This one will be a little quick & dirty, but I’ll try to expand more during class…
When I was browsing through the websites for this week, my first reaction was that out of all of them the old familiar Deerfield site was the one that I found most engaging. Granted, Julia’s kitchen was interesting (and we got to listen to snippets of Julia herself, which added to the presentation, even if the comments deeper in the site were a bit short), and the Pearl Harbor site did allow people to add their own comments (though I’m not sure what salience “New Zealand rules!” had to, well, anything), the Deerfield site was more straightforward. Though the exhibit of old toys held some charm, I found the interface limited, and I was missing some required software and didn’t feel like sitting through the download and installation process just to watch a short movie. It also took me a while to figure out the HistoryWired site– the opening timeline seems unneccessarily confusing, and the interface (double-clicking zooms you in, object details open in a new window, and so forth), while not overly complex, was still too involved for my tastes.
Michael Frish, in the essays concerning museum exhibits in A Shared Authority, notes that an often-overlooked element of the process is working with what the public brings in to the museum, not just the message you (as curator or exhibit designer) want to provide them. My personal context this week is one of time limitations and distraction– so what I’m bringing with me is mostly a desire not to have to work too hard to get to the “meat” of this collection of websites. Both the Pearl Harbor and History Channel came up short in this regard– the History Channel especially so, since it took me some time even to find content (as opposed to programming information) on the frontpage. And the toys, though interesting in themselves, suffered in many cases from what Jon has called the “two-step” rule: I found I had to click a number of times to get to something I wanted, and even then the animations and interactives were often minimal (the shadow puppets being a good example– they seem to have only one or two movements programmed, like “hands up” versus “hands down”).
The Deerfield site is clearly laid out and easy to access and navigate. It may be less interactive and flashy in terms of how it uses the medium, and certainly is predicated on “presenting the message” (“here is the information we, the curators, want you to have”) more than sharing the authority (“what can you as audience and we as historians say about 1704 together”) but in terms of my personal context this week, less is certainly more.