 with one of our colleagues from the Hearst Museum, and someone who's brought on recently to do the important work of bringing interpretation out of, you can have those contacts from the museum onto a broader public, doing those kinds of negations that we know that anthropology has to do. And having our colleagues from the Hearst with us on a regular basis, we're reminded that the relationship that we have as a community of archaeologists here is one that, and oftentimes we may take for granted, that we have a million and one institutions in that museum. From over, we have a real community of academics who work really hard what they do, who really support us in ways that many of us don't quite understand in all of its intricacies yet, but are really important. And that if you haven't spent the time to meet some of our colleagues in the museum, that you really are short changing yourselves and all the opportunities that those working relationships could have for you as an up and coming scholar. So I really want, especially for the younger academics in the room, to push you to reach out to our colleagues in the museum who have been a tremendous part of my experience here at Berkeley and many of the faculty around you. So, Adam, I'm Dr. Nelson, nice to ask from Stanford, but we still like him. And he's been brought specifically to do the work that the Hearst in its new reimagined state and with this new emphasis on what the museum can be in a broader community beyond our campus, beyond the academy, he's at the tip of the spear and all that. So it's with great pleasure and a huge honor with all of the Hearst community here in the room to welcome them to our brown bag. Thank you, Chew, and that's great to be here and see this nice, chill crew. I like a brown bag vibe that's a little bit more laid back than some talks. So, yeah, a few different things to, and I think I might occasionally sit here. I've seen some of this before, some of this material about what is going on in the development of our new gallery, but hopefully with some updates and with some additions because I've wanted to kind of tell you about multiple aspects of the work that I do at the Hearst that I haven't, I don't think I've shared with my Hearst colleagues all that much even. So, yeah, so just to give you an overview of sort of the topics that I'm hoping to talk about today, and I welcome your feedback and your questions at any point to just keep this totally chill and open. I'm just gonna give you a brief background about myself and the research that I do. I'm gonna give you, some of you guys might not be familiar with the Hearst. Some of you guys might be early grad students who have never actually set foot into the Hearst. I think that's probably very likely. So, I can give you a brief background of the Hearst. I know many of you guys here, I see many fishers who most certainly know the Hearst a million times better than I do, so I invite you to chime in. And then some details about our new gallery and the renovation project that we're working on and the inaugural exhibit. And then at the end, I wanna get your vibe on what I've talked about and what I've said, get your feel for how we can make this gallery, make this museum really, the public face of this museum be something that is really engaging for both academics and non-academics. That's of course a challenge to sort of play, have both of those kinds of voices. So, I hope to kind of get you thinking about new ways, thinking about ways in which every day visitors, people who come to the Hearst who might not have the sort of background that we do, think about objects and think about people of other times and places. So, like June said, so just to give you a vibe about, and I promise I won't keep saying the word vibe, that's too so far, just to give you a feel for where I'm coming from. Like June said, yes I come from Stanford, I'm not ashamed of it. In a previous talk that I gave to undergrads, I put the logo in black and white just to not freak anyone out, but it was told by a fellow Stanford alum, why are you doing that? So, start off, so my more distant background at my undergrad, my masters from NYU are in anthropology, so I come from that sort of early academic background doing research in those previous academic experiences in museums and looking at various ways in which stories of migration are told in museums. After my time at NYU, I came back and I was a history researcher and curator at the Oakland Museum. Have people been to the Oakland Museum before? Oh, awesome, okay, because I'm gonna talk a little bit about it. And had a wonderful experience there during their complete renovation of their California History Gallery when everything was gutted and being completely rethought in a similar way to which the hearse is currently being completely rethought. That got me very interested in, actually that's kind of out of order I need to have. So I actually went back to Stanford for my PhD because I got very interested in how people learn and think about people of the past specifically and how people learn in free choice learning settings like museums where they're not fed so much curriculum from a textbook but where people were learning is something that you can really customize but based on your own curiosity and your own interest. And I am super happy to have arrived here at the