional history masters and this disconnect is at the root of what many see as a tension between academic and public history.

museum

The question posed during the ASEH graduate luncheon about tensions between academic and public history accused public historians of not keeping abreast of new findings in academic history and as a result creating historical knowledge for the public that fails to adequately address the current state of literature in a field.  My response was as a-political as possible, drawing on the different modes of presentation used in public history and considerations for the audience as part of why certain information is left out of exhibitions and similar presentations.  In the response I tried to convey that public historians, especially curators, do keep up with the developments in academia; professional development is part of their job, they are constantly researching to develop their collections, and they actively publish in peer-reviewed journals.  However, that depth of knowledge is not always reflected in the knowledge that is transmitted to the public for two very important reasons; audience and space constraints.

The audience for academics is other academics.  There is a level of assumed knowledge that come with writing for your peers that allows monographs and articles to delve into the minutia of a topic that is not possible in other areas.  Public history does not have the luxury of assuming a base level of knowledge at the masters’ level.  Instead, public historians have to convey the same information that would make for a great article without the use of footnotes to explain or reference back to supporting information.  The audience for public history is anyone from an elementary school student to a university professor and everyone in-between.  There is no assumed knowledge when writing for an audience this diverse so often the newest information academics would like included must be cut for the sake of contextual information that gives the public a necessary base from which to continue exploring a topic.

Space is the second constraint and it often has a greater impact on what a public historian can convey than their audience.  In a museum, for instance, each text panel is restricted to about 200 words.  The first paragraph of this post is 109 words!  Often a curator has 200 words to convey what an academic could devote an article to.  It is a challenge to any academic thinking it is easy to do public history to distill the information of an entire article into 5 panels, 200 words each, in language that is suitable for a grade 8 reading level and still maintain the crux of the article.

The emergence of professional training through graduate programs in museums studies and public history created a pool of people working in museums, archives, government ministries, etc with an understanding of what public history should be and the skill set to make what they do seem simple.   However, not everyone producing history for public consumption is trained in the field or attune to the best practices in presenting knowledge to the public.  This is where pop history and public history collide and too often those working outside public history judge it with a harshness borne of too many disappointing or frustrating interactions with pop history.

Pop history is analogous to pop music – it is light and easy to access and digest but without much substance.  It can also be seen as the tabloids of history in the tendency toward sensationalizing over accuracy and use of outdated or disproven information.  Most pop history is encountered in television programming – the recent series “Viking” is an excellent example – and distorts fact for entertainment value without providing the viewer with a disclaimer.  As a result when the general public watches pop history programs they leave with misconceptions of what happened and unwittingly perpetuate false information and assumptions about the past.  When academics encounter pop history the story presented is often so distorted that their frustration and anger at the public receiving false information is understandable.  Public historians have the same reaction to the programs as academics because like in academia the core mission in public history is to engage people’s interest in the past while providing the public with the most accurate and up-to-date information available.

There is a disconnection between public history and academic history but in my experience it is not coming from the public history side.  As a MA student in a public history program I worked with academics who understood what public history was, brought in practicing experts, and fostered connections between the university and public institutions to ensure the best possible history was presented to the public.  As a PhD student I sat in on graduate level course about public history that completely over looked the long standing journals and scholarship in the field, and listened too many times to academics conflate pop history with public history.  Upon leaving a doctoral program to pursue my passion for public history it became clear that the hesitancy of some public historians to work closely with academics often comes from false assumptions about what they do informed by conflations of pop and public history.  Public historians understand academia because to work in the field a minimum of a Masters degree is required, but most academics have never worked in public history and do not have the understanding of the field that can only come from hands-on experience.  It is encouraging to see academic associations beginning to embrace public history and the opportunities it presents to the graduate students they are training and gives hope that eventually the tensions and misunderstandings between academia and public history will disappear.

Assumptions about public history perpetuated within the universities do the greatest disservice to graduate students planning their entry onto the job market.  Academic positions are few and far between but too many graduate students are woefully under prepared to be competitive in the public history sector.  The increase in public history and museum studies programs means the competition for jobs outside academia is stiff and simply having a doctorate is not enough to get an interview, let alone a job.  Experience is essential, knowledge of collections management is mandatory for museums positions, and practical knowledge of how to adapt history for a public audience is important.  For graduate students trying to plan for the day they go on to the job market, degree in hand, it means tough decisions.  To get the experience needed for a non-academic job means a graduate student must give up some summer researching time to work in the field, or adding volunteering at a public history institution to an already busy academic schedule.  It also means making a difficult decision while still in the doctoral program – do you want to work in academia or do you want to work in public history?  Speaking from the other side of that decision I would encourage any graduate student to take preparing for a possible job in public history as seriously as they do the academic route.

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Good-Bye STEP

Posted on 7 March, 2013 by Lauren Wheeler

Today the Alberta Budget dropped and the news is not good for local heritage and history institutions or the students who keeps them going in the summer months.  The Student Temporary Employment Program, or STEP, was suspended.  This is not a surprise but it is disappointing and detrimental to heritage and history institutions, charities, and social service institutions as well as the post-secondary students the program ensured living wages for between academic years.

