September 2008

When I hear the word ‘curator’ I usually think of museums. Museum curators are the sort of knowledge workers that take care of stuff in collections and make exhibition narratives possible.

Now I’ve just learned about another — different yet similar — kind of curators. The background is the current enormous growth in the generation of data from life science research. Large-scale sequencing, high-throughput gene-expression analyses, and mass-spectroscopy projects produce huge amounts of gene and protein sequences and other bio-data.

It doesn’t take much thinking to realise that the usefulness of all this data-generating research depends on the scientific community’s ability to make sense of the massive amounts of raw data scattered among millions of scientific papers and hundreds of data bases.

Here’s where the new kind of curators come into the picture. A recent article in Nature (Howe et al., ‘Big data: the future of biocuration’, 4 September) discusses the emergence of “a growing cadre of biologists — ‘biocurators’ — who manage raw biological data, extract information from published literature, develop structured vocabularies to tag data and make the information available online”.

When I read the article it struck me that there are some interesting similarities between museums curators and biocurators. A central aspect of data-curating is annotation — so far, however, says the Nature article, annotation efforts have been limited by a perceived lack of incentive to do the job: “A mechanism tied to career or research advancement may be required before community curation can be established as a broadly accepted and productive scientific endeavour.”

In other words, what is needed to speed up bio-curation is “improvement in academic reputation or impact, career advancement and better funding chances”. Further, academic departments and funding agencies “should consider community annotation as a productive contribution to the scientific research corpus and a natural extension of the publication process”.

Sounds like a parallell to the situation among museum curators. They too are working in the shadow of university scholars. Curatorial work in museums doesn’t have the same reputation as university research. So whether you work as a museum curator or as a bio-curator, you risk being invisible among ‘real’ researchers/scholars and suffering a lack of scholarly status.

Wonder if this has something to do with the fact that curatorial work is ‘care work’ (from Latin ‘cura’ = care)?

Read more in Nature’s special issue on ‘Big Data’ here.

The Lentos Art Museum in Linz, Austria, has just opened an exhibition called ‘Ecology of Techno Mind’ curated by Slovenian “art-is-the-evil-of-culture” curator Jurij Krpan (thanks to Ingeborg Reichle for the tip). It contains, among other things, an array of art works relating to biotechnology and computerized medicine made in order to “eine Welt im Wandel zu verstehen” [to understand a changing world].

What’s interesting from a medical museum point of view is that the Linz exhibition (according to the website, I haven’t seen it IRL) tries to navigate between “die Total-Faszination von Wissenschaft und Technik” [the total fascination with science and technology] and the “Resignation und Feindseligkeit gegenüber Technik” [resignation and hostility toward technology]; it’s dealing head-on with biotech and medicine but not from the angle of “Fetischismus” or “Romantisieren von Interfaces und elektronischem Kabelsalat”. Sounds like a familiar problem for science, technology and medical museum curators :-). Maybe we could learn something from how Krpan, Director of the Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, handles this sensitive issue.

Tomorrow, Tuesday 9 September at noon, we’re having a lunch seminar with Sebastian Abrahamsson, doctoral student at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Sebastian will speak about ‘Dead bodies in science and art’ — a topic which is very central to our research and exhibition work here at Medical Museion, so we’re expecting a lively discussion.

Here’s Sebastian’s abstract:

My research is interested in the ways in which dead human bodies are transformed into artistic and/or scientific objects.

As a point of departure, my project maps the work of an artist (www.angelaspalmer.com) who – together with museum curators, radiologists and Egyptologists – has been working with a mummy child making his body and journey the focus of an art exhibition in a gallery in London. This work brings this particular body through a set of heterogeneous milieus (museum, hospital, studio, and gallery) and environments – each with its own practices, routines and experts – thus changing the significance and interpretation of the body at each stop that it makes: going from museum object to aesthetizised sculptures.

Secondly, I look at the changing status of dead bodies (educational and scientific specimen turning into contested and controversial human remains) in British museums, taking Manchester Museum and their Egyptian collection as an example. Recently three of their unwrapped mummies were covered, provoking massive public reactions (mainly negative). The museum curators had clearly taken a controversial decision, but why this outrage? Here I argue the mummies become the focal point of a sort of public experiment, the outcome of which is still to be decided.

As a final example my project looks at Von Hagens’ Body Worlds as the site where a scientific/educational and artistic ethos come together to stage an encounter with dead bodies, where the above distinction between art and science is more or less erased. Out of these three examples emerges the question concerning how we can experience encounters with dead bodies differently.

