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Analogy: Turn Into the Spin

Often my chat sessions are little writing consultations. Well, to be perfectly honest, they're less writing workshops than therapy sessions where we coach each other through our hangups. But that's all part of the game, right. My experience of these things is that if writing is going bad, we feel like things are spinning out of control: our inability to start keeps us from starting, then  deadlines loom, and the stakes are raised even higher which makes the writing even harder. 

In these situations, your response to this tailspin is to try to get out of it by turning against it. This feels natural; it's a bad situation and you need to get out of it to get your work done. 
But an excellent RadioLab Short gives the lie to this tactic. This short tells the amazing story of Lincoln Beachy, the first pilot to loop-the-loop. But that's not the story here. The other thing Beachy learned to do was this:

Then one day, while working as a mechanic at an airshow in Los Angeles, he got his big break: a star pilot got hurt, and Beachey leaped in to take his place. He shot upwards, 3,000 feet into the air…and his motor failed. He went into a nose-diving spin that no pilot had ever survived. And he did what no pilot had ever done: he turned into the spin, regained control, and landed safe and sound.

This has reframed my understanding of how to respond to the tail spin of stress, writing, and deadlines. Instead of fighting to turn out of it, you gotta turn into it. This is a variation on the "The only way out is through" dictim, but turning into the spin is visually distinct. I find it really valuable, because for me it means that instead of forcing yourself to redirect, you face your spin and find the deeper hangup. Like pilots before Beachy, writers don't really escapes a tailspin by fighting it. They just set themselves up for a future spin. Instead, turning into your spin might help you prevent those spins. At the very least, it should help you get out of it much earlier than usual. 

What's the Title of Darwin's Book? Biologic Irony and the Power of "the"

In an exhibit on how the Nazi regime used natural selection and hereditary principles to justify eugenics and carry out very evil deeds, I found it ironic that the exhibit refers to Darwin's book as On the Origin of the Species.  

Misidentifying the as "the species" seems to indicate that the whole book is about human evolution, when in fact Darwin barely mentions humans at all. As a result this copy does harm by contributing to a misunderstanding of what Darwin does. More importantly, once humans become the central point of Darwin's text, then suddenly the core text of evolutionary thinking suddenly looks like he might have been commited to eugenicist principles. The irony is that in an exhibit showing the horrors of eugenics movement, this misrepresentation in fact provides a subtle rationale for eugenics thinking: it makes possible the assumption that at its core, evolutionary thinking is tied to eugenics.

Odd that this exhibit doesn't  accurately represent Darwin, while the Creation Museum does.

Is History Enough? Dissociation and Nazi Science

At the risk of asking a rather naive, dangerous question, I couldn't help but think about whether this emotional history was effective. I ask this because to me the core of this exhibit is that it is dangerous for politicians to apply scientific principles for the "good of the population." And yet, this is exactly what we do all the time: we set health standards; we talk about curbing diabetes and obesity; we make laws about sugar, carbs, fat, and salt; we incentivize healthy people with lower health insurance premiums; and we select mates (in life and in the sperm bank) based on pedigree.

Lombardo's talk made this even sharper, because many famous, many smart people have in the past have pushed eugenics. This doesn't make it right, but it does indicate it is appealing. 

My problem with the exhibit (and this gets to the heart of the issue about representing science) is that the history doesn't do enough to help us think through these issues. Even though eugenics becomes evil, we leave and we can't draw lines between the practices we see in this exhibit and the opening scene of Idiocracy (a scene that has heaps of traction). 

 

This is partly a bioethics question. But it's also a question of dissociation. Hearkening back to my Race exhibit, there I analyzed how it distinguished between race as a biological reality (which doesn't exist) and race as a social construction (which does). That dissociation was roughly carried out, but the core of its purpose is really important. In Deadly Medicine, however, eugenics is evil, but then we leave the exhibit and begin to think about some of the same ideas that led directly to the eugenics movement. Some of the ideas about the health of the population seem to make sense. Yet the exhibit gives us no tools with which to draw these lines or make these distinctions. Where does eugenics start and stop? How are we able to say that science over here is doing good work improving the health of the population and over there it's doing dangerous work we must stop? By seeming to lump all thinking about the health of the population under the heading of "eugenics," we are left with an emotional response, but we are not provided the tools to think through these larger, very important and very current issues. 

Quick Thoughts on Deadly Medicine

Last Thursday I re-entered my European researcher mode and attended the opening of the Deadly Medicine exhibit at the University of Michigan's medical library. This is a traveling version of the larger exhibit from 2006. I missed it when it toured to the SMM, and I've regretted it because I had hoped to contrast it with the Disease Detectives exhibit from the dissertation. The exhibit was accompanied by a presentation by Lombardo, who discussed the notorious US Supreme Court Case Buck v. Bell. It was an enlightening presentation, and he enriched the history of this story in really fascinating ways. For all the exhibit's concern with Nazi use of eugenics, Americans were really the origin and source for many of their ideas. And many states still have sterilization laws on the books. 

I don't want to spend a heap of time on this, but here are some quick, rather unformed thoughts about my response to this exhibit. 

The Valence of Evil  This is a very sad, very emotionally powerful exhibit. This story is not one we really know about, and getting the sense that children and families were murdered, not just by Nazi soldiers, but by nurses, doctors, and others who should be doing good, is particularly striking. This exhibit is one reason why Sarah Palin's utterly false claim that Obama's plan was going to create "Death Panels" is so frightening.

Pathos As a result, this exhibit is nearly all pathos, the effect of which is that both the Nazi regime and the eugenics moment acquire a much stronger valence of "evil." To this end, it's vey powerful.

Quotation Marks This exhibit uses quotation marks throughout. I dug this, because one of my criticisms of the Race exhibit was that even as it defined “race” as a social construction, it continued to reify "race" by leaving the quotation marks off. Oddly, Deadly Medicine uses quotes for nearly everything but the relaxed use of "race" itself, a move I need to think more about. 

An Amazing Exhibit? While this might be just a common overstatement, when the library team that brought the exhibit to Michigan introduced the speaker, they referred to the exhibit in terms that surprised me. They implied it was really amazing. While the story itself is super powerful, I didn't get a sense that the exhibit experience was amazing. And what struck me was that the little fold out pamphlet that accompanied the exhibit actually does an "amazing" job of capturing exactly the argument, history, and narrative of the exhibit. So, my question is, again, how impressive can the experience of an exhibit be when it can easily be distilled down into a takeaway brochure? The only difference is size, scope, and the presence of videos. Is that enough?

Where Are They Now? The exhibit's final panel is titled "Aftermath," and in the organization of the space at the health library, you see this title before seeing the panel itself. This led me to expect something different than what I got. The Aftermath panel follows a documentary approach by describing what happened to each of the seven or eight doctors profiled throughout the exhibit. One was tried for war crimes and hung. One escaped to Brazil. Another got some prison time. But the majority continued to practice medicine in Germany, a fact that offends our sense of justice. 

This end panel annoyed me for a couple of reasons. First, my experience of the exhibit hadn't given any priority to these men and women. I hadn't seen them as the exhibit's main characters. To me, all the men and women and children who were murdered were the main characters, but unfortunately a "where are they now?" segment wasn't necessary for them. 

The second problem, for me, was that this approach consolidated the evil of eugenics into these few scientists. This consolidation was offset to a degree by the diffusion of the evil to all the unnamed doctors and nurses that helped out, but there's an odd cathartic sense at the end when the exhibit essentially says: these doctors and scientists were the core of the problem. 

What did I want? To preview my next point, I wanted us to see aftermath of the real character of the exhibit: Eugenics itself. To me, the point isn’t simply historical, it’s philosophical, it’s scientific, it’s more broadly educational. It’s here that I wanted a real meaningful discussion of eugenics and the politics of the science of health.

My Valentines Gift: The Word Game

The Word Game is a game I play that makes language more personal.  Here's the deal. Most words have personal associations for us. this game asks you to publicly inflect language with those associations by sharing stories with other people. This makes language yours together. It's a great get-to-know-you game and an especially fun way to get to know the people you already think you know well. 

Number of Players: 2+

Ages: No limit

Materials: None

Rules

1. One person selects a word. Novice: Person Place, or Thing. Experienced: add Verbs and Abstract Terms. Advanced: Random.

2. Take turns doing one of two things:

a. Describe a memory that the word triggers.

b. Create a new story based on the associations the word creates.

3. Repeat

Note: This game can be played through conversation or through writing.

Analogy: Why Tom Brady Teaches us to Appreciate Structure

The other day I walked into my advanced writing class and told them how much I love to read and think about structure. They looked at me like I was some kind of little puppy that couldn't climb the stairs. So I went to a metaphor to explain why I get so excited about outlining. This is what I told them.

We often have this experience of reading something that's well-written and thinking, "Dang, this is genius, I wonder how he or she did it?" This is the same thing we feel when we see a good speaker. Because they don't read this way or really pay attention to speakers, I gave them something else: Think about Tom Brady. You watch him play football (yes, even in the Super Bowl where he set the record for most consecutive passes), and you're amazed. Or you should be. He's really good at what he does. How does he do it, and why can't others do it so well? He does it well because he understands the structures of the NFL, the plays, the possibilities, the formations, the available options. He acts within and responds to these structures very effectively. Tom Brady isn't an arm in motion, he's a mind assessing patterns. In writing (as in football), this is the power of structure: it allows you to select ideas, facts, and arguments and order them to be most effective for a context and an audience.  

