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

As immersive technologies have become ubiquitous today, traditional museums are finding success augmenting existing exhibits to increase visitors’ satisfaction. However, due to the immutable nature of house museums, and their tendency to place visitors in direct contact with historical artifacts, museum managers are seeking original approaches to cultural preservation. Implementing mixed reality systems into historic house museums is one such approach. The goal of this study is to develop and test a conceptual matrix that guides how designers use the affordances of mixed reality systems to create experiences that align with the range of historical narratives found in house museums. Experiences that can contribute to improving visitors’ satisfaction, self-interpretation, and understanding of the homeowner’s life and the community within which they lived. Building on human-centered design methods, the researcher developed and tested a prototype of an augmented reality (AR) mobile application centered on the Pope House Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. The outcome of the research suggests house museum visitors should have agency in deciding the lens through which they experience the variety of historical narratives present in the home.

Memorializing Dinah and Reckoning with Enslavement

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.

Reviving Stories And Space Of The Past: Exploring New Opportunities In Mixed Media Storytelling

This project presents the idea that historic house museums (HHMs) can use Augmented Reality (AR) and physical interactive space to bring stories and characters of the past back to life. Designed to foster self-directed discovery and informal learning of the space and story, this project uses a historically factual AR character to reanimate the sense of human presence within the space. Rather than disrupting the traditional narratives of HHMs, this mixed media storytelling experience extends historical stories by making them more personal and relatable. Using tangible stories, multisensory interactions, and an AR experience to extend the historical narrative, this form of museological work creates more opportunities for empathic character-driven storytelling. Lastly, I identify that this proof of concept could be used in multiple applications, as both a storytelling medium and a communication tool.

Reviving Stories And Space Of The Past: Exploring New Opportunities In Mixed Media Storytelling

This project presents the idea that historic house museums (HHMs) can use Augmented Reality (AR) and physical interactive space to bring stories and characters of the past back to life. Designed to foster self-directed discovery and informal learning of the space and story, this project uses a historically factual AR character to reanimate the sense of human presence within the space. Rather than disrupting the traditional narratives of HHMs, this mixed media storytelling experience extends historical stories by making them more personal and relatable. Using tangible stories, multisensory interactions, and an AR experience to extend the historical narrative, this form of museological work creates more opportunities for empathic character-driven storytelling. Lastly, I identify that this proof of concept could be used in multiple applications, as both a storytelling medium and a communication tool.

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

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.