The American Image: An Experiment in Mashups, Flickr and Public Access

Network News Fall 2008
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The American Image: An Experiment in Mashups, Flickr and Public Access
By Beth Maloney, Museum Education Consultant

When The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology received a large collection of photographs by John Collier Jr, they decided to highlight this acquisition with a website designed for high school students featuring a few hundred of the photographs. Since The Maxwell was temporarily without a museum educator, I, a freelance museum educator, jumped at the chance to be involved. The National Endowment for the Humanities funded this project.

Catherine Baudoin, Curator of Photography, and I developed three major goals; to make the photographs relevant and accessible and to promote visual literacy. We worked first with UNM’s College of Education Technology and Education Center and then with the private company Ideum. The result is a website (http://americanimage.unm.edu) that uses contemporary photo sharing techniques and video mashups.

The Website
The photographs that appear on the American Image website were taken by John Collier Jr. when he worked for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information during the 1940s. His assignment at the time was to document daily life in America focusing on civil defense and public morale. Our on-line activities use Collier’s images as a canvas on which to explore wider issues of authorship, agenda, historical context and objectivity.

In addition to a collection of selected photographs, the website features three main activities. “Active Looking” encourages the user to analyze and decode images for information—who created them, within what context, using what tools and for what purpose. “The Shooting Script” explores how an image may be categorized with regards to its subject matter and how our definitions and understanding of these subjects can change over time. “Propaganda Film-maker” invites users to combine photographs, text, audio and video to create their own video mashup—one that can be emailed, shared and rated.

Flickr
One innovative aspect of the website is its relationship with the public photo sharing website Flickr. We scanned Collier’s photographs (already part of the public domain) and posted them on an account we created for him on Flickr. We’d contacted Flickr about this project and they gave us a complementary professional account for 10 years.

The American Image website draws images directly from Flickr, creating a bridge from the museum’s website and this public forum. Having the collection on Flickr brings Collier’s work to a more diverse and new audience. Visitors to Collier’s Flickr site tag, list favorites, refer to and talk about his photographs bringing them out from the archives and into a contemporary context.

It took us a while to arrive at the Flickr solution. We began by looking at examples of similar photo-education websites targeting high school students. First we went towards a “closed” site with more sequential activities but this did not seem suitable for older students. We revisited and rethought the mechanisms we were using. Experimenting with format, we took a big leap by using Flickr—not only as a space to post the collection of photographs but also as a source for contemporary images. “The Shooting Script” draws, at random, contemporary images to compare with historic Collier images tagged with the same terms.

Evaluation
The UNM College of Education arranged formal evaluation of the website. Their evaluator worked with teachers and students here in New Mexico. Results mainly concerned technicalities—for example, frustration about the size of images and download time. More informally, the museum has tracked users from all over the world who explore the photographs, create their own video mashups and download material. When we shared the project with peers at the Museums and the Web Conference in 2007, people commented that our use of Flickr and the “Propaganda Film-maker” were strong assets to the site and its interactivity. At the 2008 conference, the American Image website won the “best of the web” online exhibition award.

The American Image website has had a great impact on The Maxwell Museum. It is connected directly to the museum’s main webpage and is credited with increased traffic to the website. The museum’s leadership is interested and invested in working on similar projects in the future.

The bigger picture
For me, the development process was most rewarding when we posed the larger question of how best to share and use these amazing photographs. How can we truly engage our targeted audience, who might otherwise surf through the photo collection? If our audience posts, uses and shares photographs on line, then we need to be in the mix. Once we decided to go this direction, the messages and skills we wanted to introduce seemed to fall into place. Key to the process was the support of The Maxwell Museum to leave what we perceived as typical on-line museum programming and enter a more social network. Linking to a public photo sharing website like Flickr, made the project more dynamic and exciting as a result.

The site generates daily responses and seems to be reaching a broad community—more diverse in age and interest than our target group of high school students. Incorporating the latest trends in technology in museum programming and curriculum design is complicated. On the one hand there are so many new options and techniques to meet the needs and interests of our audiences. On the other, it’s our job to think carefully and deliberately about how we use new technologies to insure that they enhance and not detract from our goals. The American Image project has joined content with medium in a meaningful way, giving Collier’s photographs a new life 50 years after he took them.

Beth Maloney is a Museum Education Consultant working with museums in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, NM. She also teaches a course in Museum Learning at the University of New Mexico. Prior to moving to Albuquerque, she was the History Programs Coordinator at the Oakland Museum of California. Beth has a MS in Education from the Museum Education program at Bank Street College and a BA in History and English from Swarthmore College. She has worked in and with museums since 1997. For more information or to contact Beth please go to www.bethmaloney.com.

The Museum Education Roundtable
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