On Friday, October 10, I had the unusual privilege of spending the night in the slave quarters of the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, MA as a part of The Slave Dwelling Project, organized by Joseph McGill. This project is intended in part …
At the start of the semester, I did something I had never done before. I wrote my first computer game, and submitted it to my first virtual game jam. A game jam is a gathering of game developers working on games collaboratively or competitively — …
This post is geared towards keeping up with information by reading, partly because a large portion of media related to our fields is print-based, but also partly because I’m a fairly visual learner, and I’m much less likely to listen to a podcast or watch a video than I am to read a blog post. If you have tips for the audio-inclined, or any other thoughts on how you keep up, I encourage you to share them in the comments.
by Tegan Kehoe Have you seen the news? An activist group in London has begun pouring concrete over metal spikes that deter people from loitering and homeless people from sleeping in certain areas.. As it turns out, the field of designing to influence behavior is a pretty …
Summer is often a time of change. Many recent graduates of the Tufts Museum Studies program are either already in, or in the process of finding, jobs that will take them to places they have never lived. Many of us are interning somewhere new to …
by columnist Tegan Kehoe
A couple weeks ago, I was a part of Boston’s first History Camp, an “unconference” that was organized by volunteers and a wiki. One of the panels was on means of publishing for history books, and Boston historian J. L. Bell made point I think applies just as well to museums. He said that people — particularly writers — are used to thinking of publishing houses as the gatekeepers: people who control what gets inside, people who has to please, appease, or even depend on the whims of. With e-books, inexpensive self-publishing and other text formats flooding the market, he proposed, it makes just as much sense to think of gatekeepers (whether they are publishers, reviewers, or others) as ushering readers in through open gates, helping them find what’s good and what suits their tastes. I think the same metaphor can be used to talk about museums as gatekeepers of knowledge, stories, and images or artifacts.