Website Review: The Lower Merion Historical Society

The Lower Merion Historical Society. https://www.lowermerionhistory.org, The Lower Merion Historical Society. November 2009.

The Lower Merion Historical Society aims to promote community involvement in the preservation of local cultural resources. Their website states this is accomplished “by stewardship of local history, education of the community, preservation of historic resources and outreach to promote awareness of the cultural heritage of the Township of Lower Merion.” The Society's website is divided into two sections, one focusing on the society itself, the other on the collections and archives of the Society. As can be noted from the mission of the Society and the content of the site, the main audience is not the scholar or academic, rather the historically interested citizens of Lower Merion.
The site has a significant quantity of useful and relevant resources, particularly for those interested in family and area history. This includes artifact collections, collections of individuals, burial records, atlases, maps, historic photographs and significant Quaker collections. The photographs are digitized, but the rest of the collections are not, so searches of these collections provide identifying information such as call numbers and abstracts, but one must still go to the collections. For being directed at the amateur historian, the navigation of the site and research tools leave much to be desired. Despite sections entitled “How to Research” and “Search Tips”, the search interface is difficult to navigate even for a seasoned researcher, and the explanations are too long and too text driven. More concise and visually friendly directions (something other than blocks of black text on white backgrounds) would aid the user. The site could improve navigation to ensure a user's ability to return to the main page without having to retype the URL. The navigation is also not coherent. The site currently tells no distinct narrative nor promotes any particular interpretation of the area's past. A coherent narrative could introduce a user to the wide array of resources available and encourage involvement and preservation through increase historical engagement.
Despite these issues, the site provides access to intriguing and useful information. This is particularly true of the digitized photographs of mansions and architecture. A signficiant part of the society's site is dedicated to these themes (mansions are a significant part of Lower Merion's history) and its website is useful to research these structures and architects. It allows for quick access to photos and relevant information without having to pay the Society's librarian or make an appointment to pull the folio. This is particularly useful for the user with some interest in one particular place, but not necessarily a hobbyist invested in historical research of old homes.
While the site attempts to engage current issues through their online newsletter, the site lacks current historical civic engagement. There is no mention of big news items such as the recent destruction of an architecturally significant mansion in the area. The fight for this building and its destruction garnered significant press due to the society's involvement and the actions of Lower Merion preservationists, but is not included anywhere on the site. The Society could utilize these current events to bolster their mission of increased awareness of the township's resources. The Society has significant resources and their photography and map collections are impressive. These current events and photographs could be utilized in the design to create a cohesive narrative and entice casual users to do further research and engage history.

Readings, November 23

I think this would have been a superb week to read Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, particularly in relation to Rosenzweig and Cohen's thoughts on Exhibits and Film as made available through digital media (mainly the internet). Yes, access is truly a wonderful thing, but is viewing a online version of a museum exhibition about say, Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 portrait of George Washington (Portrait included) the same experience and does it garner the same 'take away' as going to actually stand in front of the portrait and the supporting artifacts and exhibit? Benjamin would naturally argue no. Rosenzweig and Cohen also agree that the internet is not a replacement for the real thing, but weigh the negatives of that against the positives of increased access. But can a person truly engage the exhibit in the way intended by viewing it online? Can you breech comfort and provoke through the controlled view of a computer screen? Will museum directors and museum design staff become moot players eventually as exhibits cease to be physical and just go online? Will people eventually give up on a museum and just go to their computer to experience an exhibit?

For the most part I appreciated Cohen and Rosenzweig's thoughts and analysis. However, for some sections (particularly those on creating, maintaining and backing up a site) I started to have flash backs to taking the GRE when they explained to you how to use a mouse and the up and down arrows. This, I suppose, does function as an example of how issues of digitization and digital media become out of date by the time you publish them.

Skipping back a paragraph, returning to the future of museums, I found the piece "Museums and Society 2034" fascinating and aggravating all at the same time. The point that struck me the most, possibly because I did all of the digital media reading first, was their discussion of media in the museum. They apparently do not believe museums will fall off the face of the earth, which is good, but they do believe they will become more media/digitally driven. This will be good for a society that is increasingly 'tech-y'. However, they miss the ever popular 'generation gap'. Despite feeling myself to be fairly technically savvy, it is entirely possible that when I am 60, I will be completely inept at using whatever the latest mechanical doohickey (technical, I know) the kids are writing their school work on. How will this translate to museums? If they are increasingly media and digitally driven, what generation's technical knowledge will they be catering to? Will parts of museums become inaccessible to a particular generation or group due to the technical constraints of the exhibit? (Throughout this entire article I waited for the phrase 'flying car' to get thrown around. Alas, it did not happen.)

And to make this completely lacking in any form of segue, a wee discussion of the two smaller articles, that about Haunted Mice and that about Internet as Civic Engagement. I liked both of these pieces, and think that they provide case studies about how the internet can be a really useful tool, for those both supernaturally inclined and community driven.

Readings for November 16

This weeks readings were Angela Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory and Jay Winter's "The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the "Memory Boom" in Contemporary Historical Studies".

