The Franklin Institute

     This week, our class visited the Franklin Institute, and we were given a tour of the new electricity exhibit. Like other museums we have visited, the Franklin Institute's primary goal is education. Unlike other museums, however, the Franklin Institute is an experiential museum, such that the goal of education is achieved through the method of entertainment. The Academy of Natural Science had some interactive exhibits, but nothing quite on the scale that the Franklin Institute uses. The electricity exhibit, while not being especially large, managed to pack in a variety of displays. These displays included both static displays (like artifacts once owned by Ben Franklin in a glass case) and hands-on, "dynamic" displays. The hands-on displays were varied, and included a key which gave visitors a static jolt, e-books on touch screens, and even some video games. Each piece of the exhibit had a lesson to teach, even the most seemingly pointless ones. The displays were fun and they all effectively held a visitor's attention, which took a great deal of work from all the people working behind the scenes.
     The electricity exhibit proved to be a prime example of the experiential museum. Fun, seemingly extraordinary exhibits served to teach lessons about completely ordinary things. The exhibits taught about lightning, static electricity, magnetism and more in an interactive way. The displays give visitors a certain sense of importance. Visitors are being lead through the exhibit and persuaded to try various experiments, but it is done in a way that makes them feel as though they are aimlessly exploring and adventuring. It's easy to feel a certain sense of self-satisfaction when you use your hands to complete a circuit, give somebody a shock, or cause a wall of lights to flare up and react to you. The Franklin Institute quite effectively teaches visitors while making them feel clever and engaged.
     I think the Franklin Institute did a great job at what it set out to do, that is, to teach and entertain simultaneously. Some of the lessons may have gotten muddled in the fun, however. The exhibits about sustainability struck me as especially odd. They attempted to teach about sustainable energy use and renewable energy with a multiplayer video game. I watched four of my classmates play this game, and I could tell that the lesson hardly sunk in. When experiential museums attempt to teach brief lessons about deep, complex topics such as sustainability, balancing learning and entertainment must get very tricky. Perhaps if the exhibit had been just a bit bigger, it could have better reached its educational goal.

The Academy of Natural Sciences

     Yesterday, our class visited the Academy of Natural Sciences on the Ben Franklin Parkway. The Academy is the picture of a natural science museum, populated by dinosaur bones, dioramas, excited children and disinterested parents. Entering the building, a visitor is immediately confronted by the skeleton of an immense aquatic dinosaur, and the sight of this bus-sized skeleton is both intimidating and awe-inspiring. As such, the first room I (and just about every other student) was compelled to enter was the dinosaur hall. Here are displayed numerous skeletons of dinosaurs which fill me with a childlike sense of wonder. Some of the bones are put into action poses and placed over primordial backdrops. The aquatic ones even have an accompanying ocean sound effect which seems to loop indefinitely. This hall was of great  interest to me, because so much is said so matter-of-factly about these creatures that nobody has ever seen alive.
     After looping through the dinosaur hall, I found myself in the African and Asian halls. The placards make me wonder what savage lands these must be! It is interesting to note at this point that the Academy didn't seem to me to be organized in a way to command visitors into following a path, but rather it encourages some wandering and exploration. Even when dioramas were neatly aligned, I still felt compelled to follow a winding path.
     The dioramas are of great interest, as they make up the majority of the museum and are it's most important displays. Numerous glass-walled rooms lined the halls of the African, Asian, and North American exhibits. In them were displays of animals, which seemed to be quite alive despite their absolute lack of movement. The animals were placed into settings which were meant to reinforce their realism and make the viewer believe this is their natural setting. Oddly, while the animals and fake plants were quite convincing, the backdrops over which they were set were painted without much regard to detail. It seemed as though the backdrops were intentionally left unrealistic. The animals were grouped with their respective species, and what's more they were all posed to be facing out at the visitor. This, to me, made it look even less realistic. The fact that they were posed for and by humans was just too strikingly obvious.
    I found it surprising that humans were not present in any of the dioramas. What's even stranger is that humans were shown multiple times in the dinosaur hall, where the exhibits would draw comparisons between the anatomy of dinosaurs and humans. It was odd that they would put humans into this exhibit, because nothing even resembling humans existed when dinosaurs walked the earth. Despite this, no humans could be found in the dioramas of animals that are not yet extinct. Perhaps people were removed from these exhibits to avoid some of the racial controversies we have learned about. I could not help but wonder if the dioramas really were a good way of displaying nature. While I may not know of a better way, I feel that dioramas try to trick the viewer into believing they are totally true and natural, but in fact, they are just man-made constructions and settings. As such, they aren't a great way of displaying natural history, but they probably could be worse.

A portrait of Joseph Leidy, "The last man who knew everything," sat in the dinosaur hall.

His contributions make up a portion of the museum's displays.

The Betsy Ross House

This Thursday, our class visited the supposed house of early American patriot, Betsy Ross. Betsy Ross was an upholsterer who is famously believed to have designed the first American flag, known notoriously as the Betsy Ross flag. The house museum located at 239 Arch Street is agreed to be her home.
The building enters into a gift shop, which doesn't seem to be a part of the house's original 1740 design (the room itself, obviously she didn't have a gift shop). The self guided tour begins next, touring one through the main house, up and down winding stairs. Plaques dot the walls, celebrating the legend of Betsy Ross's creation of the first American flag. The guided tour, on the other hand, barely mentions it. Instead, the guided tour leads the listener through the life of Betsy Ross while describing the various rooms in Betsy's small house. The audio is littered with testimonials from Betsy Ross, which were quite clearly things she never said nor wrote. The tour itself is as small as the colonial house, ending after some 15 minutes. One must then return to the gift shop to return the audio device (not to mention, the audio specifically asks you to visit the gift shop).
If ever one of our field trips related to the readings, this was it. This place was the model of a house museum. The Betsy Ross House, on a smaller scale, attempts to accomplish much of what Colonial Williamsburg does. The house uses objects and buildings to contextualize history. The house also encourages nationalism through the narrative of Betsy Ross as a hard working early American. The place exists as a historical site, and there's no reason to think that Betsy Ross didn't reside there. However, the legend of her telling George Washington to can his six-pointed stars in favor of her simple five-pointed stars is likely a lot of exaggeration. There is no documentation to prove that Ross singlehandedly created the flag, and it is more likely that she was a member of a collaboration. In this way, the Betsy Ross House seems to function like every other house museum. It is a genuine historic site, but it spreads a fair bit of fiction. Because the place must hold up in a changing modern world, some facts are stretched to keep it interesting and valuable. This is the strange condition that all house museums find themselves in, and it is these faults that make them so interesting to study.