Now compare Tom Brady with Tim Tebow. Tim Tebow doesn't understand structure. He's the arm in motion without a grasp of what's happening around him. Tim Tebow is like the writer that pulls an all-nighter to finish the paper. It works occasionally because Tim Tebow has the raw talent to throw together a paper and say some interesting things. But here's the rub: give Tim Tebow some structure, let hem understand plays, and possibilities, and formations and structures and suddenly that raw talent turns into "consistently good."  

My main message was that getting to grips with structure demystifies greatness in writing and in football by showing you that good writers (like good football players) are good because they understand patterns better than you do. But appreciating it means you can begin to master those patterns yourself. They're just patterns, after all!

There's an additional point here about creativity that's also relevant -- the idea that constraints and structures charge a different kind of creative energy -- but that's a thought for another day. 

Mummies and the Scientific Process

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I love exhibits that talk about the scientific process. The latest was a small exhibition inside the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History on mummies. It was nicely done, with an ending that I really found fun. 

The opening panel ends with this typical statement about the process and the extent of scientific knowledge:

Learn about some of the techniques scientists use today to study our scientific exploration of the mummy of a young Egyptian boy we have named Umi. Through modern scanning technology, radiometric dating, and rapid prototyping, we take a close-up look at Umi's body and two dozen artifacts beneath the linen wrappings. While science does not give us all the answers detailing his life and death, our research has provided many clues about Umi -- and even a few surprises.

We get a hint at techniques, specific methods, and limitations of what we can know. And we're enticed! 
The bulk of the opening section of the exhibit is essentially a really nice technical description. (What is a mummy?, Mummy Chemistry, How are mummies studied?, The role of paleoimaging, etc.)

Because this museum came quick on the heels of my experience at the Creation Museum, it was hard not to compare the two. In this light, two things struck me about the opening section.

First, the admission that science doesnt have all the answers is a very common trope in exhibits of this sort. But these moments are really fascinating to me, because in one brief sentence they offer up the paradox of scientific authority (a paradox that the Creation Museum takes unfair advantage of). 

Recently, this paradox became the core of a proposal. My case went like this:

On the one hand, the science museum dispels doubt, ignorance, and uncertainty by designing exhibits that inform visitors about what science knows. In so doing, the science museum asserts the authority of science as a body of knowledge. On the other hand, in their multidimensional, hands-on, interactive galleries, science museums promote a form of inquiry based on a fundamental appeal to what we don't know and don't understand. In so doing, the science museum cultivates a sense of science as a practice that emerges from uncertainty. Museums often accomplish both of these tasks (sometimes in the same installation) through the appeal to wonder and the use of questions, which provoke open exploration or prompt definite answers.

Exhibits like "The Science of Mummies" that point to the edges of scientific understanding simply sharpen this paradox. Here it does so in a rather non-chalant way. It doesn't make a big deal of the fact that it's walking a very fine, very subtle line between what science knows and what it does not. 

We're all comfortable with this distinction -- science knows and yet doesn't know -- until the Creation Museum sticks in a wedge, and separates the two.

The second thing that struck me about the opening of this exhibit is really a question, perhaps with interesting implications. The exhibit points to two primary methods used to understand mummies: DNA testing and radiometric dating. DNA is ignored completely in the Creation Museum, but Radiometric dating is one of those things that it criticizes by saying that it is "based on assumptions." It doesn't disclose what those assumptions are or why they might (or probably don't) undermine the data radiometry provides.

So the question: What does a creationist do with an exhibit like this? Do they dispute the use of radiometry here? Do they dismiss it, saying age can be determined another way (contextually, for instance)? Honestly, it's hard for me not to expand way beyond the scope of this particular topic: how do creationists handle the speed of light, because if we agree with the speed of light, then telescopes indicate that the universe is _much_ older than they're dating system allows. This gets flip pretty quick, but if radiometry can't tell us how old rocks are or how old dinosaurs are, then it can't tell us how old mummies are, either, right? Surely I'm missing something.

Anyways, while the Creation Museum assails radiometry too easily, "The Science of Mummies" tries to explain how it works: 

Radiometric dating is a method of providing absolute dates for organic archaeological materials based on the decay of radioactive isotopes. In modern archaeology, the majority of radiometric dates are derived from calculating the residue of a radioactive isotope of carbon called 14C. Radiocarbon dating is based upon the principle that all living organisms contain a constant proportion of 14C. 14C is no longer replenished when the organism dies, and 14C begins to decay t a constnat rate known as a half-life. If one knows the "half-life" and the amount of radioactive carbon left, then the absolute age of a specimin can be calculated. Because the actual amount of atmospheric radioactive carbon has fluctuated throughout recent times, these absolute dates are normally calibrated using curves established through dendrochrnology, or tree-ring dating.

Here the museum attempts to explain some of those fundamental "assumptions" that the Creation Museum fails to identify. And again, like in the introductory panel, there is clearly an element of uncertainty -- the need to triangulate findings -- that might make us question the value of these methods. 

Here's what I want: I want a list of things that collapse, things from from science, medicine, and technology that no longer make any sense or are not possible when you jettison ideas like radiometric dating and natural selection. I want to know how those things are blackboxed into the everyday world of creationists. I want to make an argument like this: the same principles that x-ray your teeth, attack your cancer, fly your plains, and understand the solar system are based on the very ideas that they reject. I want to say: If you fly in an airplane, you can't be a creationist.

I'm now far afield, but you can see how visiting this museum has really colored my reading of other galleries. 

So, back to the point. The general process approach in this exhibit was used used to talk about how science can determine the age of the mummy. Like all questions, this one makes us care, here about process. In a sense, then, we walk thorugh this gallery with the expectation that we'll get an answer at the end. So, how does it end? After all this talk of methods and research and evidence and the real mummy itself, the final panel is titled: How old is Umi's Mummy? Our Hypothesis.

When I encountered this panel, even I laughed: after all that, all we get is a crummy hypothesis? But there's more! We also get a description of the scientific method.

The panel begins:

The scientific method is how scientists conduct their research. The first step is observation, which leads to the development of a hypothesis. The hypothesis has no validity as an explanation, but is important in designing experiments. The best experiments are conducted to disprove the hypothesis. However, if repeated experimentation supports the hypothesis, the hypothesis is accepted and is then called a theory.

A bit basic for my tastes, but better than nothing, and it's rarely so well explained. The final bit of the exhibit is also fascinating for what it says about process and knowledge. 

Drum roll please... The radiocarbon age of Umi's mummy is 80-210 CE (AD) or 1,740 to 1870 years old. This is at least partially within our hypothesized data range. The 130 year carbon range actually represents one standard deviation (or variation from the mean) with a 68% probability that the actual dates would fall within that range. At two standard deviations, the range increases to 60-240 CE (AD), but the probability of the actual date falling within this range is now 95%.

Not exactly scientific certainty. Definitely based on some assumptions. But can we live with this? I imagine a creationist in this exhibit would be completely flummoxed. 

Curation and Pitt Rivers: Starting a Conversation

When I visited the Whipple in Cambridge, my contact there mentioned in passing that the museum didn't want to be thought of like the Pitt Rivers museum. Because I didn't make the connection immediately, I inquired what she meant. For her, the Pitt Rivers Museum was a trope epitomizing an outmoded approach to collection. When I visited Oxford, I immediately understood. 

A few things mark this museum. First, it's dark. The museum actually rents flashlights so you can really see into the cases. Second, the organizing principles are so different from other museums. For example, I love razors, so I liked finding this case:

A friend and I have been pondering the meaning of curation, collection, and the role of curator and audience. Pitt Rivers, I think, is a useful point of reference for understanding these relationships between collection and curation and the public. Here we can see what an old model of display does, and we are able to better understand the gradations of exhibits that move away from simple cases of related stuff.

Pitt Rivers has a very basic curatorial framework: objects organized by similar use -- swords, maces, human dolls, razors, shields, etc. Before we had a sense of the scope of things, Pitt Rivers captured what seemed like a useful snapshot of human stuff. From here, we start making more distinctions -- historical, cultural, material -- into which these groups of objects can be separated. But even this initial framework is curation: the application of an organizing principle to a collection of things. It's not as sophisticated as the Linnean system of binomial nomenclature, but it's a start.   

To an extent, this kind of organization sparks our curiosity, but it then leaves us unsatisfied, because the cases fil to communicate use, culture, history, or construction of any of these things. They're simply and functionally related.  

We don't often catch glimpses of this kind of structure. Museum collections are now taxonmized, organized, and presented with narratives. In the Rivers museum, the visitor marvels and makes meaning. Someone has grouped these objects together, so the collection part isn't within the visitor's purview. But visitors are left to make sense of the cases. 

Full of Steam: Tall Tales, Technology, and American Culture

If you watched the Paul Bunyan film, you'll find yourself, as I did, rooting for him against the steam saw. Really, can anyone even think of rooting for the steam saw? When I saw this on filmstrip as a third or fourth grader in the library at Jackson Elementary School in Sheboygan, I was outraged. Upset not only that Bunyan loses, but mainly because Paul should have added another part to the competition. I remember thinking, "Wait, what about the stumps? They weren't even part of the race!" Add in Bunyan's singular ability to stomp stumps, and the steam saw loses hands down. Every time. Especially this time! It's not even a question.

