November 2008

The museum blog-feed aggregator MuseumBlogs.org, launched by Jim Spadaccini (Ideum) in 2006, is a major source of information about what museum affiliated bloggers think. Due to overload it has now been rebuilt with a lot of structural changes, a somewhat revised interface design, and (claims Spadaccini) much better performance. It now carries feeds from 274 museum-related blogs.

Jim isn’t sure what to do with the aggregated collection of 224,093 posts in the archive: “it may not be worth saving as it contains only partial posts and the majority of the original blogs are still available”. But where else can future blog historians and historians of museology get an overview of the museum segment of the blogosphere in the years 2006-2008? Please, think like a historian would do, don’t delete the archive!

It’s only one year ago that the first commercial personal genome services became available to ordinary customers, thus initiating what might become a new major postgenomic health industry. deCODEme was launched on 16 November, 2007, and 23andMe three days later.

As Attila Csordás points out, the media (and blog) coverage of 23andMe has been far more intense than that of deCODEme. Why? The products are basically similar, so it has probably more to do with their public image. For example, deCODEme has a mainstram commercial-looking website, while 23andMe looks like something that came out of a children’s toy store. It may also have something to do with different personal ‘likability’ factors of the front figures of the two companies (Anne Wojcicki and Kari Stefansson, respectively). And one shouldn’t dismiss the Google-association factor. To add insult to injury, Time Magazíne announced 23andMe’s retail DNA test as “best invention of the year” in 2008.

The number of conferences of potential interest for medical museologists and historians of contemporary medicine is increasing.

Take, for example, the annual conference of the German Society for the History of Technology that will be held at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Offenbach am Main (close to Frankfurt aM), 22-24 May 2009 — on the theme of the history of robotics.

“If ‘the atom’ and then ‘the gene’ were symbols of the 20th century, then ‘the robot’ is that of the 21st century”, say the organizers. (Especially nanorobots, I guess.) The aim of the meeting is to discuss the historiography of robots and robotics and analyze presentations of robots in museums and exhibits.

In science fiction, visions of the future were and are being constructed about the possible use of robots. These visions often show a rather ambivalent view of these machines. Even current robotics casts both positive and negative lights on them. Thus, developers and producers promise that in the future robots will contribute to the solution of such large and manifold problems of humanity as environmental catastrophes or caring for the elderly.

A particularly controversy of the topic lies therein that robots appear not only to be surpassing humans in regards to particular activities, but also to be replacing them: with regard to heavy labor in industry, particular cultural skills such as arithmetic or music, or in social work, such as in the care of the handicapped, children or the sick. Therefore, a challenge is to research if these developments will change the self-conception of people in its relation to itself and to machines.

Possible topics include:
 
History of the vision of the future for robots
Interaction between science fiction and robotics
Historical change in the perception of the man-robot relationship
Robotics in international comparison
Application errors of robotics and its history (industry, medicine, military, service, toy industry)
Historical decisions regarding the use of robots in particular sectors
The sociality of robots
The design of robots in the course of time: humanoid robots as a model?
Historically based technology assessment
 
Proposals for presentations (max. 350-400 words) should be sent along with a one-page curriculum vitae before 6 January, 2009 to Catarina Caetano da Rosa, caetano@histech.rwth-aachen.de.

“Can something that exists with no physical form be considered an object?”, asks Amber Arnold on Sev Fowles’s Columbia University “Thing theory” class web site. The answer is ‘yes, of course’. Computer people operate with virtual ‘objects’ all the time.

Amber’s conclusion — “Although blogs are virtual things in the electronic world, their role in the often emotional conversations of society cement their identity as an object and their importance in our lives” — reminds me that blogs and websites devoted to discussing the acquisition and display of museum objects, are museum objects too.

How to tag this kind of object — a museum object that comments on other museum objects — in our registration data base? Maybe it’s a ‘metamedical object’?

(thanks to Adam for drawing attention to Amber’s essay)

I haven’t had a chance to see the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow yet. But Øystein Horgmo (The Sterile Eye) has just written an enthusiastic comment on their permanent exhibition, ‘A Healing Passion‘, which is based on William Hunter‘s big anatomical and pathological collections.

Like myself, Øystein has no patience for long texts in museums:

This exhibition however, is visual all the way through. They have made a selection of items and use them as a physical basis for a bigger picture, and not the other way around. As a visitor you first see the item on display, for example Joseph Lister’s famous carbolic spray, and then have to actively push a button to get the story of antisepsis. The interesting item itself motivated you to seek more information. I liked that.

I will probably like it too when I see it. There are many good reasons for putting the artefacts in the focus of attention, instead of using them to illustrate some general principles (like illustrations in a book). To let the text follow the artefacts, like in an art exhibition, not the other way around. (The catalogue can be in reverse mode, though).

I think of this as ‘museological empiricism’ and as a wholesome antidote to The New Museology of the 1990s (see Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology, 1989), which emerged as a critique of the former naïve empiricist tradition among collection curators. I call it ‘museological empiricism’ in order to emphasise that it is not a reversal to the old curatorial empirical tradition, but an empiricism that incorporates and transcends the narrativising hegemony of The New Museology.

Adam, Camilla and I are writing a paper together on this topic right now — keep an eye on upcoming posts the next couple of months.

I say “I will probably like it”, because I don’t know if the intention behind ‘A Healing Passion’ is deliberately post-New Museology, or if it’s just a relapse into the old school curatorial empiricism. Øystein doesn’t comment on this.

See Øystein’s post for photos and a fuller description of the Hunterian Museum (not to be confused with the Hunterian Museum in London).

Imaging technology in museums is not just about sublime high-tech artefacts to be admired by the esoteric few. As Bente points out on our Danish parallel blog, one of our most popular imaging artefacts is a shoe-fitting fluoroscope (a “Schucoskop”), on display in our x-ray study collection.

The ‘Pedoskop’ as it was called in German was quite common in shoe stores in Europe and North America from the 1920s to the 1960’s. Customers stuck their feet (with shoes on) into the slot below and could then see an x-ray image on a fluoroscent screen from above. Many of our elderly visitors clearly remember having used such pedoscopes in Copenhagen shoe stores in the 1950s and 1960s. A nice evocative object which releases a lot of memories of times past.

The text above the left foot says: “With Pedoskop right fitting — enough space”, and over the right foot: “Without Pedoskop wrong fitting — too short”.

As the awareness of radiation risks grew (see this paper for a risk evaluation), pedoscopes went out of fashion — in some countries they were outright forbidden.

Jackie Duffin and Charles R.R. Hayter have written a nice piece on the rise and fall of the pedoscope (in Isis, 91: 260-82, 2000). From their abstract:

One of the most conspicuous nonmedical uses of the x-ray was the shoe-fitting fluoroscope. It allowed visualization of the bones and soft tissues of the foot inside a shoe, purportedly increasing the accuracy of shoe fitting and thereby enhancing sales. From the mid 1920s to the 1950s, shoe-fitting fluoroscopes were a prominent feature of shoe stores in North America and Europe. Despite the widespread distribution and popularity of these machines, few have studied their history. In this essay we trace the origin, technology, applications, and significance of the shoe-fitting fluoroscope in Britain, Canada, and the United States. Our sources include medical and industrial literature, oral and written testimony of shoe retailers, newspapers, magazines, and government reports on the uses and dangers of these machines. The public response to shoe-fitting fluoroscopes changed from initial enthusiasm and trust to suspicion and fear, in conjunction with shifting cultural attitudes to radiation technologies.

(the whole article is available on JSTOR).