Visual Connections for Museums
Making connections between things is an essential human activity. We do this all the time. Who made the glass you are drinking from? How many flowers are on the daisy plant? Who is your grandmother? Consider the last question — there is a relation called “has_grandmother” that connects two concepts: you and your grandmother. This is one way to visualize connections: draw a circle around you and one around your grandmother, and then label the relation by drawing an arrow between the circles. Our worlds can be seen as vast webs of knowledge. The world wide web and the internet are predicated on this realization. Big spider webs.
Museums are gateways to understanding culture. Instead of being organized by subject matter, as we find in our schools, museums contain objects. These objects tell stories. Objects are part of exhibits that are designed by the museum’s curators, often in conjunction with educational staff. The curator takes a collection of objects and then forms a cohesive story for visitors.
I was fortunate to work with 3 museums for a Fall 2020 class in “modeling”. The museums are: The Crow Collection (now at the place where I teach and do research — University of Texas at Dallas), The Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) with whom I interacted in Summer 2018 via a Leverhulme Trust fellowship, and the Nasher Sculpture Center.
There were 2 projects in the class that were museum-related. These projects arose after obtaining 9 specific objects per collaborating museum, for a total of 27 museum objects. Each team was composed of 2 students, and each team was responsible for visualizing one object per museum. Models are simplified representations of reality and the student teams were to model each museum object. There are different sorts of models.
The students started with a general concept map. A concept map is a network of concepts, with arbitrary relations that link concepts. Here is a concept map on plants created by Reading Rockets.
A plant has roots and flowers and needs sunlight. We extract this sentence by reading and translating the map. The map is a way to organizing knowledge by visualizing one or more sentences. The idea behind this sort of map goes back to representing knowledge and logic, but visually in a diagram, rather than using sentences. The idea is also closely connected within the history of artificial intelligence (the symbolic variety rather than neural networks) in the form of knowledge representation and semantic networks. John Sowa’s online book is a good place to begin your journey into knowledge structures. Concept maps were introduced by Joseph Novak in the early 1980s. Novak created these to illuminate (to both student and teacher) how a thing is known. Concept maps are tied to both knowledge representation and communication.
The students had the following two assignments: (1) Create a general concept map of each object (3 per team), and (2) Create one of three possible process models for each object. Consider (1) to be modeling structure, “what is this?”, and (2) to be modeling process, “how does it work?”.
To explain these assignments using a simple object such as a hair comb, what are all the connections for a comb? Where was it made? What material was used? What is “comb” in Japanese? What paintings include combs? What is the history of a comb? You can make a map, or network, out of the answers to these questions. This is a concept map — the first assignment.
If you create a map of process like “how was the comb made?” or “how was a comb used?” or even “how is plastic molded?”, this is the process model — the subject of the second assignment.
We used the CMAP Tool software from the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC). This was used for both the concept map and process model visualization. A key advantage of CMAP is its ability to encode rich media (images, audio, video) and hyperlinks. While these abilities may seem obvious to those of us who enjoy web browsing, these features are frequently lacking in diagram software, resulting in dry diagrams devoid of diverse media.
A sample flyer, shown below, was created to highlight each kind of model for 3 particular museum objects. Listing all links (27 links for the concept/structure map and 27 links for the process maps) is not possible, but here is a link that can be used to examine each model in detail. The models are stored in IHMC’s cloud space for concept maps.
A lot was learned during this experiment. Students learned about modeling, culture from museums, and ways to take normally abstract-looking models and turn them into public-friendly representations of networks that can inspire people to visually connect the dots within museum collections.
The students in the graduate class on modeling pulled all of this together: Jan-Felix Abellera, Poornima Mugappa Chabbi, Kevin Chen, Heng Chen, Yibo Cheng, Teng Fan, Yuer Jiang, Shristikaran Katiyar, Matthew Le, Abhisek Prusty, Abhishek Ramesh Hosmani, Nishanshi Shukla, Justin Tang, Vignesh Thiagarajan, Pengfei Tong, Anjali Sundareswaran Varier, Jaibhopalreddy Vumma, and Mingxiao Ye. Thanks to each of them for their extraordinary models. Each model is copyright by the team that created it.
I would like to thank the following colleagues for a discussion of concept mapping within museum contexts: Navonil Mustafee, Professor, University of Exeter, UK (Nav was my Leverhulme Trust host while I lived in Exeter in Summer 2018), Koshi Dhingra (colleague who directs Talkstem and has vast connections to museums, art locations, and K-12 education), and Bonnie Pitman (Distinguished Scholar in Residence, University of Texas at Dallas, and former Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, University of Texas at Dallas) with whom I have had numerous conversations about the notion of “connection” within museum contexts. I would also offer a special call out to Rob Stein (formerly Deputy Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, currently Vice President, American Alliance of Museums), and Kimberly Jones (Ellen and Harry S. Parker III Assistant Curator of the Arts of the Americas at the Dallas Museum of Art).
Nav and I wrote a Winter Simulation Conference paper on connecting to the RAMM museum in Exeter based on the Mesoamerican Inca-centered curation of Kimberly.
There are also our museum colleagues— who are directors, curators, and educators in the 3 museums: Jed Morse and Anna Smith (Nasher Sculpture Center), Camilla Hampshire, Julien Parsons, and Rick Lawrence (RAMM), and Amy Hofland and Jacqueline Chao (Crow). Without them and their help, there would have been no student projects and no visualizations.