So when it came time to prepare my Technology and Culture class at Kettering, I returned to this little film, because for me it captures perfectly the American anxiety about technology.

Later, as I was reading around, I came across an article by the great Carrol Pursell who noted something similar. He doesn't include Paul Bunyan in his list, but he sees in the tall tales of John Henry, Mike Fink, and Stormalong some key affinities. The most important of these is that all the heroes represent some kind of older technology that loses out -- in one way or another -- to steam power: Mike Fink's keelboats get displaced by steamboats; John Henry, who dies with a hammer in his hands, is replaced by the steam drill; and, like John Henry, Old Stormalong, the captain of a whaling sailing ship, dies in his victory over the steamship. The Disney version of the Paul Bunyan story fits exactly into this same narrative. In each case, the hero is vanquished by steam power, and thus their oversized, overpowered spirits no long roam our land and sailing our seas. 

Pursell notes:

[…] if these were indeed authentic folktales (and this could not be safely assumed), they might represent a deep tide of artisanal unease that ran against the flood of national self-congratulation over the technological “progress” of the nineteenth century that was deskilling a large number of workers, with social and political as well as personal costs that could hardly be calculated. I never followed up on that hunch, but sometime later I found the tools with which I might have done so.

Pursell captures the larger, more important point that I saw when I returned to these cartoons. The frustration I felt as a kid (and, honestly, still feel) is that we don't often see what we lose when we adopt technologies. My students struggle to see this -- often dismissing it as too pessimistic. But the loses of technological progress are very real. And they're very often hidden by the fact that your iPad2 has made it easier to do a multitude of things. 

Yet for a moment, when you watch these films, you feel, deep down, that the advancing technology has ruined something. The values and skills and real spirit of a core part of America -- John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Old Stormalong -- are made to disappear. And as much as we can say these heros stand in for skilled railworkers or lumberjacks or sailer, then that way of life, that way of thinking, those values and skills and entire ways of life have disappeared. You don't see it if you only think in terms of the tools -- the hammers and axes and steam saws and their utilitarian purposes -- because then all you'll see is progress. After all, who wants to dig a tunnel with a hammer or cut down trees with an axe? 

But in celebrating Henry and Bunyan, the cartoons and stories first celebrate the values and the lifestyles and the ways in which each of these men shaped our country. Banishing or killing them is, in a sense, a loss of the soul of this country. That is, after all, what the what folktales capture: the core values and meanings of a place, a time, a people. 

In the end, then, what I find so fascinating about these Disney films is that they evoke a response out of step with our usual technological optimism. We'll likely forget these feelings moments later. My students do. During the mid-course break, they don't talk to each other. Heck, they barely even get up any more. Instead, they get out their cell phones and talk to anyone else who's not in the room with them. We might remember these lessons as the number of books in kids homes dwindle or when we get excited receiving a real letter or when we notice the subtle loss of our important skills in younger generations. These films, then, serve as a nice reminder, an emotional appeal, creating a deep attachment to the idea that technologies aren't always for the good, and that we should try to remember what they so often displace.

Pursell, Carroll W. "Technologies as Cultural Practice and Production." Technology and Society, Volume 51, Number 3, July 2010 pp. 715-722.

Full of Steam: Tall Tales, Technology, and American Culture (a teaser)

If you're a child of the 80s (or, since these were made in the 50s, a baby boomer), you might remember these short Disney cartoons of Paul Bunyan and John Henry:

Paul Bunyan (Part I)

 

Paul Bunyan (Part II)

 

John Henry (Part I)

 

John Henry (Part II)

 

When Winning is Losing: the Legacy of Science and Technology in the Race to the South Pole

The other day I was wondering about the significance of this project. I probably return too often to the "So what?" question, but it's productive as long as I remember to turn into it and not away from it. This particular time I went back to an early exhibit from last year's visit to New York. Race to the South Pole was a traveling, non-photographable, blockbuster exhibit at the American Natural History Museum. It traced the competition between the two teams -- Amundsen's from Norway and Scott's from Britain -- who vied to be first to the South Pole. 

I loved the shape of this exhibit. It coiled you from the ocean, through the expedition prep, into the hardships of the journey, and, after arriving at the south pole and discovering who won, it uncoiled you back out. This was a controlled route, but the narrative was dramatic and visitors were given cards at the start so they could follow one team or another. This added a competitive spirit to the exhibit. Kids raced ahead to see if they'd "won" or not. 

The relevant historyis that Amundsen won handily. His fleeter, simpler team outpaced Scott by a month, and the Norwegians made it out alive while Scott's entire team perished in the Antarctic winter.

But the insight isn't that this exhibit does a fantastic job telling this story. The insight has to be bigger, better. So what's curious is that this isn't a celebration of Amundsen's victory. It's really a celebration of science and technology. And in that "race," Amundsen wasn't the winner. Even though the research station in Antarctica is named after both explorers, the real leagacy is Scott's. 

Amundsen went to Antarctica to win the race; Scott wanted to win, too, of course, but he also had another purpose: to do science. It's this legacy that the BBC reported on.

Amundsen's team didn't do this. They got in and got out. They brought traditional gear and animals that worked better. Scott, on the other hand, innovated. He tried out new things -- snow machines and horses, both of which weighed him down and slowed his progress. So the final lesson of the race isn't how traditional methods can sometimes serve our ends better than new technologies (a lesson I'd love to see a museum tell).

The real lesson is how Scott's mission established scientific exploration on Antarcitca. And the exhibit ends with this legacy by displaying the scientists who are currently researching and studying there and some of the advanced technologies they're using. The celebration, then, it's epideictic function, is only partly about about the journey. It's more accurately a celebration of science and technology. Amundsen and Scott are just the means to get us to this bigger point.  

Now we must ask, so what? Isn't this what we'd expect to find? Does it surprise that the exhibit uses the pretext of the race to inculcate values about science and technology? It doesn't seem so surprising to me. What do you think? Useful? Or do I return and find a better point?

Left Behind

This is from a small diorama of the flood at the Creation Museum. The ark is in the background, but what struck me was this rock (there were two others, similarly gory) and those poor souls left behind when the flood occurred. And the tigers, like two special forces of the animal kingdom, which have efficiently murdered (not for food but for vengence) all the people behind them. Were they really necessary? 

On Routes

I visited the Creation Museum with the idea that it would serve as a sort of starting point for this project. I imagined it would throw into relief the fact that museums are rhetorical and then illuminate how they are rhetorical.

Because I experienced it so directly, I want to talk first about exhibit routes. I've discussed  this before, so I won't recap some of the broad ideas. Here's the point.

Because the events museum's sponsor in support of their exhibits can be illuminating, I specifically went to the Creation Museum on a Saturday so I could catch a presentation titled "Is Genesis Relevant Today?" I got to the museum at 1. The talk was at 3. I figured I'd just jump out of the galleries when the talk started and jump back in afterwards. But at 2:55, when the the final reminder went out, I was deep in the belly of the museum, stuck in the route. 

When I sped up to get to find an exit, I was suddenly skipping rooms and major portions of the exhibit. After about three minutes of fast walking, something happened. I felt like I was spoiling the museum, giving away the story and the narrative, and I slowed down. Then I realized that to return to the point where I "left" the route, I'd have to begin all over again. These two realizations stopped me, and I walked back to where I had stopped reading and skipped the talk. 

This experience heightened for me the authority, power, and control inherent in strong route-driven experiences. Never before had I felt so limited in my movement or in my ability to escape an exhibit. Never before did I feel the ideology of the place so thoroughly. I've often felt frustrated by the lack of narrative in free choice exhibits, but the deep justification for their structure was made clear at the Creation Museum. 

But the next day, at the Cincinnati Natural History Museum, I experienced a very similar controlled route exhibit -- the Ice Age Trail. Here, however, I didn't feel the same weight or control and authority problem. Even though many of the exhibit tropes were exactly the same, the content didn't turn me off, so it was easier to ignore the fact that I was being guided. In this way the Creation Museum highlights the way the rhetoric of space sharpens our assessment of other kinds of narrative spaces. It's not enough to criticize the use of space in exhibits that we disagree with. We must also assess the way it works in spaces where we're comfortable. The Creation Museum makes strange.

How Should Museums Respond (part II)? Playing with Latour's "Object-Oriented Democracy"

I've been meaning to follow up on something from The Blogora. I've been waiting until I had clear sense of how to get after it, and today after doing some writing, I sat down with Latour's Introduction to the "Making Things Public" collection and worked my way through it. 

Here's my starting point from Reid's post: "It means asking how we create technologies that allow us to see and compose arguments differently, with a cautionary eye toward a nonmodern, object-oriented democracy."

My initial reaction is "Oh, museums could do this!" A thought quickly followed by the realization, "museums, right, perhaps the most modern of institutions..."

Yet the museum is exactly the space where Latour is trying to work through these ideas. His essay is the introduction to an exhibit catalogue. His advantage in curating a genre-defying show is that he gets free reign to do what he wishes, drawing in heaps of scholars to help shape his "assembly of assemblies." But it's a start, a provocation. And my task is to return to those first two thoughts and take seriously Latour's ideas for this ever expanding project of mine. 