The STEP program cost $7.4 million a year and subsidized wages for students working for charities, museums, community institutions, and other groups with limited funds for full-time employees.  The program gave approximately 3000 students a year valuable work experience outside the typical serving and retail jobs available in the summer months.

STEP also helps charities and social service institutions pay students to help administer vital social programs in the summer months.  It gives students, particularly arts and social science students, a chance to put their courses to use and see what they can do with their degree before graduation.  To suspend the program does a disservice to students, making the competitive summer job market even more crowded and making it harder for students to come out of an undergrad degree with valuable work experience in their field.

The first STEP job I had was in 2002 at the NWMP Barracks Historical Site in Canmore.  This was the job that made me seriously consider a career in the field I later learned was called public history.  Since that first exposure to museums and STEP the program has helped pay part of my wage at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, the Canmore Public Library, the Three Sisters Scottish Festival Society, and the Canadian Circumpolar Institute.  Without the STEP program it is unlikely people like me would have the work experience necessary to be competitive in the field of museums and public history.

STEP gives back to communities because so many of the students it employs were in institutions that provide services and programs for their community.  For instance, at the Canmore Public Library I was one of two students who organized and ran all the summer reading programs for children aged 2-15.  Will small rural libraries have the funds to offer reading programs to children in the summer without the help of STEP?  Will museums and heritage institutions be able to develop their collections and exhibits without STEP?  Will the next generation of public historians and museums professionals be able to get the experience they need to get their foot in the door after graduation?

 

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A Little Bit of Everything

Posted on 18 January, 2013 by Lauren Wheeler

The key to working in public history is to be adaptable and willing to try anything.  You will learn quickly in this field that no matter what the job description said you will be asked to do things you never imagined were in your skill set.  If this scares you, don’t become a public historian and definitely don’t work in an institution that presents history, for instance a museum.  If you like to be creative and like the challenge of coming up with new approaches and constantly learning new skills, public history is the place to be.

For seven years I’ve worked in public history and done everything from research to interpretive programming to managing an exhibit to creating databases and pretty much everything in between.  Each contract is different but the one similarity is a willingness to try new things and push new ways of conveying information to the public is essential.  In these contracts I have been a website contributor (Active History), event planner, POS expert, interviewer, designer, video editor, researcher, guide, and general assistant to whom even needs assisting.  Often I am many of these things at once.

Not convinced?  Here are the various hats I’ve worn this week:

Video Editor

App Designer

Researcher

Event Planner

Photo Shoot Assistant

Text Editor

Design Assistant

Content Assistant

Only four of these jobs fall under the umbrella of what you would learn in a history program.  The rest are skills I’ve picked up and developed over years of public history work.  I am a decent video editor because of the year I spent co-producing EHTV: Live from the Field for NiCHE.  I am an event planner because in grad school I organized far too many conferences, social events, and workshops.  My academic work in visual history allows me to assist the designers and act as a bridge between the content expert curator and the creative minds who will make an exhibit look amazing.  However, my programming expertise is limited to one class in html back in 1998 and I only got to play at app designing this week because the IT guys found a seemingly idiot proof program I could populate for them.  (Unfortunately, the program’s linear design means it is useless for what we need it to do so it is useless.)

Next week will likely be more of the same because public history is one of the most interdisciplinary fields around.  There is no hard edge to delineate what the job entails.  To convey history to the public in a meaningful way you must go beyond the written word and a token picture.  Everything must fit together to create something that conveys the richness of a topic that does not rely heavily on text in order to engage multiple learning styles and all ages and education levels.  This means incorporating new technology with the tried and tested standards of exhibiting — a text panel and archival image that functions alongside a tablet for exploring old newspaper articles or videos.  Layering how information is presented in this way allows makes an exhibit accessible and exciting.  It is this challenging process of making history resonate with the public and trying new ways of presenting it — ways that don’t even seem like learning about history — that keeps me interested and working in this field.  There is nothing more rewarding than wandering around an exhibit you’ve helped create and seeing visitors interacting with it exactly how you hoped they would.

Public history is the most creative branch of history.  Innovations in how to tell history is reflections the creativity and daring of the people working in the field.  Telling the story in a new way shows people who write off the past as a dry series of names and dates that it is exciting and interesting and fun.  It shows how pertinent something that happened a century ago is to what we do today.  If making history fun means I have to learn how set-up a basic program on an iPad then I welcome the opportunity (and will happily leave the really technical stuff to the pros).

 

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Making History Look Delicious at the Royal Alberta Museum

Posted on 18 December, 2012 by Lauren Wheeler

*This post was written for Active History.

I recently took a trip to a Calgary restaurant where the most iconic of Chinese-Canadian dishes originated.  The restaurant is on Centre Street at 27th Avenue North and you would likely miss it unless you looked for the sign reading “Silver Inn.”  Two colleagues from the Royal Alberta Museum (RAM)also  made the trip from Edmonton to Calgary to record the interviews.  When the interviewee is the owner of the first restaurant to serve “Ginger Beef,” the footage has to look better than good.  It must look delicious.