Hearst. I just had my six month mark last week. So time has breathed by and I've been loving it because this position as head of education really combines what I love to do in terms of anthropology, in terms of educational research and in terms of the creative aspects of museum work. I first want to just give you a, I was about to say vibe, I want to give you a feel for the sort of research that I do. So one of my really deep interests is how people think and put themselves in the mind, the minds of people who they perceive to be different from themselves, specifically how they empathize with people who they feel, who they perceive to be different and how they put themselves in the perspective of those people. In doing that in museums, one of the pieces that I, or one of the kind of pairs of museum theorists, museum learning theorists that I continually come back to and that I just want to tell you about real quick that kind of guides the work that I do is someone with an impossible name, Chikcent Mahai. And Hermann said in Mahai, Chikcent Mahai being a Hungarian educational researcher who does really awesome studies and on museum learning. And the work that I do at the Oakland Museum and here, we try to think in three kind of different ways based on their research about how visitors learn and what draws visitors. And previously museum learning was 10, museum professionals tended to not even think about the visitors and not really think much about what visitors were actually doing in their galleries. It was just a matter of we present the material and we hope material, we think people should learn and present it in the way we think they learn but paying very little attention to what people are actually doing. So thinking in terms of what are ways that visitors get hooked in, what are ways that you can draw visitors in by creating curiosity and specifically my interest in relating to people of different times and places, making really clear the links between people, between modern day people and modern day visitors and people of different times and places and using lots of stories, lots of first person narratives and faces to bring that content to life. Looking at ways for getting visitors involved in their museum visit actively involved instead of just this transmission model of learning that still seems to pervade classrooms and informal learning environments like museums. So instead of having this idea that information's just gonna be fed to visitors and they're just gonna absorb it, looking for opportunities to involve them so ways that they can discover material and put pieces together themselves, immersive environments, this idea that and something that we're very much working on at the Hearst is conveying this idea that even though museums may, material and museums may seem to descend from the academic heavens onto the walls and you may not even think about the credibility or how this knowledge was arrived at, getting visitors to think in terms of, to think about the contestedness of knowledge and how knowledge gets creative and how created and how there may be multiple perspectives on particular themes. And then this idea that they have about flow, the creating conditions for and flow it's such an everyday word but it's very heavily theorized by especially Chik-Sent-Mahai and other academic, other educational researchers and I really like this way of thinking about how can we produce opportunities for visitors or learners in any environment to get in this sort of zone and the sort of zone of flow, as they say, where you kind of forget the world around you and you're so immersed and you're so interested and the challenge level and the level of challenge and the level of novelty of the experience is a good, is a ideal match to your actual abilities. So making it so that people are just challenged enough by working with new information or with new content so that they're immersed and they're interested. So various ways that have been heavily, that have been extensively worked on by these theorists are, in the context of museums are the importance of orienting visitors to a museum and orienting them to a space so that when visitors enter a museum they have a feel for what they're about to experience and how they might like to, how they might best be able to, what sorts of questions and what sorts of ways of making the material relevant to them but the best ways that they might be able to think that is sort of primed them for their visit and looking for ways to sort of make museums comfortable and make them cozy and make them places where they're not going to be distracted by negative mental states, they're not going to be frustrated, they're not going to be tired of standing, they're not going to be confused and where they make soulful connections as they say that are not just about sort of cognitive processes but they're actually making emotional connections and having their emotions raised by the material in the museums. So to give you a little description of the work that I've done previously and that I was doing right before I started my work here, I went back to the Oakland Museum and did work, did some research on how visitors are engaging with their new approaches to museum learning and the kind of guiding ethos of the Oakland Museum of this renovation process that something, idea that guided the renovation