First, a summary, always a necessary task with Latour. In this essay (and in the exhibit), Latour seeks to explore the possibility of what he calls an object-oriented democracy, one where we realize that objects aren't just objects, they are things. This distinction requires us to see the social and political inside the objects and facts that surround us. One of his examples makes this distinction very well: when Columbia sat on the launching pad, it sat like a real, factual, solid objective object. We knew what it was and what it was going to do. But once it exploded, it exploded that initial conception of its objective status; Columbia was, in fact, thoroughly infused with NASA's bureaucracy. 

Taking the social life of things seriously is the starting point for a call to arms where we see in things the significance of the political. It means that assertions about those things must be met with other assertions; they can't be taken on faith or at face value. But this isn't simply a call for renewed critical thinking; it's really a dramatic shift in the way that issues get framed, explored, and negotiated. It requires a new rhetoric -- a new way of organizing, assembling, and thinking. The shape this will take is unclear, but I want to use Latour's notion of "cohabitation" to re-explore the question about how natural history museums might respond to the challenge posed by the Creation Museum.

We'll start with the confusing: By cohabitation, Latour means that we've replaced "the time of Time" with "the time of Space." Clarification: time (i.e., progress) no longer orders things, space does. In Latour's rendering it, under "the time of Time," we could wait for things like creationism to go away. It was, mind the expression, just a matter of time. But the object-oriented democracy means that space is the new ordering principle, which means things are contemporaneous, they cohabit, they won't disappear. And since they don't go away, the challenge then is how to combine as much as possible together so that comparisons are possible. In Latour's exhibit, this occurs through the assembly (collection and display) of assemblies (those institutions and places where the public becomes political). 

Latour's exhibition works on a meta-level. Almost every exhibit I've encountered does something different: they make specific arguments, focus on one side of the issue, employ traditional rhetorical moves. They do not take the stance that Latour is advocating. Nothing surprising there. But that's modern museum practice. In their early days, museums were simple cabinets of collections. They were crowded with objects, hardly curated, and not rhetorically framed to make points. Instead, they were idiosyncratic representations of one collector's construction of the natural world. Museum visitors to these spaces didn't read them; they participated in thinking about the relationships among the assembly. After visiting, things in the museum might change, both inside and outside, for the representation of the natural world that was constructed inside the museum helped to shape our understanding of the world outside the museum's walls. So long as we remember their social core, this is what Latour wants us to do with modern things.

Now we can talk about the Creation Museum and the Natural History Museum. I concluded earlier that taking seriously the challenge posed by the Creation Museum would mean alienating audiences and stirring up controversy. But that conclusion was based upon an imagined exhibit that tried to take down the creationist standpoint. Latour's notion of cohabitation implies a different kind of exhibit. The mindset that creates my imagined exhibit helps along someone who says (and this is Latour's language), "Don't worry, all of that will soon disappear; they're too archaeic and irrational." Instead, Latour offers a new voice, one that says, "You have to cohabit even with those monsters, because don't indulge yourself in the naive belief that they will soon fade away; space is the series of simultaneities, all of that has to be taken into account at once."  

In short, my imagined exhibit (and its imagined failures) remain wedded to the old paradigm. So, can we imagine what this would look like under Latour's new paradigm where everything is contemporaneous? This is where it becomes difficult, because if anything, I am a person of the old paradigm -- I like outlines, topic sentences, arguments, narratives, structure, conclusions, etc. Knowing all of that will only get in the way of my attempt to truly make things public, I'll take a stab at it.

It's an exhibit that takes no global critical stance on evolution -- it's not an evolution exhibit, and it's not a creation exhibit. It illuminates the thinking and argument on both sides, but not simply in order to achieve a rapprochement of viewpoints. Rather, it's an exhibit that brings together the things we use to think about our origins, our development, and our relationship to nature. It lets no one off the hook.  It does so to illuminate the way things work in a democracy. It assembles those things and the arguments that each of these frameworks use. It's a space where both audiences would feel welcome, where they are assembled so that both sides can cohabit the space and experience the politics of evolutionary things.  It's a space where an evolution exhibit or a creation exhibit would themselves be put on display as things.  It's an exhibit that displays other creation stories, other narratives of our origins and development. It would allow visitors to compare different types of representations. It would seek to convey "an eloquence much more indirect, distorted, inconclusive" (Latour 20). It would convey the human struggle to make sense of both the natural and moral universes. And in this way, it'd be a very human exhibition of things. 

Question: Graduate School and the Writing Life?

My experience is that writing for deadlines and assignments doesn't promote a daily writing life. Instead, it creates momentum that often doesn't carry over past the deadline. Or maybe it does, it just never has for me. So I'm curious if graduate school -- that place of deadlines -- can do more. If your graduate program helped foster you as a writer, what in particular worked? If your program didn't, what could it have done differently? I'm thinking mentorship, course design, assignments, writing groups, etc. How did you transition from graduate student to writer? And, finally, how can graduate programs better cultivate the writing life?

A Writing Prompt

Start here, see where it goes:

"Scars mark moments. Or whole measures of time."

Admitting Natural Selection, Denying Evolution: Ramifications of the Creation Museum's dissociation on the public understanding of science

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited." -- Plutarch

Even though Men in White, the opening propaganda video at the Creation Museum, explicitly mocked scientists and teachers, I was surprised at the extent that this museum took science seriously (indicated in part by its use of archaeology discussed previously). This, I think, emphasizes the museum's aggressive rhetorical approach; it knew its enemy. And however dishonestly it did this or however asymmetrically it applied its method, I have to admit that something striking happens in this museum regarding the public understanding of science. 

In the middle of the museum and against all my expectations, the museum grants the truth of natural selection. The confusion this generated for me initially is hard to overstate. In a fundamentalist Christian creation museum, one that takes as literal truth the story in Genesis that the universe was created in seven 24-hour days and that believes the earth is only a few thousand years old, in that same museum, Darwin's core idea -- natural selection -- is accepted as fact. This seemed a dangerous and admission. The Bogeyman Darwin was welcome here.

A few fascinating things occur when the exhibit makes this move. First, the museum no longer seems completely "anti-science." It seems more reasonable. Science, after all, knows some things, and the observable changes that result from the processes of natural selection cannot be denied. Accepting this fact is a brilliant move. Even better, the museum's panel on natural selection doesn't seem that problematic. It says: 

Natural selection is the name Charles Darwin gave to an observable process, which results in small changes in the plant and animal world, such as fur color or plant height. 

A common perception popularized by many scientists is that natural selection is a primary mechanism for evolution. According to the National Academy of Sciences, "Natural Selection ... can have radically different evolutionary effects over different time scales.

Darwin believed that given enough time (millions of years) natural selection could lead to large changes (such as a dinosaur evolving into a bird) and was the underlying mechanism of unobservable molecules-to-man evolution. However, natural selection and evolution are different concepts, though today many mistakenly interchange the two. 

I emphasize the last line, because this is the second fascinating thing that occurs in this portion of the museum: it rhetorically dissociates these two concepts. And before continuing on, try this exercise: Describe the difference or even the relationship between evolution and natural selection? Are evolution and natural selection two different concepts? How are they linked?  

In a second panel, the museum employs definition, quintessential dissociative technique, to distinguish the two concepts:

Natural Selection -- the process by which plants and animals that possess as set of traits that have a survival advantage in a given environment pass on that advantage to their offspring (such as traits for fur color or plant height). These offspring then survive to reproduce in the next generation. 

Evolution -- as commonly defined today -- is the idea that all life on earth has come about through descent with modification from a single-celled common ancestor. We refer to this as molecules-to-man evolution. Inherent in this process is the requirement for the origination of new genetic information as organisms evolve from simple to complex.

Again, on the face of it, these quite serviceable scientific definitions add to the exhibit’s ethos. Yet the definitions aren't just informative, they're thoroughly rhetorical because the second one on evolution builds in the seeds of its own demise (at least in this context) -- the requirement of "new information."

In order to establish the dissociation, the rest of this exhibit goes on to try to demonstrate that while natural selection is observable (note the recurring emphasis on empirical data that, again, is not symmetrically applied), evolution cannot generate new genetic information. A few panels will show the visual and textual aspect of this dissociation.

 Then this portion of the exhibit concludes:

Ok, so there's obviously a lot more to say about the way the exhibit employs rhetorical dissociation to separate natural selection from evolution.

What is fascinating to me at the moment, however, is the exhibit's combination of reasonable scientific description and museum authority that is at work here. The reasonableness and serviceable definitions of evolution and natural selection establish the museum's scientific ethos -- we're not anti-science, we get this stuff. But that ethos is then used to make assertions that are not clearly explicated, described, or documented -- why the creation of "new information" is a problem. Thus, the crux of the exhibit's argument hinges on the authority of assertions we're not given the tools to assess.

And to be honest, I was stymied. In this moment, I had no counter-argument. I wasn't prepared to explain where this exhibit goes wrong, even though I knew it must. Is it impossible for natural selection to create new information? And what does that nebulous concept "information" even mean in this context? And how would scientists explain this problem or show that it's a non-problem? What I wanted was for this exhibit to explain why this was the case, not simply that it was the case. Yet for someone interested in the public understanding of science, who has read books on evolution and Darwin's Origin of Species, this exhibit made clear my complete inability to explain or answer or argue for how natural selection and evolution are related. In this context, I felt frustrated, inadequate, like a failure (and even now embarrassed to even admit these things).