While at a GHI lecture ("Der DDR: Was Bleibt?") about a month ago, I realized how much easier it is to talk about History and Memory in German than it is English. German has such good words for memory and remembering. Much better than English. The 'memory boom' Jay Winter speaks to did not leave Germans in a frantic search for a term defining the memories of a group for which English tosses around collective memory and public memory at great debate. Groups, cultures and nations have Gedächtnis. People have Erinnerung. Memorials are Denkmäle. The words for groups remembering and the activities there in, such as memorials, are taken from the word 'to think' and not the word 'to remember'. I feel the challenge of learning how to differentiate these terms and their meanings was worth the depth the language can bring to discussing memory and history. As Winter stated, memories have come to be associated with trauma, the nation, its politics and identity. Germany has a traumatic past and particularly traumatic 20th century, encompassing 7 different political regimes, all of which people still (potentially, depending on life span) have living memory. Now that Germany is reunified, discussions of memory have intensified, particularly wondering how reunified Germany will remember its fragmented past (and present; ask any German, political unity does not mean unity in identities), made even more complicated by their role in the European Union.

I spent the entirety of last year reading Pierre Nora, Halbwachs and Aleida Assmann and Rolf Goeble (some among many) in an attempt to come to terms with how Berliners (and their memories) relate to their communist past. I wish I had read Landsberg's text last year while I spent hours wracking my brain trying to define the memories Berlin's have for a particulars buildings, despite having no living memory of them. I ultimately had no great moment of genius and that section got hacked out of my thesis. While her particular presentation reminds me why I stopped taking English Literature courses freshman year of college, Landsberg's concept of Prosthetic Memory really intrigues me. Cultures and people have memories of events and places of which they have no legitimate experience. Do they thus not count? How these said memories are created and how they shape a person's relation to their own past and history in general is illuminating. In the case of Berlin, people have spent millions upon millions of dollars to tear down one building simply to resurrect another, neither of which they have any living memories. But they have prosthetic memories, created from pictures, news stories, romantic ideals of Prussian exceptionalism and sometimes unreasonable accusations of East German cruelty. In Berlin, one history disappeared, and another has become the sanitized party line because of Prosthetic Memories.

So, in lieu of spending your space and time explaining this whole thing, here's the story of what went down in Berlin. It's hard to get a neutral voice, and the government site isn't ideal (they did vote to destroy the one building, and pay to rebuild the new one) but they are less sensational about it. It's also the only one in English.

Schloßplatzdebatte

Readings for November 9

Nancy Raquel Mirabal, “Geographies of Displacement: Latinas/os, Oral History, and the Politics of
Gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District,” and Eric O’Keefe, “Auctioning the Old West to Help a City in the East.” As well as the addition, "The End of History: What is Plan B?"

This week's 'theme' so far as we have one, is Community Engagement. How does history engage the communities in which it is experienced. As can be seen from this week's readings, experience and engagement does not necessarily have to be of the history of that particular area.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with the "Auctioning the Old West to Help a City in the East" article. Besides from the shady quality by which the artifacts were acquired (nothing like not telling your taxpayers where their money is going), I suppose I did not find odd the desire to tell that part of Harrisburg's history. I think it is a provocative shift of scope to frame Harrisburg as the beginning of the journey to the 'frontier'. Even if in the 19th century it was no longer the edge of the wilderness, it is an intriguing make people see that at one point most of the country as 'new' and that past Ohio was considered an adventure (which for many it still may be...but not in a bison, native American sort of way).

However, I did enjoy Mirabal's article. I am a big fan of using individual memories to tell the histories of an area, for without them, histories become silenced. In this case, these individual memories tell the story of an area quickly moving away from the culture that defined it for many years. Are these memories, however, community engagement? Are the oral histories which Mirabal and her cohort collected going to enact social change? Possibly. They certainly seem to hope so, if going by nothing else than the title of the project "La Mision: Voices of Resistance." It would be interesting to see if since the dot com boom has busted, whether the older residences and cultures have returned. Do the previous residents of the Mission area have shared authority, and better yet, are they utlizing it?

On a slightly different note, Cary Carson's article about the death of history museums. He begs public historians to look at the people walking through the door and focus on the quality of museum that those visitors are seeing. He notes that public historians are, in one way or another, history teachers. I feel that many (most?) public historians would agree to that, but as we have discussed previously, are they to be stewards only to the visitors and not to the collections? His Plan B, which is pretty much pandering to the short attention span of Americans (thanks, Sesame Street), leads us on the slippery slope of sanitizing history so that when people visit, they can be immersed without feeling uncomfortable. Immersion history often leads to a linear progress view for most visitors, the 'oh look, they were stupid and we're so advanced' view of history, something which I personally try to discourage to the best of my ability. Not to say that history museums do not need to shift focus to keep the attention of their visitors, but is just 'giving them what they want' really an effective tool to being a historian or a history teacher?

And really, the idea of a history soap opera kind of makes me ill.