process at the Oakland Museum was that people connect like I was saying with faces and voices and stories of real people and so I was very interested in well what are people actually doing when they encounter those especially the secondary guiding ethos is how, is minimizing curatorial texts, minimizing the amount of text written by this omniscient curator who is telling you the way the world is or what the facts are but at the Oakland Museum much of the material is told in voices of first person voices of real people who were there from diaries and letters and interviews so visitors are sort of having to piece together these individual stories and voices to create their own narrative understanding of what a particular past, of what a particular era was like and so I did part of my dissertation research on one exhibit that really highlights or that especially uses that approach which was the Coming for Gold, the California Gold Rush exhibit in the California History Gallery and so you see when you walk into this exhibit you are one of the first things you see is a wall of faces that were intentionally picked to be very diverse with the idea that the diverse range of visitors to the museum would be able to connect and so yeah those faces, lots of first person quotes, this was a little scrapbook where people are looking through and they can read diary excerpts and see photos of real people and another image of this right here is a, I do have a pointer, that right there, you can't really tell but it's a life-size screen with an actress who retells stories that are excerpted from diaries and from letters so you push a button and she comes out and she retells these stories so another way of creating this opportunity for personal connection. So in my research and what I did was I, you can't really tell because of the lighting but that's a GoPro camera on this woman's forehead. She was one of the participants in my study and I've not yet used that GoPro camera for anything other than this study. I look forward to scuba diving or something with it but right now it's just truly my research tool and what I was interested in looking at was how is a person going through this exhibit linking together all these voices and stories and tying it into a new understanding of the gold rush period and so I had a number of, I had a dozen visitors do this process and giving me a stream of consciousness as they're going through and I'm able to analyze the video, the video of what they're looking at and combine that with what they're saying, with their thoughts that they're expressing as they're seeing the material and look at various ways and look into ways in which they're feelings of connection with these stories, this vague idea of connection, what does that mean? Connection with these stories relates to how they're actually learning about the period. I gave them a sign of course so people wouldn't think they're crazy, like talking to themselves in the gallery. And so I could talk about this research for a long time. I just wanted to give you a little taste of it but some implications that I really want to bring to the hearst from this work and that I actually hope to carry out some more studies at the hearst are just a more nuanced view of what this idea of connection is what that actually looks like and what it means because my feel is that a lot of museums these days are sort of willy nilly putting, just thinking the key to learning is just put up more voices, put up more stories, just get some diverse faces and put them up and people are gonna connect. In my research I'm fleshing out what that actually means and looks like. I'm also trying to kind of raise that as a concern and also raising the concern that a lot of visitors in my study and in other studies too have expressed frustration with the lack of curatorial text. So this sort of movement away from curators telling stories actually seems to be frustrating for a lot of visitors but it's a delicate balance of course between overwhelming visitors with text and giving but also giving them space to breathe and space to make their own connections. So that's something I want to pursue further is to figure out what is that balance and how can we sort of optimize visitors experience with these sorts of stories. And of course the idea that's not new but the idea that kind of fleshing out and reflecting more on the idea that not everything works for all visitors that some visitors really want their curatorial text. Some people don't want it. Some people don't care about the object. Some people only care about the graphics. So what are ways in which we can create exhibits that are gonna speak to a wide range of types of visitors. So things that I'm hoping to bring to the Hearst. Now turning specifically to the Hearst. And so people may, I'm kind of gonna zoom through this because I think that a lot of people probably already do know a thing or two about the Hearst Museum but Ira Jackness who is research anthropologist at the Hearst Museum knows the museum backwards and forwards and I have learned a great deal about the museum from him so please correct me if I'm getting anything wrong Ira. But so Phoebe Hearst, early patron and one of the founders of the Hearst Museum who was formerly called the Lowe Museum. So yeah, one of the founders of the museum who is the mother of William