Haunted Intimacy: Spectral and Vital Space within a Historic House Museum

Merchant’s House Museum is haunted. While it functions as a historic house museum in Manhattan, the house remains the home of the Tredwell family who now appear as ghosts. For the museum, these ghosts become animating presences, continuing to keep the everyday things of the house embedded in the intimate space of a family’s home. Throughout this article, I explore how those connected to the house as staff, visitors, and volunteers present the ghosts of the Tredwells and, based on these peoples’ experiences, I examine the Tredwell house within a museological framework of, what I term, haunted intimacy, that keeps the house in vital relation to the family.

Exploring Heritage Archaeology at Indiana University

This article is an overview of a collaborative Indiana University (IU) Bicentennial Project designed to explore and raise awareness of the cultural heritage on IU’s historic Bloomington campus, protect the university’s archaeological resources, contribute to its teaching and research mission, and enhance documentation and interpretation of its historic house museum. The primary project partners were IU’s Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology and the Wylie House Museum, a unit of IU Libraries. Using state-of-the art remote sensing methods and traditional archaeological excavations, the project sought to locate the buried subterranean greenhouses at the home of first university president, Andrew Wylie. Historical research focused on the position of the Wylies and IU in the development of the city of Bloomington, particularly on the transition from subsistence farming in the mid-19th century to the development of leisurely gardening and floriculture later in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Through campus archaeological field school opportunities, internships, talks, exhibits, presentations on campus, and outreach opportunities throughout the university and Bloomington communities, the project contributed to the IU curriculum and promoted a better understanding of IU’s cultural heritage. Importantly, this campus archaeology project provided a unique opportunity to pursue place-based education and experiential learning that connected students, university, and community stakeholders to their local heritage.

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.