Last Sunday on my undergrad's campus, all the freshwomen lined up in the Cloisters and got their Lanterns. This year's class is red. Just like mine, Just like my sisters. (Four year rotation, light blue, red, dark blue, green). Sophomores give the freshmen their lanterns, while the juniors and seniors direct the whole thing. This is the second of of the four main traditions that frame the year.

Bryn Mawr, for better or for worse, is deeply entrenched in its traditions. The lantern is probably one of the most positive traditions, representing your alligences to particular graduating or incoming classes and embodying your "Bryn Mawr Experience". Beginning in 1901, it has had bumps along the way, such as metal and money shortages during WWII meaning no new lanterns for the new students, but is still one of the most exciting evenings of the school year.

Some people say that if you do something more than once at Bryn Mawr, it becomes a tradition. While close to true, this has luckily not held for some of Bryn Mawr's bleaker traditions, some on which the institution was founded.

Springing from our discussion on monday, I got thinking about why it is important to discuss the motivations and situations under which an institution was founded. Seeing all the facebook congratulations to the incoming class of 2013 for their lanterns just got things moving.

Bryn Mawr was founded in 1885, in simple terms, so that women would be able to earn PhDs in the US and not have to go to Europe. The main impetus to that is this woman:


Ms. M Carey Thomas, the first dean, and second president.

And besides looking like she will consume your soul for dinner (which really, I wouldn't put it past her), she was fiercly intellegent, incredibly determined, greatly motivated...and an incredible classist and bigot.

Now, those first three adjectives sum up your typical "Bryn Mawr Woman", and Thomas's tradition lives on. However, because Bryn Mawr keeps the situation of its founding in mind, the last have not become part of a Mawter's daily life. Thomas would scoff at the idea that 80% of students hold a job to help pay for college, that most do not come from wealthy backgrounds, and many are not white. Bryn Mawr is acutely aware of the pretenses under which Thomas molded the institution in its early years, and keeps it in mind while molding the institution today. Bryn Mawr students often take pride in their on-campus jobs, and while diversity continues to be a heated subject, the school takes a proactive approach to separate itself from its founding views.

I am exceptionally happy for the traditions that Bryn Mawr chose to keep throughout these years; they made my college experience more than I could have ever asked for. Bryn Mawr would be tearfully dull and two demensional without its history, and I am very grateful that the college has kept its history, both the lanterns and the bigots, in mind over the last 125 years.

Readings, Nov 2

(I'm a smidgen behind on the readings for this week, thanks to some unfortunate dental work. However, I wanted to have something here to at least add onto when I do finish the readings).

Freedman Tilden's Interpreting Our Heritage has come across my desk at work a number of times, is quoted fairly often in NPS training, and occasionally is critiqued as being outdated.

Interpretation is a peculiar sort of animal. What works one day may very well never work again. What really engaged the group on your walk at 11am may leave the group at 1pm falling asleep standing up, even if the group make up does not appear dramatically different, (although the level of mental engagement of the interpreter may have changed).

Something Tilden throws about in his text is this idea of comfort. Comfort for the audience, comfort with the information, comfort with the interactions of people to the resource, even the comfort of the interpreter. What does comfort mean exactly, though? Making the visitor feel warm and fuzzy? Making sure no one will pass out from heat stroke or acquire frostbite while you walk the rim of the Grand Canyon? Knowing your "stuff"?

Just this morning a colleague and I were discussing how you have to be 'in the mood' to make a walking tour up to the huts a good one. If you, the interpreter, are not mentally and physically comfortable with the walk and all that it entails (your theme, the information, the simple 1/4 mile up to the huts, your boots, your group not walking into the middle of the street, the list goes on and on), it creeps its way into your talk. If your visitor is hot, cold, exhausted or tired of being on vacation, the ability to absorb interpretation, and that lovely provocation Tilden mentions, decreases. Comfort in interpretation is hard to come by, but when it does, Tilden is right, interpretation can be very relaxing and very fulfilling, for both the visitor and the interpreter. However, can you still provoke a visitor to engage this history, both with other historic knowledge as well as the past, and still have them be comfortable? Isn't provocation by definition an uncomfortable thing? Handler and Gable seem to think so, or at least that a visitor cannot be both comfortable and engaged.

Tilden has a lovely definition for interpretation. It is all of one sentence long, but presents a incredibly daunting task to those who "do" interpretation. Striking that balance between information, provocation and revelation is an incredible challenge. Yes there are a myriad of aids to help you, exhibits, films (or as one lovely visitor this morning stated, slide presentations), demonstrations, interactions, etc. They all help. But provoking the visitor to want to take steps towards understanding the scope, motivations, or consequences of any given event or action is so difficult it becomes the exception, not the norm. This, I feel stems from something that Tilden chooses to ignore: the motivation of the visitor to come to a particular place. I respectfully disagree with him, but an individual visitor's reason for coming to a site guides their ability to interact with the interpretation more so than any docent, guide, film or exhibit.

More to come tomorrow.