Randolph Hearst and who set about with a number of projects of collecting objects from around the world and sending researchers on expeditions to excavate and collect Phoebe in Egypt. Some of the early images of objects that were collected in Egypt. This I believe, these are objects in the collection. I believe when the museum was located in San Francisco, right? Another example is archeologist Max Uli who was commissioned to set out to Peru and to excavate and bring back collections that comprise a significant, one of the more significant and larger portions of the collection. So we have a beautiful collection of objects from Peru. And I think a lot of people are familiar with the relationship between Ishii and the museum Ishii, a Yahi Indian who became a friend of Alfred Krober and who was kind of an informant and a person who created objects for the museum and worked with the museum and actually lived at the museum during a period. And so part of it, we do have many objects that were created such as this arrowhead that was created out of glass actually by Ishii. Museum in 1959 moved to the building just across the way. So yeah, it doesn't look too much different except for the cars, right? And you'll notice the totem pole, the 40-foot totem pole that was removed, I believe, was it the 90s? 80. 80, in 1980? There we go. Okay, yes. So the totem pole was removed and is currently at our facility in Richmond. But so moved into Krober in 1959. And the gallery space in there is about 6,200 square feet. So it's a little bit of an ironic that we have this massive collection of about 3.8 million objects and this very small gallery space. And just some quick images that give a little bit more feel for objects in the collection and just what the museum looked like before it closed for renovation. And another big thing going on to the Hearst is the massive move of our collections. I believe it was five collections facilities or five locations, is that right, Jane? Five locations in which Hearst objects were scattered and are now being consolidated into two facilities. So it's been a massive project that has taken a great deal of time and expert energy from our staff and our new facilities, especially our Richmond facility which is our newer one, is quite beautiful and it's kind of a kid in the candy store experience to go through and walk the aisles of these amazing objects. So ways in which we're rethink. So now specifically turning to the gallery renovation project and what we're working on to renovate the space and make the space a new, give the space a new feel and what the inaugural exhibit is gonna look like when we reopen. The speaking of reopening and the timeline, where the timeline for all of this that I'm about to talk about is that we plan on opening in December slash January. So probably having like a soft opening in December and having our grand reopening in January. Did I say that right? Soft opening in December, big opening January. So yeah, so multiple ways in which we're rethinking the museum sort of based on the ideas I was talking about making this a place where we have a lot of community participation where it's not just scholars kind of feeding or transmitting knowledge to visitors but where visitors are actually involved in that process where we involve visitors or community members in the process of curating exhibits and of helping us to assemble exhibits using their own expert knowledge of a different sort. Making it a place that's very interactive. Lots of links between on-campus and off-campus so we have all this amazing research happening here at Cal so it seems worthwhile to make tighter links between us and the community surrounding us. Connections to the lives of everyday visitors and this is something I really wanna get your feel about at the end of my talk is after you've seen all this how you, ways in which you feel that we can really take this material and make it very relevant and really get visitors thinking like anthropologists and the space is gonna be really flexible so that it's not something where you walk in, month after month after month or don't walk in month after month after month because we don't want it to be a place that's stagnant but where we can very easily rotate new objects in and out and where we will have the capacity to do things like pop-up exhibits or other programming that's gonna keep the gallery fresh and new feeling and updated. I've kind of talked a little bit about this but various ways in which we're looking at community participation, having ways of evaluating our material from the starts or throughout the process of exhibit development so taking our initial ideas and going to our community and doing sort of front end informative evaluation if we wanna do an exhibit on X, how are community members, how are non-academics thinking about X in the world? What sorts of questions do they have? What sorts of thoughts do they have and how can that guide the way that we design the exhibit and prototyping those exhibits, those ideas as we go forward and doing mock-ups of our displays and seeing do these make sense? Are visitors totally bored? Are they totally fascinated? Do they have questions that we didn't think about? Co-curation opportunities like I mentioned and including real peoples of voices and stories so bringing in perspectives of everyday people from outside