Two really important things happen as a result of this experience. First, it suddenly flipped my world. Just as I knew this exhibit was wrong but couldn’t explain why, a creationist in a natural history museum might have a similar experience. This experience made the ideology and appeals to authority of both institutions suddenly clear. My frustration indicated my trust in the authority of science. That trust was based on inadequate knowledge. Hence my embarrassment: I really felt the “science is just another faith” argument. 

But there’s something to take away here. I'd ask: how can science museums learn from this experience and create better exhibits that work honestly and from the ground up to explicate concepts and processes? Relying too much on museum or scientific ethos fails to convince, since in the opposite context, it clearly failed to convince me. Thus the Creation Museum indicates that all museums must do more to make way for a different type of understanding, one built through rhetorically savvy exhibiting.

This leads to the second and closely related important effect. The rhetorical definition and dissociation at the core of this argument creates (at least for me) a true moment for understanding science. The exhibit's rhetorical moves enhance an experience of "needing to know". Through its rhetorical framing and dissociation, this exhibit initiates a real, honest inquiry process, the core of which is to truly understand the relationship between evolution and natural selection. So what this experience does for someone who doesn't believe the museum's case is to illuminate a real lack of understanding and to take seriously a problem that I didn't really think I needed to grasp. This is the second lesson that science and natural history museums can be learn from this exhibit: rhetoric can be used to  manifests meaningful exigencies for advancing the public understanding of science. The power of the Creation Museum's continual poking at what seem to them to be fundamental problems at the core of the scientific project create a real need to understand. This is powerful, and should be harnessed. This museum fills the vessel-mind of those who want to "know," but for me it lit a fire.

Kettering Updates

Exciting things afoot!

A new website!

And something I helped with last year paid off yesterday when we were informed that the Baord of Trustees revised the University's bylaws so that faculty can now serve as non-voting members on Board committees. This is a big win for us.

I am a writer?

At the risk of jinxing my current writing practice, I wanted to put down a few of the things that are currently working for me. That way, when this all comes tumbling down, I'll remember that they were once true. What's funny is that none of this is new; I've heard it all before. But the experience that it works makes it feel true, really, for the first time. I hope that, too, can be a lesson I remember.

Get in the chair. Ok, I admit it, fifteen minutes a day is a totally workable philosophy. More often than not, I write for longer and get out 1000 words or more.  

Write until you earn the beer. This one started in Europe. When I went out for a drink at the end of the day, I'd sit with my notebook and write until something seemed interesting. All I needed was the kernal of an idea. Those turned into longer blog posts back in the dorm. This game got me started. Now I realize it's hard not to write and earn the beer. Writing is generative of writing.

Make prompts. Each of those earned beers becomes a short topic -- an idea worth developing. Keep a list of these ideas. Each one should be developable within 1000 words or less. When you can't write anything, look back at your list of ideas and see where you can get in 100 words.

Don't lean too much on deadlines. Graduate school really failed to instill in me the habit of writing. We wrote too often for assignments and deadlines. While the pressure of deadlines can motivate, I find it never encourages my best work. Deadlines kill creativity, because you don't feel like you have room to write around. Daily writing, writing to develop ideas rather than complete assignments, allows you room to explore. 

Write without editing. The typewriter has changed my life. I spend less time with it now because I'm more comfortable with it. Now after a page of typed text I swivel over and start revising on the computer. But having it there keeps me moving. Experiencing this way of thinking, forcing myself to keep writing into my problems has meant more productive thought and less pausing to make sure the prose is right.

Imagine an audience. I don't think anyone really reads this blog, but because some of my most thoughtful friends have read it in the past, I still imagine they're with me. This raises my game and holds me accountable to more than just daily rambles (even if these are just daily rambles).

Ask yourself a question: How is what I'm doing right now moving me toward my goal? I came across this question on the pool deck while stretching before a workout.  It's clearly how I think about my time in the pool -- improving streamlining, obsessing over hand positions, etc. But I hadn't really asked it regarding my work. It's a scary question, but if it gets you in the chair writing once a week, then it's done its job.

Leave the house. This term I've accepted the fact that I don't get much done at home. Getting up and getting to a coffee shop (and leaving the computer at home) has been eye-opening. It now happens weekly.

Find a partner. Add a partner to coffee shop time and accountability skyrockets. Add headphones if you're too chatty. Take breaks to share exciting ideas or talk through structural problems. 

Chart it. However you want to do it, log your writing. Seeing the days or minutes or pages or words or whatever add up is really motivating. I track it right along with my swimming.

Celebrate it. Use rewards. Though, to be honest, coming home at noon with a full day of writing under your belt is really the best reward. I didn't realize how much guilt I had about "failing to write" until I started writing. 

Own it. You're a writer, damn it. Tell people you're writing. Work on it. Watch it. Read it. Practice. Be brave.

How should museums respond (part I)?

Say we take the Creation Museum's purpose and arguments and flip them, creating an exhibit in a natural history museum that takes religion seriously but tears down creationism. What would this look like? How would it be received?

The fact of the creation museum looms large, larger than it probably should. After all, even I wanted to use it as a starting point. Yet it's really a religious institution, fighting for a very specific and very narrow reading of the Bible. It's not a scientific institution. So does its existence mean museums should take it seriously?

Since most large natural history or science museums are funded at least in part by the state, building an anti-creationist exhibit would not be well-received. It would alienate a significant portion of its audience, because even those who do not accept the creationist view would likely find this sort of exhibit as anti-religion. The distinction between creationism and religion would be too hard to establish. The Creation Museum doesn't have this problem. It's inherently alienating, and it doesn't mind. It's successful because (and when) it strikes across the mainstream. 

Yet there's a portion of the museum audience that flails against a non-creationist account, that, like me in the creation museum, will immediately throw up walls when faced with a view of evolution they do not accept. What responsibility does the museum have to this audience? And more pointedly, what responsibility does the museum have to audiences that respond to science with despair?

I tried to work through this the other night using an analogy about wine and wine tasting (I was talking about it with Liz). It didn't really work. My idea was to say this: the science museum doesn't promote a godless world or threaten religion or undermine life's deep meaning; it's agnostic about such questions.  Rather the creationist brings these problems to the science museum. They're the ones unfairly assessing science for things it doesn't place in its purview. But this is why the Creation Museum is a powerfully persuasive and science museums remain rather traditional institutions of the enlightenment. 

Yet meaning is front and center at the Creation Museum. The route alternates between sciency rooms and rooms that directly point out the moral issues at stake. Visitors face what happens when science and evolution trump creation and challenge the Bible. So, after pointing out that different starting points and different, the CM doesn't pull punches; Using a rhetorical question, it goes right to the core of their problem:

So would it be appropriate for museums to get into the meaning business more fully? To make the argument that science provides a way of thinking about our lives that supports a moral stance?

After visiting the creation museum and reflecting on it, I find its confidence and appeals to authority a bit brazen, and its representation of science mind-bogglingly frustrating. And yet at the core of this institution is a very deep defensiveness, a defensiveness not found even in the evolution exhibits I've described as defensive. So I have no clear answer to what museums should do in response to an institution like the creation museum or the larger intelligent design and creationist movements. Experiencing the power of the Creation Museum made me realize the stakes. But is the museum the site where the battle should be joined? I'm not sure. By largely ignoring it, the science museum grants the Creation Museum the upper hand; by engaging it, the museum threatens to alienate audiences, becoming a specific site for the controversy. Perhaps the approach they've taken -- the small installation on meaning or responding briefly to creation science -- is appropriate. 

The Rhetoric of the Polar Bear Question

I was photographing this polar bear in the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History (a staple of these museums; doesn't this one look like he belongs in Scooby-doo?) when I noticed the family nearby was testing out different gloves in ice water to see how polar bear fat keeps them warm. I wanted to try, but I find doing such things alone in museums kind of awkward. Them: "So, why are you visiting today?" Me: "Oh, I study you guys for a living." Then I do my best "researcher squint."

As I made my way on, I overheard the museum staffmember ask the family a question. I was curious, so I listened: 

On average, how many penguins can a polar bear eat in a day?

What do you think? Got an answer? Good.

Here's a thing about me: I love questions. They're such powerful tools for rejiggering your thinking or illuminating a point. A well-formed qeustion is half-solved. I forget who said that. One of the coolest things I picked up a few years ago was The Interrogative Mood: A novel? by Padgett Powell. It's nothing short of brilliant. 

So questions shock thoughts because we assume there's an answer. I explored this in the Race exhibit. There the exhibit started off with the basic question: What is race? And because we're conditioned to answer with something substantial, something definitive, when the exhibit responds with "Race is a social construction," we find that the question wasn't entirely honest. Yet the experience is powerful, for it clarifies something fundamental about what race really is. "Is" here denotes being, existence, core features; "social construction" denotes just the opposite.

So, how many penguins can a polar bear eat (on average) in a day?

The answer, of course, is zero. Polar bears live in the arctic, penguins in the antarctic. I would argue (because this is what happened to me) that being tricked by such a question creates a more memorable experience. It is much more memorable, I believe, than questions like: "Where do polar bears live?" or "Where do penguins live?" or some other exhibit prompt. The experience of being set up to fail helps us remember important geographic knowledge. 

What's the rhetoric of trick questions? And how can I use them more often in my teaching to provoke, shock, and promote learning?

