Moving to Digital Space

With the completion of the physical Ellingson exhibit came the near immediate transfer back to the classroom and start of a project to move everything from the physical into the digital.

It was a new experience, as anything related to the class is. The long process of digging through archive, formulating a story, creating labels, and the organizing into a case was over, but so was the most arduous process of any exhibit creation. The sheer amount of time spent in the Archive, obsessing minutely over the most tiny detail of the title, date, description, and source came to fruition. With all items chosen, labels made, and metadata waiting to be formatted, the first move to the digital space was seamless.

Omeka is an open source content management system for online digital collections, and makes the process of inputting information as easy as possible. It allowed for the easy creation of a collection titled ‘Mark Ellingson’, which then acted as a common link for all the items in the physical case. Each item needed an image, a label, and metadata, but fortunately, all of this came with the creation of the physical exhibit and creating six separate items was as easy as copying and pasting from a spreadsheet. With properly named files, images of the items were added, and the Mark Ellingson collection of the RIT Museum Studies Omeka page was created.

Incidental Learning… Incidental 𝕸𝖚𝖗𝖉𝖊𝖗?

While working on this project, I’ve learned quite a few things about Nathaniel Rochester, Rochester the city, and RIT/Rochester Athenaeum.  Nathaniel Rochester, as he’s more well known, is one of the principle people who founded the city we now know as Rochester.  He along with two fellow friends purchased a 100-acre tract of land which would eventually become the nucleus, or center, of Rochester.

As it is known, Nathaniel Rochester was one of the main people who founded the Rochester Athenaeum, as well as he was the first president of the Athenaeum.  The most interesting I’ve learned about Rochester and the Athenaeum was pertaining to the creation of the Athenaeum – the beginning of RIT.

Chart of the Institute, Dane Gordon RIT History book.  Charts the institutes that lead to the modern RIT and campus.

The Rochester Athenaeum was the offspring of a few members of the Franklin Institute, who were Masons.  However, what caused this offshoot was what surprised me.  William Morgan, who was a Mason and did the masonry work on Nathaniel Rochester’s downtown house, was kidnapped and later murdered (or thought to be murdered).  This disappearance and suspected murder led to the split between Masons and non-Masons in the Franklin Institute, thus leading the remaining Mason members of the Franklin to create the Athenaeum, which would become RIT.

Dane Gordon RIT History, page 7.  Details on Morgan’s death and how it connects to the creation of the Athenaeum.

Portfolio Overview

Projects:

Project 1:

https://twitter.com/RITmuse/status/916377751657107456

Project one I was not sure what to think about but did I enjoy myself. I really enjoyed having to to the research about my topic, I had fun designing the cases, and I really had fun working with our class. My only problem was that I had to work on my own a lot and it was a bit of a scramble for materials at the end. But I am glad I was able to do this project. It really helped me understand what Metadata is and what goes into making an exhibit. Overall it taught us the innerworkings behind exhibits and exhibiting, and introduction to metadata, and to think about the visual setups behind putting together an exhibit.
Project 2:

Omeka.net

Project two was difficult but also fun. Working on Omeka, Drupal, and WordPress was an interesting venture. Overall I ended up liking Omeka and WordPress more because they were a lot more user friendly and easier to navigate. This project helped me better learn Metadata and how it works, How to build a good website both for online exhibitions and information, and helped me explore what is out there to work with.
Project 3:

http://agreenthumbandaproblem.omeka.net/

I think this was my favorite however. It really helped me throw myself into my work during a bad situation and focus on something I really enjoyed. Exploring how to work with Omeka was fun and (incidental learning) I ended up teaching myself some HTML in the process! I got a lot better at metadata by this point as well. This project helped us look into things that were important to us and set it up like an online exhibit. This helped the class prepare for if they had to make an actual online exhibit and how they would do so.

Cultural Informatics Project One

For Project One of Cultural Informatics, we dove in head first, partnering with the RIT Archives to create not just a catalog of metadata or an online exhibit, but selecting materials for both an online and physical exhibit, designing both exhibits, cataloging the materials for our exhibits, writing exhibit texts, and laying out our physical exhibits (and, if you’re nitpicky like me, planning out your item titles so your online exhibit was arranged the way you wanted).  Now, we didn’t get free reign to pick our topics– we were allowed to choose from a preselected group of RIT related collection from the Archives– and I was somewhat put out to be assigned Milton Pearson (pictured above), who was a photography student in the late 1950s, early 1960s.  But I did my best to work with what I was given and I was very pleased with how my exhibit turned out, despite it not being my first choice.  

But, as it happens, fate has a funny way of coming back around, and I was given the opportunity to design an exhibit on my first choice, the students of 1966, which I titled the “Spirit of ‘66.”  I was even more pleased with this exhibit than with my exhibit on Milton Pearson and I was excited to do it because we finished our exhibits just in time for Brick City Homecoming, and actual students from 1966 were going to be able to see my work on display in the library.  I was equally surprised and excited to learn that Milton Pearson’s son came to Brick City and saw my exhibit, then gifted more of his father’s school-related items to the Archives.  I was happy that he liked my exhibit and wasn’t offended that I chose to focus more on student finances then and now, rather than exclusively on his father.