of the museum staff and some new learning goals also. Encouraging, looking at ways to encourage visitors to use tools of anthropologists in their everyday lives. This idea of open questions like I kind of mentioned and questioning our own ways and reflecting on our own ways of thinking and feeling and acting in our own lives. Several new, so how many people have, I guess how many people have not been into the Hearst before and to the actual, oh, only a few, okay. Okay, okay, handful. So some of this, I'll show you a little diagram. Some of it you might kind of have to know, might have to have been in there to know, but we're relocating the entrance, which was formerly, you had to go into the lobby of Krober Hall to enter the museum, but we're shifting the entrance to the Bancroft side of the building so that the museum will have a little bit more of a public face. We're gonna have walls that are movable that aren't just fixed in place like previously had been the case. So walls that have a wheel system and we're trying to figure out the logistics of this right now, but we're excited that that's definitely gonna happen where we can shift. I mean, it's amazing what just moving a wall or two does to change the look and feel of a space. So that's gonna be a good way of keeping the gallery very fresh feeling. New cases, new furniture, floor, ceiling, lighting. I mean, complete overhaul, even down to those micro levels and then a new learning center in what was formerly the gift shop. And I can talk a little bit more about that in a second. This is the floor plan, which you might, so if you've been in there in the gallery before, you'll kind of recognize, so this is the door that goes into the lobby of Krober and we're gonna be moving the door right there to, so this is Bancroft right here. So the new entrance is gonna be right there on Bancroft. We have a welcome area, kind of an introductory and orientation area. And then this is what we're working with right now as the possible layout for how our mobile walls are gonna be each little chunk of these, of this little configuration, each little chunk is gonna be a wall that we can shift around. And this is learning center, which I'll show you and our storage space. We have this drawing that we love showing some of the possibilities of what's gonna be possible in this learning center, where we wanna make it equipped with a variety of technologies that will be useful for faculty and students and engaging with the collections. So we're working on doing that right now and some of you may have done our survey about ways in which, asking about ways in which this learning center can best serve faculty and students in their teaching and learning. So there'll be a variety of ways for faculty to have objects pre-selected that can be displayed in this learning center so that students can come and study them on their own time. We're looking at various sort of visualization technologies and the like. And also having a BS space where we can, the gallery will be flexible, but this will be super flexible where we can, where we can bring in, create exhibits kind of on the fly that are really responsive to things going on in the world that are really current, current events or current issues or current research that where we can have these pop-up exhibits. And so one of the first objects, so now kind of shifting to the layout of the gallery as you walk in, the object that's gonna be sort of welcoming you when you come into the gallery is a fellow known as the doctor. Do people know about the doctor? Yeah, okay. People probably are familiar with our crowdfunding campaign back in the fall, but the doctor is our affectionate name for a 2,500-year-old, 6,000 pounds, 6,000 pounds, 7,000 pounds? Six? Seven. Seven, okay, 7,000 pounds. Sarcophagus lid that is in impeccable shape and belonged to a guy named Sometik who we know from being able to read the hieroglyphs, which are beautiful, we know that he was a doctor and so we call him the doctor. And we had a really exciting and successful crowdfunding campaign back in the fall, like I mentioned, where we were able to raise over and above our goal for all that's involved in getting the doctor to our gallery. So this is gonna cover things like transporting the doctor from our Richmond facility to the museum and building a new mount for him and new interpretive material for him and getting the, I mean, he's massive, 7,000 pounds. So there's gonna be a lot of work to make it possible for him to actually just be in the gallery. So the doctor will see you now, as we said in our campaign. And so he will be there welcoming you at the opening of the welcome area of the gallery. So now to turn to the inaugural exhibit that we're working on, the first exhibit that will be open when we reopen. And right now we're calling the exhibit the language of objects. And so things could change, things are sort of influx and we're having a lot of conversations about this right now. I'll be interested to hear your feedback on these ideas. The basic idea behind this opening exhibit is that we are looking to get visitors thinking like anthropologists, like I mentioned, and thinking about objects in the way that anthropologists or archeologists think about objects in three different ways, three different aspects. So materiality, the materiality of objects, what objects