Kelsey Landis
NMS 509-301: Digital Museums and Archives
The Museum’s Story: telling a narrative and learning through databases
In the 1963 DePaulian yearbook, Chicago museums are described as a places where the patrons “vivify and enhance the past, making it part of their future and The Future.” That sentiment, along with the rest of the yearbook, has been digitized and is now text searchable and entirely accessible at DePaul’s library website. That is, it has joined a digital database.
But what is the significance of historical texts joining a database? First, “database” must be explained. It is a collection of data organized to represent reality. For example, is this book available in the library? How many women graduated from the College of Commerce in 1963? Can I book a flight to Barcelona for June 8th? We need the information, and databases can provide it in a very special way.
I write “special” because databases think differently than we do; they are paradigmatic. That is, they organize data vertically, which means that every item is of equal importance. If we align the three following sentences, a database would organize it vertically by word type:
P/N V PR ART N
I swim in the lake
She runs on the sidewalk.
Debbie smiled in the sun.
The database categorizes the words by type, and all elements are equal. When humans read these sentences, we see them horizontally; we read them from left to right, and order is important. We can’t mix up the order, or else the meaning would be confused. Our understanding is through association, through space and time; we reference memories. That is, we tell stories. That’s how we understand the world around us. Databases simply have the information, and see everything equally. This takes up much less space than the way humans see things because it is either on or off. There, or not there. 0 or 1. Information can be easily added, changed, or removed. There is no meaning, no order, no story, or as some would say, no beauty.
Though full of beauty, museum archives have arguably always been databases, but they are expensive and limited compared to digital databases. Museums feel the threat of being replaced by the very databases they source. Such fear is not unsound. It’s like a novice playing chess against a computer set to expert: your opponent is just too smart. It has all the available options and can readily compute them all while you’re struggling to consider the past, present, and future.
At least the museum has one thing going for it: its patrons are humans, not computers. We can’t interpret our world paradigmatically, at least not yet. We still need to see the story to gain meaning. It is undeniable, however, that the database can offer more information, and is therefore an invaluable learning resource. See that painting over there? That was painted under such and such circumstances. And voilà! You have more knowledge on the piece.
But merely having the knowledge is not enough (that’s for databases). We need to obtain meaning from that knowledge in order to learn. And here’s the Darwinist jab we all needed: learning advances the human race. How do we obtain meaning? By experiencing it ourselves. Luckily, the museum is there for us to walk through, to experience the past, the present, and to think about the future. We vivify the museums.
The database logic could help us, though. Of course, we can access the information to make the pieces in museums more meaningful, and minds can reach conclusions they might not have before. But more than that, databases are easily changeable, equal, open, and transparent. In the world of the database, elitism is irrelevant.
This “new media” through which we openly access information will not change how we experience the museum. We are still beings of time and space; we have to know and experience the narrative to gain meaning. New media will, however, help us learn more from the museum’s stories, and by extension the institution will begin to mirror the database, where equality of information rules.