Exhibit Writing as Excellent Technical Writing

This example, from the first section of Ocean in Paris, does a nice job of showing why excellent exhibits are based on excelent technical writing skills. This is why museums should take our discipline seriously and why our discipline should continue to take seriously the communication practices of museum exhibits.

Leveraging Archaeology in an Asymmetrical Application of Scientific Thinking

I spent a surprising amount of time in graduate school concerned with an odd question: What's the scientific status of archaeology? The question emerged because of my work with the Mysteries of Catalhoyuk exhibit at the SMM, an exhibit on the post-modern archaeological methods ongoing in Turkey. My argument then and now is that the representation of archaeology in this exhibit -- of the cultural and social approach to thinking about what archaeology does and knows -- is one of the most sophisticated pictures of science I've seen in a museum. But was this kind of archaeology really science? Is a post-modern, post-structuralist anthropologically infused archaeology that goes post-post-process a good example of the scientific method? Simple answer: Yes, because it's put on display in a science museum. 

Now that I've visited too many science and natural history  museums to count, I continue to be surprised at the way archaeology is used to set up the basic ideas of science. It seems that the drama of digging, finding, collecting, cataloguing, and inferring things based on evidence is an efficient way to capture science as a way of looking and thinking. (See forthcoming post on archaeology at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History.)

So it wasn't really a surprise to see the open diorama of an archaeological site as the starting point and centerpiece of the Creation Museum's route (read: tightly controlled argumentive pathway).

Because I honestly don't feel equipped to really tear down the museum's approach here, let me describe what it does and what it means. 

The key move in this opening section is to put science and religion on the same footing: both begin with assumptions and both lead to different conclusions. What's fascinating is the use of this very traditional diorama and an appeal to "nature" to make this case. The main panel here states,

Dinosaur fossils don't come with tags on them telling us how old they are, what they ate, or how they died. We have to figure that out from a few clues we find.

On its face, this seems a rather nice way to introduce visitors to the scientific method, for it gets right to the heart of the problem of science: making inferences about things in the natural world based on signs and evidence. 

Just as the first two sentences here capture the foundations of scientific thinking, the next one subtly undermines it: "But because we never have all the evidence, different scientists reach very different conclusions, depending on their starting points."

But does this undermine a scientific worldview? After all, we never have all the evidence -- that's why science never stops, and it's true that different scientists work with different assumptions and, as a result, come to different conclusions. The history of science -- if viewed through the lens of Kuhn's paradigms -- is exactly this shifting of assumptions. So there's nothing in this panel that's problematic. Place it in a museum on the historical development of science -- one that explained Kuhn's paradigm shifts -- and it'd be a sophisticated way to engage the visitor. In short, then, this can be viewed as a very scientific opening, because it takes seriously a fundamental problem in the theory of scientific knowledge: how do we know from the evidence we see?

In the context of the larger museum, however, it does something else. Instead of setting the visitor up for an historical discussion of the development of science, this panel creates the provokes the level of doubt -- what can science really know and can it be trusted?  But the devious use to which this set-up is put isn't clear initially, at least not as clear as it will be later. Other panels in this room carry the theme, using evidence from the present to raise questions about the past. And this seems honest. For example, look at how the fossil of Lucy (Australopithecus) is introduced:

Again, this is not atypical, and if I found it in another museum, I'd praise it for the way it gets to the key questions and sets up  a discussion of how science knows. 

But the purpose of the set up is quickly made clear. It boils down to this question: which starting point would you rather rely on, fallible man or infallible God? 

Perhaps going out on a limb, but anyone attuned to a religious worldview -- and probably  many who aren't -- wouldn't choose to turn down the starting point of an infallible, omniscient being. Absolute ertainty is, after all, very comforting.   But the same appeals to "evidence" in this opening section quickly go out the window. We are not allowed to ask any questions about the evidence for God. We can't ask, for instance, "What do we know about God?" and we can't make parallel statements like "Evidence for God's existence doesn't come with tags" or even "But because the bible can be interpreted differently, different people reach very different conclusions based upon what they start with and what they include." There's a lack of symmetry here that's dishonest, which is where I get hung up. Science has no problems thinking about and honestly presenting its own epistemological hangups. It thrives on this. But you can't apply a deep skepticism to science and then let it go when you turn toward another way of looking at the world. The assumptions, in a sense, aren't equal. But the museum wants to make them so.

Why are there different views about the age of dinosaurs?

It all comes down to starting points: Where would you rather start?

This picture, I have to admit, isn't wrong. This is exactly why there are "different views." But the interrogation of both those views must be given the same airing. And if they're not, then this is dishonest and dangerous. It's an application of valuable critical thinking (how does science know?) to one side of the equation but not the other. It's the application of two standards. This is why it's not symmetrical. 

This exhibit, then, leverages the scientific drama of digging up dinosaur bones to go deep, hitting on the core problem separating a creationist view from science. It's a highly effective way to set the scene. Incredulity established, you won't be surprised where the exhibit goes next.

The Creation Museum's Introductory Trinity

Dinosaurs! (technically outside the museum, but it is the first "museumy" thing visitors encounter. The dinosaur appeal never fails.)

Control! Authority! Check yer t-shirts!

Religion!

And these together preview the false natural history, the assertion of authority, and the selective nature of the museum's religious content. 

The Humanities and Entrepreneurship -- Framing an Argument

Introduction

With entrepreneurship and innovation continuing to serve as key terms for the second decade of the twentieth century (see Obama's 2012 State of the Union address), it is no surprise that universities and colleges have embraced this momentum, with programs and courses popping up at institutions across the country. Within this growing educational movement, the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN ) has set itself apart by securing an important niche establishing and promoting an entrepreneurial mindset among future engineers. The KEEN model recognizes that not everyone should or will become entrepreneurs. It is a model that results in a sophisticated, real-world cultivation of innovators across a wide spectrum of industry and skill levels.  

The KEEN model is also well positioned to take advantage of the expanding interdisciplinary movement in higher education. Most entrepreneurship programs exist in specific departments, offer courses, minors, majors, and certificate programs that reach only those students who choose to pursue a specific path. KEEN's goal of infusing the principles of entrepreneurship through wide-scale curricular reform recognizes that "innovation occurs at the intersection of disciplines" (Kriewall 16). By extending the principles of entrepreneurship across the university experience, KEEN's model harnesses the interdisciplinary power of inherent in the entrepreneurship experience produces graduates prepared to innovate.

However, KEEN's interdisciplinary approach has a distinct challenge. Unlike entrepreneurship programs housed in local departments, KEEN's goal of curricular reform does not come ready-made with faculty, champions, and the prestige and power of institutional spaces. This flexibility allows KEEN to have wide-reaching influence, but to achieve its goal, it also requires a degree of disciplinary buy-in not required when entrepreneurship has a formal location and departmental mandate. In short, KEEN's model requires commitment and support from departments and faculty members who might not identify with the principles of entrepreneurship. Often, that problem of buy-in can manifest as active resistance. While these challenges can emerge from a  variety of places in the university, because these principles threaten to shift the pedagogical value of their courses and programs, one of the most challenging academic audiences to win over are those faculty in the humanities and liberal arts.

The Sources of the Challenge

KEEN itself has recognized this problem. In the flagship article of its journal JEEN, Kriewall and Mekemson admit that "KEEN leaders have run into strong resistance from key campus constituents" (15). While Krewall and Mekemson do not indicate the specific source(s) of this resistance, my experience as a part of the KEEN initiative at Kettering University has indicated that a portion of that resistance comes from faculty in the liberal arts.  The challenge of integrating the humanities in general is also indicated by the general lack of voices from the liberal arts in the pages of JEEN (The Journal of Engineering Entrepreneurship) and at KEEN's national conference, the outlier being MSOE's presentation there in January of 2012. 

The source of the resistance to KEEN's curricular mission can be located in two places, one general, one more specific. First, is the general resistance to the economic hyper-pragmatism of business and entrepreneurship that has begun to pervade higher education. There is a very real concern that the economic model (paired with the "student as consumer" model) fundamentally alters the nature of the educational experience. Thus, KEEN's attempt at curricular reform embodies a larger cultural shift in higher education that many who remain committed to the traditional, civic-minded goals of a liberal education actively resist. Importantly, though it might find its strongest source of resistance there, this reaction is not limited to departments in the liberal arts. 

But the challenge of buy-in among faculty in non-technical fields is not solely a result of individual mindsets, commitments to the liberal arts ideal, or political and economic outlooks. The second problem with securing commitment to the KEEN mission is found within within the mission itself. Even though Kriewall and Mekemson recognize the interdisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship and admit that those in non-engineering fields "have much to offer to the entrepreneurial mindset," KEEN's stated "Attributes of an Entrepreneurial Mindset" fail to reflect or make clear room for the contributions other departments might make (16).        

The most obvious attributes in KEEN's list relevant to faculty in the humanities include items like tolerance for ambiguity, leadership, ability to resolve conflict, altruism, prescience, creativity, maintain high ethical standards. Each of these can be fostered by courses in fields like history, sociology, literature, philosophy, rhetoric and composition, political theory, among others. But there are two problems. The first is that these attributes are not distinctly linked to the humanities, which means that KEEN does not meet those faculty half-way. Because all of the above attributes can be conveyed in technical as well as non-technical courses, KEEN has failed to recognize the specific and unique contribution from the faculty in the humanities. As a result, those faculty must accommodate course themes and assignments to a set of goals that aren't a clear fit. This is exacerbated by the second problem, which is that those attributes are framed under headings like "Business Acumen" or "Understanding Customer Needs," a framework which quickly becomes unpalatable to faculty who wish to explore the way story-telling creates a shared vision or who wish to encourage students to tolerate ambiguity, but not simply (or even primarily) for shortsighted, economic reasons. 