are made of and how raw materials are manipulated, authenticity, what makes objects real or not real and what does that mean and why does that matter. And context, what can we gain from the lens of looking at objects and thinking about the context in which they were used or found or displayed. So three different lenses. A new development in our plan for the gallery is that one of the main sets of objects that you're gonna see as you walk in the door after you go through the welcome area where the doctor will be. We are proud of our collection of Taiwanese opera puppets. I believe there are about 200 of them and they're a beautiful set of puppets used in Taiwanese puppet operas. And so beautiful colors, some bizarre and really cool shaped faces. Really fascinating to look in the eyes of these objects and just the range of different designs and colors. And our hope is to be able to get all of these into as the introductory objects in the gallery and to use them as a way to get visitors right from the start, thinking about the three different lenses. What can we get out of looking at the materiality of these objects, what they're made of, what does that tell us? What can we get out of thinking about authenticity and how does that relate to these objects and the context of these objects and who they belong to, the time and place in which they are made, what their function is. So really cool intro objects that we're excited about. So gonna give you a couple of brief examples of the three different themes and objects that we're gonna display for the three different themes. Anyone have any questions so far at all? I've been talking for a little while now, so people cool? Okay, so to launch right in, section one and materiality, happy to be able to have someone in the room who is helping us with one of the sets of objects in this collection. We're really excited to be working with Carolyn Smith, who a lot of you might know and who is a student here. Yeah, Carolyn? Who is a student here in the Anthropology Department and is doing her PhD work on basket weaving on the Klamath River. And one of the stories that we're excited to be telling in the gallery, well objects that we're gonna be displaying are Karuk baskets that were collected by Krober. And the story with these objects, which I really love is the way, so Krober collected these baskets, but it was Lila O'Neill, anthropologist in the 1920s, who Krober had kind of just collected the baskets as objects or as, you know, kind of static and representations of this culture without really looking too much into the meaning behind these baskets or the design of these baskets. Lila O'Neill, who was a pioneer in the ethno-aesthetics movement, went back to the Klamath River with these baskets, with pictures of these baskets and interviewed people on the Klamath River about the aesthetics of these baskets, what made these baskets, particularly our baskets, beautiful or not beautiful or well-made or not well-made. She was getting to what is the sort of deeper cultural significance of these baskets. And so Carolyn's work is really interesting where she, so Lila O'Neill wrote a book about this that has become a very respected and beloved book among basket-weavers on the Klamath River. And Carolyn is going back or has been going back to the Klamath River and is interviewing modern day basket-weavers about their relationship to this book and to the work of Lila O'Neill and ways in which the book has a lot of modern day significance in terms of a source of pride, a source of family connection, a source of connection to the past and as a guidebook, as something that they can actually teach and learn with. So this is kind of an example of this materiality theme of looking at these baskets, research that looks at these baskets beyond just physical material objects, but ways in which they were made and ways in which people think about them. Also under materiality, we raise the question that I think is very interesting about how most of our collection, we have no idea the individual, we don't know nothing about the individuals who made most of the objects in our collection, but there are a few exceptions to that. And we're gonna be highlighting those exceptions and getting visitors to think about relating this to objects in their own lives and who do we know? Things, all this stuff in the room, do we know who made it and why does that matter and why is that interesting? And so this is an example of a staff from the Yoruba of West Africa and this staff is used, it's called a shango staff, shango staff, and is used in ceremonies that are worshiping, where individuals are worshiping the goddess, shango, and this staff is carried in those ceremonies. The story behind this is that one of our previous directors, Bascom, went, was in this area and was hoping to purchase one of these staffs that was on an altar and that was being used in ceremony and he was hoping to purchase it, but he was told, no, this is, you know, you can't purchase this, but I can direct you to someone who can make one for you. And so as a result, Bascom, he didn't just collect the object, but he did a lot of interviewing and photographing and work with the maker of it who was an individual named Duga. And so we get, with this particular object, as opposed to most of the objects in our collection, we get to know not only about