History Re-Experienced: Implementing Mixed Reality Systems into Historic House Museums

Shadrick Addy;

doi:10.18178/ijmlc.2021.11.4.1053

Safe Containers for Dangerous Memories

The Public Historian ◽

10.1525/tph.2015.37.2.61 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 37 (2) ◽

pp. 61-72

Author(s):

Sarah Pharaon ◽

Sally Roesch Wagner ◽

Barbara Lau ◽

María José Bolaña Caballero

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

North Carolina ◽

Social Justice ◽

Case Studies ◽

Social Issues ◽

House Museums ◽

The Social ◽

The World ◽

Historic House Museums ◽

Historic House

Since 1999, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience has worked with historic house museums around the world who assist their visitors in connecting past and present, use dialogue as a central strategy in addressing needs in their immediate community, and encourage visitors to become active in the social issues their sites raise. Featuring case studies from Coalition members Centro Cultural y Museo de la Memoria (Montevideo, Uruguay), Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation (Fayetteville, New York), and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice (Durham, North Carolina), this article reviews the revolutionary approaches Sites of Conscience take toward addressing challenging histories and their contemporary legacies.

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Re-entering the house. Scenographic and artistic interventions and interactions in the historic house museum

Nordisk Museologi ◽

10.5617/nm.2998 ◽

1970 ◽

pp. 25

Author(s):

Hedvig Mårdh

Keyword(s):

Art History ◽

House Museums ◽

Heritage Studies ◽

Historic House Museums ◽

Museum Design ◽

House Museum ◽

Historic House ◽

Historic House Museum ◽

Critical Heritage ◽

Artistic Interventions

Scenographic and artistic interventions and interactions have gained in signi cance within the elds of exhibition and museum design since the 1990s. is article speci cally focuses on historic house museums, and how they use their theatrical and scenographic assets in order to recharge and reinvent themselves. e author discusses the di erent aims and tasks these interventions and interactions take on, and the attitudes that make them happen. Further, the author argues that the eld of art history should address these changes in museological practice, and should investigate new possible readings of the historic house, the objects within, and artistic interventions. is would also show the relevance of art history to the eld of critical heritage studies in a period that is characterized by the heritage boom and the new experience industry.

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Sense of the past: historic house museums in Toronto, Canada, as forms of an urban heterotopia

10.32920/ryerson.14656326 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Alevtina Naumova

Keyword(s):

Participant Observation ◽

Embodied Experience ◽

House Museums ◽

The Past ◽

Historic House Museums ◽

House Museum ◽

Historic House ◽

Museum Staff ◽

Historic House Museum ◽

And Performance

Historic house museums allow for reconceptualization of the meaning of tangible objects around us. We establish this new relationship with materiality through our sensory bodies. We conceive of ourselves differently and allow ourselves to move and behave in ways that are not acceptable in the world outside of the museum. We perform our new selves with permission granted by the sense of place that cannot be understood other than through embodied experience–of things, of selves, of the environment that brings it all together. In the coming together of all these elements in the immediate, intimate present, the notion of the past is defined as cultural heritage as mediated through the historic house museum curatorial work and space. I approach historic house museums as socially created and lived kinds of spatiality and sites of social practices and focus on the experiences of people that spend considerable amounts of time there–the museum staff. As a researcher, I have inserted myself within the environment of a historic house museum and attempted to open it to social inquiry through various ways of being within it–observing, writing, interviewing, interacting, sensing, entering it and leaving it. I have carried out a form of phenomenological ethnography, which included a two-year autoethnographic study at the Mackenzie House Museum, in Toronto, Canada, where I volunteered in the position of an interpreter and a historic cook; 24 participant observation visits to other historic house museums in Toronto; and 13 in-depth unstructured interviews with museum staff from various historic house museum sites in the city. The three methods addressed the key conceptual clusters–emplacement, materiality, and performance, which form three analytical chapters of the dissertation. The dissertation positions historic house museums as forms of heterotopia that function as contestations of the accepted spatial, social, and temporal norms within an urban environment. These museums come forth as attempted reconstructions of anthropological places, in the form of domestic sites that assert significance of material manifestations of familial relations and historical heritage. These sites are immersive environments bridge the gap in the current experience of body, time, and space.

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Sense of the past: historic house museums in Toronto, Canada, as forms of an urban heterotopia

10.32920/ryerson.14656326.v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Alevtina Naumova

Keyword(s):

Participant Observation ◽

Embodied Experience ◽

House Museums ◽

The Past ◽

Historic House Museums ◽

House Museum ◽

Historic House ◽

Museum Staff ◽

Historic House Museum ◽

And Performance

Historic house museums allow for reconceptualization of the meaning of tangible objects around us. We establish this new relationship with materiality through our sensory bodies. We conceive of ourselves differently and allow ourselves to move and behave in ways that are not acceptable in the world outside of the museum. We perform our new selves with permission granted by the sense of place that cannot be understood other than through embodied experience–of things, of selves, of the environment that brings it all together. In the coming together of all these elements in the immediate, intimate present, the notion of the past is defined as cultural heritage as mediated through the historic house museum curatorial work and space. I approach historic house museums as socially created and lived kinds of spatiality and sites of social practices and focus on the experiences of people that spend considerable amounts of time there–the museum staff. As a researcher, I have inserted myself within the environment of a historic house museum and attempted to open it to social inquiry through various ways of being within it–observing, writing, interviewing, interacting, sensing, entering it and leaving it. I have carried out a form of phenomenological ethnography, which included a two-year autoethnographic study at the Mackenzie House Museum, in Toronto, Canada, where I volunteered in the position of an interpreter and a historic cook; 24 participant observation visits to other historic house museums in Toronto; and 13 in-depth unstructured interviews with museum staff from various historic house museum sites in the city. The three methods addressed the key conceptual clusters–emplacement, materiality, and performance, which form three analytical chapters of the dissertation. The dissertation positions historic house museums as forms of heterotopia that function as contestations of the accepted spatial, social, and temporal norms within an urban environment. These museums come forth as attempted reconstructions of anthropological places, in the form of domestic sites that assert significance of material manifestations of familial relations and historical heritage. These sites are immersive environments bridge the gap in the current experience of body, time, and space.

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Memorializing Dinah and Reckoning with Enslavement

The Public Historian ◽

10.1525/tph.2021.43.3.55 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 43 (3) ◽

pp. 55-86

Author(s):

Beth A. Uzwiak

Keyword(s):

Community Participation ◽

Community Integration ◽

Racial Equity ◽

Historic Sites ◽

House Museums ◽

Collective Work ◽

Historic House Museums ◽

House Museum ◽

Historic House ◽

History Of

Inequality in Bronze is a two-year project (2018–20) reckoning with the history of slavery at Stenton, a plantation house museum in Philadelphia, by commissioning a new memorial to Dinah, a woman enslaved at the property in the mid-1700s. Drawing on data collected throughout the project, this article argues that historic house museums need to move from “community participation” to “community integration” in their efforts to forefront racial equity. This article asks how we can redress centuries of erasure and the absence of Black lives at historic sites. It offers points of consideration for other historic house museums contemplating similar projects as the collective work to address the legacies of American enslavement continues.

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