Perhaps the most glaring instance of this is the role KEEN grants communication in the list of attributes. The importance of communication to a successful entrepreneur cannot be overstated, and yet writing, speaking and listening skills have been collapsed into a single item, with technical, economic, and business attributes comprising the majority. Communication faculty -- many of whom already appeal to the practical value of their courses to engineering and business students -- will be glad to find their discipline valued here. But by collapsing three skills into one item, KEEN does not afford them the respect or the space they deserve. After all, listening, writing, and speaking are at least as distinct as design synthesis, design characterization, and design verification, but these last three listed separately, which grants them an emphasis not given to the distinct communication skills. So not only do some non-engineering faculty initially resist incorporating principles of entrepreneurship into their courses, they will also have a difficult time time seeing how what they do is truly valued within the KEEN framework. This is true even where the humanities faculty can find what they do in the list of attributes. Thus, because KEEN has yet to fully recognize the potential of their unique contribution and make room for it, faculty in the humanities must contort themselves to fit a series of goals that are not their own. 

Fortunately, KEEN's interdisciplinary approach is flexibile enough to address these challenges. My task in this article, then, is two-fold. First, by drawing on research relevant to a number of non-technical fields, I intend to demonstrate the ways in which scholarship in the humanities and liberal arts enriches understandings of entrepreneurship. The purpose here is to show how KEEN's learning objectives can be extended to reflect and make room for that contribution. Second, I will then describe how KEEN's recognition of that contribution can be used as an appeal to faculty who might not see how their work or courses are relevant to entrepreneurship. To do this, I will be drawing from my experience at Kettring University, both as a communications and liberal arts faculty member and as a participant in our KEEN initiative. 

The Foundry, Day I: Confined Spaces

The foreman met me at the gatehouse. Mike, short with a mustache and an air of quiet annoyance, probably thinking "Another college kid..." He escorted me past the fence and into the choking and fuming and looming foundry. From the streets on the other side of these buildings -- the streets in pristine Kohler, WI -- you'd never know the grime and machines and noise was there. The ivy covered walls of the foundry on that side seemed civilized. On the other side, it was 5 a.m. late May. Still dark for another hour. This place, though, was alive. I was walking into a hell. 

Gear

Inside, I was assigned a lock and a brown mesh metal locker among banks and banks of the same. Mike handed me a generic pair of striped blue and grey coveralls, fire retardant, never to be worn twice. As I put on my coveralls and black boots with protective metal tongue that covered the laces, Mike attached the mesh face protector to a bright smooth blue hard hat. Then he set it on my head, adjusted it, and told me to never take it off up on deck. Next came a pair of tough leather gloves, dark as night sunglasses, and a black respirator. Change the filters every day, he said. New filters are up on deck. New gloves and earplugs, too. 

Orientation

Down and I was quickly lost. Rumbling, rolling machines muffled overhead contrasted the silent, dusty conveyer belts we passed below. Up again, and the din. Huge open spaces; bags on pallets; small carts shuttling back and forth; men arms white setting bricks in a new kiln; yellow lights sharply indicating just how much it wasn't day yet. Then quiet again as we entered the foreman's office. Nothing stuck in this 30 minute tour through a rule and regulation book. But the notion of "confined spaces" set my imagination awhir. I had no clue what my job entailed -- I was going to be slagging and charging furnaces; driving a crane, and filling ladles; sweeping and sitting. But this notion of confined spaces, together with my new getup, made me feel like I was heading down a coal shaft, to a place where I'd not be able to stand up or turn around or exit as quickly as I might want. (Later, as a teacher of technical communication, I wish I could return to this moment and review what that manual said.) The deck held no real confined spaces, so the emphasis, in retrospect, was a distractor. I'd rather have learned any one step in the protocols I was about to experience.

Deck

Back into the yellow light, we made our way past three huge holding furnaces, past faceless men in respirators and sunglasses whose stares seemed immediately menacing. Judging, with no personality, like automatons in matching gear. I was staring right into my own face -- shielded everywhere, only our height and weight set us apart. The deck was upstairs, and the men on my first shift crew were already slagging furnaces. They turned in unison to look at me -- the college kid coming to inconvenience their system. Suddenly, loud and indecipherable, "Charge George" echoed over the intercom, and the men turned back, moving to another furnace to take up position. 

I was taken through the bathroom, past the Gatorade station, and into a back room where I added earplugs to close off the last of my sensory systems. I now couldn't see (sunglasses), couldn't hear (ear plugs), couldn't talk (respirator), and couldn't feel (gloves). And the early summer heat was just beginning.

Slagging and Throwing

My first skill was learning to slag. The furnaces had three stages -- Charging, Throwing, and Slagging -- after which half the iron would be poured out and the process would begin again. Charging meant dumping in fresh iron or pig iron, adding to the molten mix already in the furnace. Throwing meant tossing different amounts of pyrite, carbon, and silicon (in 25 lb bags) into the furnace to get the chemistry right. Slagging meant raking the unmoltenable gunk that floated on top of the molten iron into a slag cart. 

Two men worked either side of a long rake, moving in unison forward and back to pull the dark, dirty slag out of the furnace. Without voices, you coordinated the rake in silence, maneuvering it to this side then this corner of the furnace without conversing. Someone led this dance. The frustration the other men felt slagging with me, the new kid, was never spoken aloud. But it emanated, through glances, nods and shakes of the head, and shifts in the body. I wasn't welcome here. 

After slagging, I watched as the men poured out the furnace. Then we were onto the next task. The control tower, which stood above and behind us, opposite the furnaces, directed us to one of the five furnaces -- Delta, Easy, Fox, George, and Hotel. Pick one. It needed bags of carbon to correct the chemistry. The control tower code indicated which furnace, then gave the numbers and types of bags. We lined up. One man picked up the bag and slung it to me. I turned, carrying his momentum, and threw it into the furnace. 

Splash! Not sparks but droplets of molton iron arced up and everywhere. I scoot quickly away. Dumb. A mistake. My first real sense that the danger here is real. 

Randy, my throwing partner, lowers his respirator and yells: "Not IN the furnace, slide it off the edge so it doesn't splash!" Though he has to repeat it three times, I do not make this mistake again. 

I don't yet realize how many of these rules are not in the orientation or the manual; they're idiosyncratic, not only to the deck, but to each activity and to each of the five furnaces. I don't yet know that most days I won't talk more than five minutes over my eight hour shift. I will eat alone, work in dim silence, make no friends here. I will learn that each of these tasks is easy but incredibly stressful. I will learn the meanings of all the secret chalk marks and blue lights. And I will learn when to disregard their obvious meanings. I will be shunted away in the crane until I screw up and overflow the holding furnace. I will cry. I will nearly knock over a forklift. I will crawl inside a furnace and brush its new, white brick interior. I will get burned, scarred, and singed. I will wake up every morning with fingers tightly clenched, fingers that pop open, individually and painfully, as I work them back into place. I will do this for two summers. But I don't know any of this yet. 

It was only day one. 

Ocean: Optimism?

The final section of Ocean presents six scenarios, each from a different area of the earth that will be affected by the changing ocean. These areas include: the Mediterranean, the Arctic, the Netherlands, Senegal, Bangladesh, and the Maldives. In each case, a general framing of the issues precedes a five minute "travel diary." Let me try to capture one of these experiences.

The Mediterranean

"Abundant, densely populated and at very low altitude, the western part of the French Mediterranean coast is also facing problems of erosion and submersion which could be compounded by rising sea levels. Recent storms have raised awareness of the risk. Will we be able to take the necessary sustainable measures?"

The following panel precedes three of the travel diary videos (the Maldives, the Mediterranean, and the Arctic):

Assessing Vulnerabilities 

"Geographically speaking, deltas, coral reefs, low-lying coastal zones and artic regions are facing the biggest threat. But the vulnerability of a territory also depends on its economic, social and political situation and therefore its capacity to adapt. Discover the strengths and weaknesses of some of the world's regions."

Another three are preceded by this panel (Bangladesh, Netherlands, Senegal):

How can we adapt?

"Building dykes, moving further inland, changing the economy? Local solutions will be as diverse as the situations. A global strategy could also be necessary with, for instance, mutual aid and insurance on a planetary scale. A prospect which raises the question of global governance."

As indicated by these brief panels, the scope and implications for adapting are global in scale. 

The five minute video in the Mediterranean case works like this. You sit down and the mayor of a coastal town in the Languedoc addresses you as someone who wishes to build a housing estate. The mayor is considering your request for a permit and is offering some feedback on the risks and problems your request raises. 

The mayor describes the low-lying geography of the area and indicates that this already fragile landscape is threatened by rising sea levels. He acknowledges that "the experts don't all agree", but still states, "it is predicted that the sea will rise between 40cm and 1 metre in the next 100 years." 

