The Lost Museum is a pretty creepy place to go to. Going to the site at night alone while everyone is sleeping freaked me out … Who made the site so freaky?
Those are the words of one of my students in an urban history course at Baruch College, written after completing an assignment at a virtualized version of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum (originally located at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street between 1841 and 1865). The student seems to have meant the comment as criticism, but I believe it is in fact a high compliment to the makers of the Lost Museum website. If you haven’t visited before, I recommend that you check out the site.
A team at the American Social History Project and the Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center developed the project between 1996 and 2004, programming with Flash and Softimage animation software to offer online visitors a deeply interactive experience. User participation is heightened while navigating through the empty museum (in a first-person, role-playing video game format) as visitors seek clues to determine which of Barnum’s many enemies may have burned down the museum in 1865. Along the way, they encounter historical information about the museum, the city, and the nation during the mid-nineteenth century. So, the fact that my student expressed fear in virtually wandering through an empty, dark, 100-year-old museum filled with items ranging from fantastical creatures to war memorabilia means that the site designers succeeded at temporarily transporting him to another place and another time.
Earlier this week, Luke did some virtual transport of his own, leaping 600 miles and many years back to the site of his childhood memories in Michigan, crafting a media-rich tour of the locale. As his title suggests, he did all this through story telling, a technique that does not require a high speed internet connection and new age video processing, but can demonstrably be enhanced by it.
While teaching with the Lost Museum, I noticed that my students questioned the material they encountered on the site far more meticulously than that of their textbook and navigated through it with greater confidence. Some commented boldly about the political turmoil in New York City over slavery evident in the antebellum museum. Others drew accurate conclusions about Barnum’s pioneering role in shaping 19th century entertainment: “Barnum must have been very good at manipulating the audiences to buy the load of nonsense he exhibited at his museum.” A third group zeroed in on minute details: “As for the cage with a bunch of different species of animals that can eat each other, how many times did Barnum have to restock the cage?”
I found a similar tendency by students to raise probing questions when studying tenement living on the Lower East Side with the aid of a virtual tour constructed by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. One of the apartments is empty, but the rest are restored with period furnishings. Unfortunately, you have to go to the museum in person to interact with role-playing actors and get a more visceral feel of the claustrophobic conditions. Next time around, I will plan to add a street-level tour of the surrounding neighborhood, as imagined by Luke. Maybe by then, someone will have invented a simulation of the hustle and bustle of Hester Street so my students can push through the crowds to visit their favorite street peddler (and Luke can restore the cast of characters that roamed North Genesee Drive).
One question I wish to raise here is, what are the risks and rewards of utilizing tools such as the Lost Museum in the classroom? My examples in the last two paragraphs touch on a benefit of such a tool. As for disadvantages, I wonder whether virtual tours of the past can “flatten” the past by making it seem too easy to visit. Many of my students reflected on the process by which the site was constructed, and they tended to demonstrate a firmer grasp on the insurmountable distance between life in 2008 and 1865; but others struggled to contextualize the sites they encountered, even when prompted by the site to do so.
I am curious to hear from folks in other disciplines about the prospects for using computer simulations to enhance teaching your subject. If the historical-minded among us wish to debate the merits of computer-mediated teaching of the history curriculum, I am of course also up for that, but I will wait for comments before getting into that discussion.
Interesting site and post, Tom! Virtual Vaudeville is a great historical simulation, in part because of its ability to capture a sense of the performer, the space, the audience, the historical context, and more. It’s so well done that I think it avoids some of the dangers of “flattening” that you mentioned. There’s something thrilling (and deceiving?) about having a “vaudeville show” recreated in this way– particularly because even examples of 20th century performance on video can often be of notoriously poor quality!To respond to your question about the potential dangers of using these tools, I would think that another one to add to the list would be to give students the impression not that history is too *easy* to visit, but that it’s too hard– why not take the live tour of the actual Tenement Museum as well as exploring the virtual?
Reply to Hillary
Hi Tom, Just picked up on your blog since you wrote about the Tenement Museum. We’re actually launching a new virtual exploration of the immigrant story in the next few weeks. While not a tour of an actual space, the game allows users to adopt an immigrant identity, circa 1915, and navigate the immigration process from Ellis Island to settling in on the Lower East Side. Users are guided by a video of a costumed interpreter playing Victoria Confino, a 14-year-old girl who lived in our tenement around 1914. It’s out attempt to fix the problem of “Unfortunately, you have to go to the museum in person to interact with role-playing actors.” Can I pass along the link once it goes live? We’d be interested in your feedback.
Reply to Kate
Thanks, Hillary and Kate, for your references to these other exciting projects. Yes, Kate, I look forward to seeing the link once the game goes live. Also, thanks to both of you for reminding us that physical spaces like the Tenement Museum and its neighborhood are treasures that should be visited in person if at all possible. While writing my post, I got so caught up with the virtual that I underplayed the important of the real.
Reply to Tom