If you want to attend, please call our technician Folke Jørgensen at +45 3532 3822, who can give you more detailed info about the location of the seminar room in Fredericiagade 18, Copenhagen, and how to get into the house. Bring your lunch! 

(Image above from Angela Palmer’s website)

Just a few words about the upcoming conference ‘The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship’ at Deutsches Museum in Munich, 27-28 November 2008 — a follow-up on the conference Research and Museums that was held in Stockholm in May last year.

It will be an interesting conference because — by bringing together exhibition makers, museum experts, designers, artists, cultural studies scholars and historians of science and technology — it addresses the core issue in our work here at Medical Museion, namely, the interplay between research and museum work. Two of us (Martha and myself) will present papers.

The motto of the meeting is: “No exhibition without scholarship”. In other words: museum exhibitions aren’t just about visualizing results of historical and other kinds of museum-relevant research results; they also stimulate academic scholarship and generate new research question and new knowledge:

How can researchers take advantage of this opportunity? In which way can scholarly arguments be translated into spatial arrangement and at the same time kept serviceable for reading and citing by later recipients? What might the results of the scholarly examination of an exhibition look like? Unlike for printed texts, the traditional publication media of scholarship, common standards of terminology and argumentation for exhibitions have yet to emerge. What exactly is the role of the objects on display? Recent history of science and technology has intensively interrogated the epistemic quality of these material sources of research. Yet how do the objects unfold their properties in being staged for exhibition purposes?

Sessions:

1) What is this thing called exhibition? Reflections on object, text and space

• Ulrich Raulff (Marbach), Old answers, new questions: What do exhibitions really produce?
• Jochen Brüning (Berlin), Exhibitions vs. publications. On scientific achievements and their evaluation
• Martha Fleming (Copenhagen/Toronto), Thinking through objects
• Commentary: Lorraine Daston (Berlin)

2) Stories on display. What and how do we see in exhibitions?

• Uwe W. Brückner (Stuttgart), Scenography – opera as model for integrative design
• Stefan Iglhaut (Berlin), Story telling and scenography: Strategies of science communication in exhibitions
• Commentary: Anke te Heesen (Tübingen)

3) History of science, objects, exhibitions: Interrelations, transitions, transformations

• Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin), Making visible. Visualization in the sciences – and in exhibitions?
• Ulrich Großmann (Nuremberg), The Challenge of Objects – CIHA Congress 2012. The object in the focus of arthistorical studies
• Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen), Do things talk?
• Commentary: Falk Müller (Frankfurt)

4) More than history of science?! Exhibitions, research, and the public

• Mosbrugger (Frankfurt/M.), Natural history research and exhibitions – a hermeneutical cycle
• Robert Bud (London), Power, belief and trust: a context for scholarly priorities in the history of science
• Ad Maas (Leiden), Tearing down the altar. A new view of displaying scientific intruments in Museum Boerhaave
• Commentary: Jochen Hennig (Berlin)

5) Making exhibitions: Concepts, constraints, critique

• Jürgen Renn (Berlin), Exhibitions as history of science in action
• Walter Hauser (Munich), Artefacts, visuals and topography as evidence: Working on an exhibition on nano- and biotechnology
• Thomas Schnalke (Berlin), Arguing with objects. The exhibition as a scientific format of publication
• Commentary: Karsten Gaulke (Kassel)

The conference is organised for the Max Planck Research Network ‘The History of Scientific Objects’ by Helmuth Trischler, Christian Sichau and Susanne Pickert at Deutsches Museum. You are welcome to contact Susanne Pickert at s.pickert@deutsches-museum.de if you want to attend.

There are many ways of finding biomedical images on the web for exhibition use, and some are better the others.

Getty Images, which is otherwise a fantastic online repository of professional high-quality images, is practically useless for a small museum like ours. Search ‘protein’, for example, and you get over a thousand images of eggs, tofu and pork meat and other everyday stuff associated with proteins, but very few scientific images — and the few they have are excruciatingly expensive (the cost for using a single ‘beautiful’ electrophoresis image is around 600 USD). I dare not reproduce even a thumbnail size image from Getty Images here because we risk being persued for violating their intellectual property rights; in fact, I’m not even allowed to show their company logo!).

