Mining the Museum Response

The exhibit Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore was cutting edge and different than any museum exhibit visitors had ever seen. The exhibit is very interesting and thought provoking. I never really thought about how institutions would be innately racist, that just by presenting the facts without bias that they are not presenting the full story or are missing part of the story like the slaves and African Americans contributions. I think the use of color to correspond to the themes of the rooms. Wilson uses subtle and not so subtle artifacts to raise awareness, reactions and to provoke the visitors. Wilson also deals with how museums present the information and artifacts. If he is drawing attention to how museums are trying to remain biased but are inherently racist, he also draws attention to the displays that museums use, number coding, and glass cases. Wilson curated a thought provoking exhibit about race relations and race in Maryland.

As We May Think Response

As we may think was interesting to read because Bush was talking about technology that could have happened but was surpassed by different technology that I don't think Bush could have even fathomed. I was talking about this with one of my friends in a way, we were discussing how our parents aren't very good at texting or using their cell phones and that led to how they probably couldn't have even thought that someday their kids would be using portable phones that they typed on and that there will be technology we couldn't even fathom when our kids are our age. To go along with that Bush talked about how cameras, film, and the Memex would be smaller and more organized. To think that a computer could be as small as a desk was a big step back in 1945 when computers were the size of a house. Cameras were talked about being as small as a walnut that was worn on the forehead and the photographer would sqeeze a wire to take a picture on film. Cameras that are film I'm not sure got to be as small as the size of a walnut as technology switched from film work and technology to digital. Digital made almost everything automatic. Focus was made automatic, film automatically advanced and developing pictures stepped out of the dark room. Bush has one line that I found really interesting in relation to cameras because it is part of technology today, "Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately" (2.) Bush talked about things that happened and some that didn't because that technology simply wasn't developed. Bush talked about compression as very important when talking about cost for things. Using new technology large objects could be scaled down and that would reduce costs largely. Bush also talked about how technology would function more like a human does, which is the basis of many computer programs today and especially the internet.