The mayor then provides an example (with photos) of how recent storms have made it clear that the coastline is at risk. He appeals directly to your experience as a housing developer: "If the coast was deserted that wouldn't raise any major problems and we could just adopt a 'laissez-faire' approach. But that isn't the case. And you are well placed to know it." 

Finally, after acknowledging there are unpopular solutions (like move housing and infrastructure back from the coast) and expensive solutions (like breakwaters) he comes to his final appeal:

"What's certain is that if we want to preserve the beauty of our region, if we want tourism which is the foundation of our economy to flourish, we must contain the erosion and maintain the coastline to avoid flooding. We must work together, politicians, business people, citizens, to find sustainable solutions."

In the end, the goal was a consensus and a partnership. THe mayor seeks accord. It becomes clear that the Mayor's goal was to convince you to alter your request -- essentially, he's made a case turning down your request as it stands. But he would like to work together: "In any case, I suggest we meet up to discuss a solution for your housing estate. In fact, wouldn't it be better to build it inland rather than by the sea? I ohpe to see you soon in our delightful village."

The other videos are similar, though the visitor plays a different roles. The other two cases I have collected have you addressed as "professor."  

Like some of the interactives in Atmosphere (and distinct from the voting section at the HMNH), these well-produced videos are quite effective at creating a situation in which you sink into a particular roles, thinking through the complexity of a situation from the perspective of someone in the know. This allows the exhibit to make a stronger case -- the individuals on the screen represent their countries, and so they're not expected to be neutral. And because the scene is set so that you're seeking information for some purpose, the focus is narrow enough to be dramatic and yet wide enough to allow for a wide range of relevant facts.

While each video captures the way that these geographic areas must adapt, they each end on a positive note, indicating how that adaption will make it possible to sustain the area into the future. 

This is a tempered optimism. In each case, the real impacts of climate change on ocean and coastal regions is already happening. And in each case, the expectation is that it will get worse. Yet, even so, the videos embrace adaptive practices that give hope to a world in which climate change can be successfully managed, even if that process requires the willing participation of large organizations and the willpower of stakeholders who may have to act against their wishes. 

Ocean: Fatalism

Compared to Atmosphere, Ocean is a serious, sober look at global climate change. The playful, near-cartoonish games found in the London exhibit are missing here. And while Ocean creates a powerful, immersive environment, there's something tame, reduced, or controlled about it. Perhaps it's a result of the exhibit's more controlled pathway through three areas. But I think the color palate, font choices, and tone also contribute. This is not a "fun" gallery. 

This sobriety is found most clearly in the exhibit's fatalism, something that seems rare in science museums and science centers. Unlike other exhibits, Ocean is much more assertive about the existence and effects of global climate change. The first line of the opening panel does not hedge: "It's a fact, climate change due to human activities is under way." But it's not just that climate change is underway, it's that (also from the opening panel) "we must anticipate and, in order to adapt, it is better to understand the ocean and its role in the climate so we can identify applicable solutions acceptable to the populations at risk."

Adaptation -- how we can manage the effects of climate change -- is the exhibit's final message. This is not about preventing sea change -- we are not admonished to adapt technologies or practices that might yet prevent a warming ocean. To carry this message, the arc of the exhibit walks us through the role of the ocean in the climate, how the ocean changes in response to the warming climate, and what we can do in the future to manage its effects. There's something a little depressing about this way of talking that is not present in the other two exhibits. At the HMNH there was a lot of certainty about the facts of climate change, but there was still a sense that we could skip the most dire consequences if we adopted choices now. The final video implied as much. In a different way, Atmosphere's playful, open experience allows visitors to construct their own messages about a variety of facets of climate change, but this same lack of control means that the stark assertion of future impacts was limited. 

Ocean is assertiveness at the outset is matched and reinforced in a panel titled "What are the future scenarios?" which offers four possibilities drawn from multiple climate models and reports. The scenarios range in temperature increases from 1.8C to 3.4C over the next 85 years. What's most telling, however, is that the factors assessed to determine these increases are economic growth, technological development worldwide, balancing of energy resources, and demography. Few of these have to do with personal choices. These are broad, big problems not easily answered by any one country. 

All of this means that the exhibit must end with a discussion of adaptation: the world is changing; we might slow it, but the ball is in motion. According to the exhibit designer I interviewed, this is the "positive" or "optimistic" section of the exhibit. Yet the fatalism is forceful, which is again different from the other exhibits: "By 2100, depending on the scenario, water levels could rise by [sic] between 20 cm and 1 m, impacting the 40% of the world's population living within 60 kms of the coast."

Ok, so strong assertions of fact, dire consequences, a need to adapt: how does this exhibit end on a positive note?

Initial Thoughts on the Creation Museum

1. This is a very powerful experience. If you attend the exhibits with even a little skepticism about the veracity of evolutionary theory, I believe this exhibit will increase your confidence that evolution is a weak theory.

2. This museum is at war. I've never seen a museum so relentlessly or so aggressively attack the tenets of science -- or even another ideology. A mirror image of this museum is nearly impossible to imagine, since the direct attacks against the foundations of religious faith in Genesis would be so vocally and passionately protested. But it's less the open mocking of scientists (evident only in the rather cocky introductory video) and more the unfair assumptions, the specific cherry-picked challenges, and the overuse of unsubstantiated Biblical authority to assert particular views that is so frustrating. 

3. Yet at times, it's clear the museum is less about science vs. religion and much more about religion vs. religion. It's about asserting a particular religious point of view. In other words, the impetus for the fight against evolution is not a fight necessarily against science. It's a fight against a non-literal reading of the Bible. So while I'm put off because science is misrepresented and a whole heap of metaphysical realities are asserted (and assumed) with no evidence, those who have a different faith, who understand that the "days" of Genesis can be read more broadly as "ages" or "billions or millions of years" will not feel at home here. This is the starkest version of Christianity, and I know plenty who would find this not to their taste. 

4. Coherence is the name of the game. According to the Museum's reading of the Bible, if God said at the end of seven days that things were "very good," then there was no death, no disease, no poison, dinosaurs didn't eat meat, etc. until after the fall. Similarly, those first six days have to be 24 hour periods. If they weren't regular, 24 hour days, then the whole Bible would tumble down like a house of cards. And because the museum seeks to set religion and science on the same level as starting points, this expectation for perfect coherence is transferred over to science. If science can't explain a particular phenomenon (or if the museum claims it can't explain it), then this starts to erode the foundations of the scientific worldview. Because the museum is not fairly comprehensive and fails to give science any voice for explaining why a complexity or perceived inconsistency makes sense in the bigger picture, science in this museum does come across as a house of cards, as a series of assumptions and failures to explain. To that end, the museum is highly effective. But science isn't a house of cards.

5. The museum moves through seven C's: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation. Only the first four are on display. The last three are covered in a 15 minute video reminiscent of The Passion of the Christ. But jumping from the Tower of Babel to Christ's Crucifixion means a large majority of the Bible is skipped over -- that's a heck of a lot of text that must figure in any attempt to make this literal reading coherent. 

6. I'm not a big fan of the form-content divide, but the amazing thing in this museum is that the museum/exhibit form is very authoritative, very powerful, very convincing. It looks and feels legitimate. And while the museum form lends this museum much of its power, the fact that it works so well reflects back on the museum form in general, making experiences in other museums feel a bit indoctrinating. I have much more work to do on this, but the initial feeling I had when I visited the Cincinnati Natural History Museum was that the tactics -- spatial and linguistic -- were the same. It made the Natural History Museum feel dirty. This went away as I appreciated more what that museum was after, but I'm not sure I can explain exactly why that happened. Was it because I buy the ideology on display? Or was it something more? Is the Natural History Museum more honest? More exploratory? More evidence-based? More comprehensive? Must spend more time here. 

Thoughts on a Table of Contents

Combining two really useful suggestions, I finally sat down today with my huge list of "museum ideas" and started to see how they might fall together into some kind of structure. This is my inductive approach. I banged my head against this for about five hours, and I'm not sure I'm any closer. I've arrived at three ideas; I'll lay them out here.

1. Five to seven chapters "Doing Interesting Things," each drawing from a multitude of exhibits, with an introductory chapter on the rhetoric of museums/exhibits and some kind of powerful conclusion.

2. Three Parts: Part I - two chapters on the rhetoric of museum/exhibits and the museum/exhibit as text; Part II - three to five thematic chapters drawing on small moments from the multitude of museums/exhibits I've seen; Part III - three sustained analyses that draw on and demonstrate the ways in which the themes from part II play out in specific exhibits for different ends (Race, Catalhoyuk, and the comparative case study Ocean/Atmosphere).

3. Introduction chapter on the rhetoric of museums/exhibits, followed by four to seven chapters organized thematically, each of which would begin or end with a sustained analysis of a single exhibit epitomizing the importance of that theme.

After describing the pitfalls and roadblocks to each of these approaches, Liz voted for the second approach. And after talking about it, that one made the most sense to me as well. It would integrate my broad "museum as text" reflections with the many exhibits I've seen with the sustained analyses that I think serve as the real demonstration of a useful approach.  

For now, I think I can roll with the second structure, and move forward "as if" it'll work out -- heck, I know the race, catalhoyuk, and ocean/atmosphere exhibits will sustain chapters (and each for different reasons) -- now it's time to continue to think about the themes and how I can build out that middle section of the proposed book.  

I still don't have a model for this sort of thing...

Thoughts welcome.