the object, but about who made it. And under the authenticity section, we'll be juxtaposing masks from the Fong of West Africa and in the collection we have one that's real and one that's fake. And this kind of raises the simple question, but interesting question of what makes a fake and what's in between a fake and a replica in terms of deception, in terms of intention of the creator of the replica. In this case, the fake was meant to deceive and was meant to be created and roughed up to look old and sold to a collector. We're also going to be featuring objects from our collection of tourist art, which was spearheaded by Nelson Grayburn and the object that I really like from this particular part of the exhibit is a hatiki ornament on the left made of jade. This is a Maori object used as an ornament to commemorate someone who's passed away. And we're going to be juxtaposing it with a very similar looking object on the right that is made of plastic and that is a little trinket given out by Air New Zealand. So hopefully if you flew on Air New Zealand you will have enjoyed your flight and you will have this cute little trinket of a souvenir to bring with. But it raises questions, of course, about authenticity and about, do we consider this plastic object to be a real representation of this culture and our way of approaching this is, well first of all, overarchingly what does real mean but whether or not it's a real representation of Maori culture, presents real and interesting interaction between Maori culture and tourism, Maori culture and members of other cultures. And finally our third section, third subsection for the exhibit is objects from what we call our wastewater collection and these are objects that were found in an area that was excavated in San Francisco during the construction of a wastewater treatment plant near North Beach and these objects are dated to around 1850 to 1880 and these objects in terms of thinking about context we'll be talking about how archaeologists think about context in which objects are found and also raising questions about the interesting combination of different origins of objects, these objects being from many different parts of the world, many of them Chinese American, many of them European American, so raising those questions about multiple questions of context. And then finally two of our, one thing I forgot to mention but part of this of our opening exhibit is that we really want to feature objects that have not been displayed before in the museum but objects that we're very proud of and two of those objects, I believe this one may have been displayed before but it's one of our really fantastic Egyptian coffin sets and we're going to be in terms of context we're going to be talking about functional context and how the same sort of life process or life, what would you say, how funerary practices differ by context, by time and place and so raising this question with this juxtaposition of the Egyptian coffin set with another coffin in our collection which is our beloved chicken coffin. And this coffin I'm not sure, I think some people may have seen this before but this chicken coffin is massive so it's meant for a person to be buried in and it's part of a tradition of what they call fantasy coffins in Ghana where many people are buried in these really fantastic custom made coffins that often represent the profession or something that is beloved by the person who has passed away, so in this case this coffin was commissioned by the museum but similar ones have been created probably for people who are farmers or maybe who raise chickens so we have these two really fabulous coffins that will be juxtaposed for raising questions about context. So summing up, we've got materiality, authenticity and context and these are just a small fraction of the objects that are on the list for the exhibit right now. We're currently honing that and working with our really awesome team of designers to make the gallery a really exciting and interesting look and feel and to make the exhibit really engaging for visitors in the ways that I've talked about. So now I want to turn to you guys and get your take on these ideas and raise this kind of overarching question. Some of you I think may have completed, may have done the survey that we sent out I think back in the fall but one thing that we want to gather from anthropologists and from archaeologists are ways in which we think that everyday visitors might be able to use tools of anthropologists and think like anthropologists. Of course visitors coming to the museum may only be there for less than an hour maybe just a few minutes or who knows but in that short period how can we equip visitors or get them engaging with the ways in which anthropologists think and some of the questions that we came up with for the survey that I think are really provocative thinking questions are this one for instance so imagine you're at a dinner party and someone asks you why is anthropology important today? How would you answer? What are your suggestions and what are your feelings about ways in which we convey that to visitors who probably either have no idea what anthropology is or they probably think it's about dinosaur bones. So how do we tell that in ways that are visitor friendly and that are interesting and exciting? Some of the specifics in your training or in