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Author interviewing the owner of the Silver Inn.

Making history look good is a big part of designing a museum exhibit.  As sites of public history, museums suffer from the stereotype of stale rooms filled with artefacts hidden behind glass and a sleepy security guard ensuring nothing happens to the precious items on display.  This idea of museums persists in spite of decades of interesting and innovative exhibits and new methods designed to engage the public with museums.  Food is still prohibited in exhibits, but high-quality video of a dish or a detailed description of its ingredients can create the same Pavlovian reaction as the smells of a busy kitchen or a table set for a feast.  With this in mind, we went to Calgary in search of footage to add this dimension to the RAM’s Chop Suey on the Prairies exhibit.

The Silver Inn was the first restaurant in Calgary to offer Peking-style dishes.  It opened in 1975 in a small space on 4th Street Southwest.  For the first few years, the establishment served mostly the burgers, fries, soda, and milkshakes typical of Chinese-owned restaurants across the prairies.  The menu listed Peking dishes, but customers were not interested in trying them.  But after a few years, the Cheung family took the risk and dropped the western side of the menu and focused exclusively on Peking cuisine.  Calgarians were hesitant to try the dishes, but they slowly came around to these new flavours.

The dish known as ginger beef is based on a traditional Peking dish of beef cooked so that it is chewy like a jerky, deep fried, and seasoned with orange peel and chili sauce.  The chef thought the dish would go over well with Calgarians because it was similar to popular pub food.  Customers liked the flavour, but not the chewy beef so he began experimenting ways to make the beef a similar texture to French fries.  The resulting dish – deep fried shredded beef in chili sauce – became an instant hit with customers.  The perfectly crunchy exterior hid beef that was cooked but still tender.  The sauce tasted so different from standard fare that people started asking for the dish as “that ginger beef dish” – even though there was no ginger in it!

The dish nicknamed ginger beef by customers became so popular that other Chinese restaurants tried to replicate it.  The flavour combination spread across the province.  The success of the Silver Inn helped to inspire other Chinese restaurant owners to introduce more authentic Chinese dishes onto their menus.   Ginger beef is now synonymous with Chinese food in Alberta.  And since it originated in Alberta, there was no question it would be featured in an RAM exhibit about Chinese restaurants.

Yet capturing the essence of an iconic dish for a museum exhibit poses a challenge.  Museums have strict rules surrounding food and drink in exhibit space for both practical and conservation reasons.  Maintaining a fresh bowl of ginger beef within an exhibit would be a logistical nightmare, not to mention the temptation to visitors that a bowl of food would offer.  Furthermore, food is a no-go in exhibit spaces because it attracts bugs, and these critters eat the organic material that constitutes most artefacts.  Knowingly exposing material in a museum’s collection or on loan from generous donors to conditions that would lead to its disintegration is a sin in the museum and archive community.

The question is: when planning and designing an exhibit, how best to use audio and video to conveying the look, smell, and taste of food to visitors?  A museum could interview someone connected with the invention of a dish, like the RAM did with ginger beef.  A sound bite that explains how a dish came to be gives people an extra treat and something to share with others; a piece of trivia to hold onto for the future and a reference point for remembering the exhibit experience.  But information is not enough to make visitors’ mouths water.

To successfully convey the essence of food without tasting or smelling it, the visual must be hyper-realistic and the sounds must be crisp and clear.  When these elements are brought together, the visitor enters a mental place where they can almost smell what is being cooked.  This all must be done without resorting to the “money-shot” of food programs everywhere: a host eating the food, making sounds of a delighted palate, and gushing over the dish.  To do so would distract visitors from the content of an exhibit and make a spectacle of what is a supporting component of a larger narrative.   Play it too safe and visitors would remember neither the visual nor the story behind the dish.  Overdo it and the dish becomes a distraction from the rest of the content, not to mention the possibility of criticism about lewd content in a public museum. But get it just right and people leave the exhibit craving the dish.

Such considerations influenced the upcoming Royal Alberta Museum exhibit Chop Suey on the Prairies.  Conveying the essence of Chinese-Canadian food is of core importance to successfully telling the story of Chinese restaurants.  However, the food is only one piece of the Chinese experience in Canada and cannot overwhelm the rest of the story.  The food — whether ginger beef or chicken balls or chop suey — is a reflection of the unique situation of Chinese immigrants to Canada before the federal government repealed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 in 1947.  The dishes that introduced Canadians to Chinese cuisine are a mixture of Chinese cooking techniques, ingredients available in Canada, a willingness of people with non-Chinese backgrounds to try new flavours, and the emergence of a strong Chinese community in the West.  The melding of traditional Chinese flavours with a texture common to English pub food created Ginger Beef, and this is one story the RAM tells at its new exhibit.

Ready to eat the ginger beef.

Ready to eat the ginger beef.

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