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Jei is evolving!!

Proposal for Final

1. What is your inquiry question?

What does the creation of these particular museums say about the culture that made them?

2. What is your primary purpose for asking this question?

I like museums and the study of culture and why it exists so I feel it is an interesting topic.

3. What additional questions most interest you and might help you discover the answer to your question?

What was important to Victorian culture?  How did museums change over time with trends and advancements in science?

4. What, if any, prior beliefs, assumptions, preconceptions, ideas, or prejudices do you bring to this project?

I’ve visited only modern museums.

4.5 What do you think of your topic now, based on the limited amount you know?


I think it is still relatively interesting.  I am really struggling to make it into an actual paper, but we’ll see how it goes.

I am really confused about everything with our homework.  What are we even doing right now?  

Everything seems REALLY excessive as far as work load goes considering I just spent all day thumbnailing comics and trying to finish two paintings.  And I am pretty sure I am not the only person in our class that feels like that right now.

franniebrown: Amazing!!! Life size paper mache and plaster sculpture portrait by Christine Elfman, 2008. Go to Christine Elfman’s website to read the story about the sculpture and see the portrait up close to view it in it’s entirety.

franniebrown:

Amazing!!!

Life size paper mache and plaster sculpture portrait by Christine Elfman, 2008. Go to Christine Elfman’s website to read the story about the sculpture and see the portrait up close to view it in it’s entirety.

(Source: christineelfman.com)

simon-martin:

I have always been fascinated by Wunderkammers, or Cabinets of Curosity… a concept of displaying weird and wonderful objects that dates back to the Renaissance and Baroque periods. They are inspiring and magical collections, that provide a frame for things which defy categorisation, bridging art, nature, science and religion. (I nearly considering calling this blog ‘Wunderkammer’ until I discovered the plethora of other blogs with the same name - there seems to be a zeitgeist for them at the moment.) Occasionally one sees them in quirky museums or historic houses, but I think my favourite has to be a small exhibition that I saw upstairs at a contemporary art gallery called the Collectors Room in Berlin. There they have the Wunderkammer Obricht (see http://www.me-berlin.com/wunderkammer/). I’m planning to create one of my own to house my favourite objects that I have acquired on travels in India, Japan, Morocco, Europe and in charity shops and flea-markets closer to home. Watch this space!

1.3-1.4

Museum Etiquette In the Victorian Era

This topic interests me because museums are treated almost like sacred places but for artifacts instead of religion.  Learning the differences between how people used to behave in museums and how museum visitors act now is interesting to me because I have been visiting museums since I was a child.  My mother often took us to libraries and museums and I remember the rules she enforced when the daycare she ran took such trips.  The difference in attitudes is also interesting to me.

Though I am unsure why we have to post about what we know (mostly because we just did a huge presentation discussing all the things we learned) I’ll do it.

  • Victorians treated museums as a place to walk and be social while looking at objects such as paintings
  • Upper-middle class members visited museums to create an impression of education etc
  • People went into museums to cool off
  • Curators often allowed people to touch the objects if they were persuasive enough
  • stealing was a problem
  • people offered their private collections and objects to be displayed for varying periods of time
  • things were arranged together according to aesthetic appearance rather than scientific relevance
  • Shops often used cabinets of curiosity and stuffed animals to attract customers
  • people were slightly obsessed with touching the artifacts or corpses of important individuals

1.4

  • What habits do Victorian museum patrons and modern patrons have in common?
  • What habits are different?
  • When did museums begin to change and own their own collections? Do they in fact own their own collections?
bodysnatching1319: Interesting fact! Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen took the first x-ray of his wife’s hand in 1895. Of course soon they began to use x-rays not only to see the skeleton but to try to treat different illnesses. They soon began to realize that their patient’s hair was falling out and their skin was being burned after numerous x-rays. Many times they had to amputate fingers and limbs that were burned. Wilhelm ended up dying from radiation poisoning from his own invention. Wow, jeepers.  That sounds like a sticky process!!  It’s weird to think about things we have pretty much perfected for medical science in their fetal stages.  I would be interested in reading more about how the first xray was put together and how they work and such.  Also, that first xray of the hand is hella sick.

bodysnatching1319:

Interesting fact!

Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen took the first x-ray of his wife’s hand in 1895. Of course soon they began to use x-rays not only to see the skeleton but to try to treat different illnesses. They soon began to realize that their patient’s hair was falling out and their skin was being burned after numerous x-rays. Many times they had to amputate fingers and limbs that were burned. Wilhelm ended up dying from radiation poisoning from his own invention.

Wow, jeepers.  That sounds like a sticky process!!  It’s weird to think about things we have pretty much perfected for medical science in their fetal stages.  I would be interested in reading more about how the first xray was put together and how they work and such.  Also, that first xray of the hand is hella sick.

Top Ten Ghost Ships

readerandwriter:

Here is a list I found this week of the top ten Ghost ships of all time. I think for my final project I am leaning more towards the research of ghost ships and stories about them. 

This is a really cool idea for a topic!!  If you focus on one ship in particular, you could also look at songs about it.  I’m sure the really famous ones have some sort of song somewhere about them.  That might help or hinder your research, though, so it’s your call!

Assignment 2:

Write at least one post for your research blog that describes what you did this week to research your project, and what you will need to do next week.

To continue my research project, this past week I continued my search on EBSCO and other online databases to search for articles of museums and museum etiquette.  I’ve found a few more articles but plan to continue searching.  I need way more information to successfully complete our last assignment.

Assignment 1:

Describe the process of completing your first “cabinet of curiosities” assignment as a story of the process so far and where you hope to go next.

When I began this assignment I could not decide a topic.  I started with the idea of researching the life of students in the naval academies during Darwin’s time before moving on to several other areas but eventually settled on a study of the actual cabinets themselves.  Well attempting to find sources on those, I discovered a particular article about museum etiquette in the Victorian era that caught my interest.  I researched to find other articles and websites that handled the same topic or similar ones.  Having seen cabinets of curiosity first hand it was easy to apply this topic to my interests and research became easier.  I read quite a few articles and gained a knowledge base that I could use to create the necessary presentation. 

I am not sure where I want to take this next.  The ideas I have are more based on what might have been stolen from museums; missing artifacts have always been interesting to me.  Otherwise I might move back to exactly what people collected and the process of storing or displaying these objects and any rituals collectors had regarding those processes.