your background what are some of the specific big ideas of anthropology that you find most important? Maybe theories, methodologies, maxims, rules of thumb different ways of thinking that you think are sort of bite sized that could be made bite sized for visitors to be able to grasp and think in a different way and some of the looking at what are some of the specific skills tools or ways of thinking that you gain that you think every day visitors would be able to use in their own lives and to help their own communities so what are ways that we can take these ways of thinking and make this usable knowledge and usable skills and usable ways of thinking that can have a real tangible positive outcome for visitors. So keeping in mind that of course that most of our visitors are not visiting problem maybe the first experience that visitors have with real work of anthropologists. So I suppose right now why don't I kind of wrap up I'll ask you if you have any questions and then I'd love to get your thoughts and feelings about this about these questions but any questions about the sort of what I've talked anything I've talked about? Yeah. So I kind of say there's a sense of how many people are actually working on this just the magnitude and the number of people who are involved and how many are not on this what I think would be the interest on this. So we have maybe an active museum I'd say an active team of five, six people who are working on this significantly significant amount of time on this but and we have student volunteers who work with us and work figure students who are also contributing in different ways. So we've got five full-time folks working on this and then yeah we have a whole team of designers actually on Friday to hammer out a lot of details of this we have two really awesome designers with the Civic Group which is an excellent design group we have a couple of people working with Gizmo Art Productions which is a really great exhibit application company and our architect Thad Schaefer who has done quite a bit of work here on campus and is closely consulting and working with us on the local field of the gallery. So maybe I guess a couple of Tanish people. I have a question more about the experience in general particularly about open music which I really enjoy and the things that like transfer between students I've had the experience of taking students to the open music as part of the field trip and within a class of open students how many people have opposite reactions to the same the same exhibit design I'm thinking in particular of things like the reels that you can put to tell the unfortunate type of idea what would happen or be more interactive and what some students found too cute or pandering and other students said no, this is really interactive and it's also just more like history. So I was curious about the experience bridging Yeah, it is a tricky balance of being to multiple types of visitors you know a lot of visitors will be coming to the festival likely these three groups and so we want to be speaking to them but we also want to be speaking to open music on campus Yeah, it's there are a lot of ways of interactive add-ons that are things on your iPhone where if you want to or things that you can use you know, for example have ipads that they use at the the front end that are going to use ipads to go through and click on in a scan QR codes throughout the exhibit that will bring out things that are super interactive and might be more kind of kid-oriented. I think a lot of museums tend to go with that default of making it more, making the content more grown-up accessible and adding on content or adding on additional ways of engaging that are kind of more kid-friendly but another way is to admit you one of the things that some of your students at the Oakland Museum that may have wrote them wrong ways that oftentimes museums will have multiple ways of engaging altogether but there will not be there won't be any sort of direction or scaffolding for parents and adults to be able to to facilitate or talk with their kids about the material so what Christopher is talking about is at the Oakland Museum there is one actually in that gold rush section there is a wheel like a wheel of fortune that you can spin and it shows the ideas to get across what your faith could have been if you were a person who came to call it for you for gold so you spin this wheel and one of the little slots that you can mount on is you know that just deteriorates another one is you know you know strike it right to the of course one of just a couple dozen things and another one is you know you don't strike gold but you have a pie making business and you know you make a decent living on that so there is often museums don't have scaffolding a really powerful way to enhance that is to have scaffolding for parents to show you know a lot of kids don't get that or they just spin it and it kind of turns it to this kind of a gimmick but perhaps your student's concern could have been alleviated by things that would help grow enough to facilitate that experience for kids so ongoing and the same question as people are going I know we're going to close our time and I haven't seen those few questions but I invite people to please email me but what do you think how are we going to get in touch with them because make sure they thank Dr. Nelson