Wellcome Images is much more useful for our exhibition purposes. Search ‘protein’ and you get over 500 images of protein molecule models, fancy microscopic images, high-tech protein research instruments, and so forth — like this image of a computer-enhanced analysis of a 2D protein gel (credit: Nicoletta Baloyianni; Wellcome Images). They’ve also got some good images of protein-rich food items and other everyday stuff. And best of all for a poor university museum like ours — their images are freely available for download under a Creative Commons licence.

Both Getty Images and Wellcome Images are collections of ‘beautiful images’ — that is, the kind of immediately aesthetically pleasing pics that science magazines fill their pages with and scientists like to hang on their office doors. The Yale Image Finder search engine developed by Michael Krauthammer’s lab at Yale Center for Medical Informatics is different (read more about the project here). It allows you to find the image content of (presently) some 35,000 open access articles from PubMed Central by key word searches in figure texts, captions, abstracts, titles and even full article texts. For example, searching for ‘protein’ in captions and figure texts gave 19,000 hits, like the Western blog analysis image to the right.

Yale Image Finder is developed as a tool for scientists, not for curators. Right now it’s somewhat bothersome to use, because you have to sift through so much material. But it gives you rapid access to hundreds of thousands of close-to-the bench kind of images which do not find their way to Wellcome Images, and as such it may become a useful supplement to the ‘beautiful image’ online repositories.

Ever thought about building your own collection of medical wet specimens? Spending your evenings and gloomy sleepless nights in the garage putting your family’s and friends’ pickled organs and body parts in jars? Founding a clandestine horror show?

Well, it’s not for real. Yet. It’s another Halloween idea:

(from I Make Projects.com; thanks to Paul at NMHM for the tip)

Have forgotten to announce the ‘Physics meets biology’ meeting at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 18-20 November 2008. Interesting because, as the organisers say, collaboration between physicists and biologists has generated a host of fascinating philosophical problems; e.g., they often disagree about the role of hypothesis in research, what an explanation is, etc. Such differences have practical consequences for interdisciplinary research and also for the border area between applied physics and biomedicine. The Edinburgh meeting brings together physicists, biologists, historians, philosophers and science policy makers; confirmed speakers include Evelyn Fox Keller (Science and Technology Studies, MIT), Kevin Dunbar (Psychology/Brain Science & Education, Dartmouth), Steven French (History and Philosophy of Science, Leeds), Michel Morange (Biology & History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, École Normale Supérieure, Paris), Gregory Radick (History and Philosophy of Science, Leeds), Otávio Bueno (Philosophy, University of Miami), and Darrell Rowbottom (Philosophy, University of Bristol). More info on http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/pmb2008.

We are right now preparing for the next exhibition, Design4Science. It has been on show in Sunderland, Manchester, Cambridge and Stockholm — and will open here at Medical Museion in mid-January 2009.

It strikes me that we actually have two in-house names for it. Usually we call it Design4Science, but sometimes some of us speak about it as “Shirley’s exhibition” with reference to the fact that it has been curated by Shirley Wheeler at the University of Sunderland.

What’s the difference? Well, the first is the way we usually refer to exhibitions. To speak about them in authorial terms is not so common. There is something about exhibitions — as opposed to books, films, theatre performances, operas etc. — that speaks against putting the curator (the auteur) in the center.

Authorial intention used to be a minefield. In 1946, Wimsatt and Beardsley coined the notion of the ‘intentional fallacy’, i.e., that literary interpretation shouldn’t assume any authorial intention (in other words, no biographical readings of literary texts): “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art”. Twenty years later Roland Barthes took New Criticism a step further by declaring the author to be ‘always already’ dead (‘The death of the author’, 1968).

For decades, poststructuralists decentered the author as the originating source of meaning for the literary work. Authorial intention was a tabu area for most of the second half of the 20th century. But we live now in 2008 and authors are live and kicking. Fiction writers are cultural celebrities, biography is a popular best-selling genre, even academically respected. Poststructuralism is so last decade.

But what about museum exhibitions? Have they ever suffered from the attack on the ‘intentional fallacy’? Has there been a new criticist tendency to disregard the intentions of the exhibition curator? Has there been a poststructuralist decentering of the exhibition curator?

Or maybe the questions are wrongly stated: Maybe exhibition curators have always already been decentered — and still are. Maybe the discussions about intentionality and the ‘intentional fallacy’ never really reached the museum world, because the auteur never has, and still doesn’t, play the same role in the collective mind of museums audiences as it does among book readers and critics?

In other words: When did you last read an exhibition review that focused on the curator instead of the content of the exhibit? Cf. how most book reviews center on the author and film reviews circle around the instructor.  

Any ideas?