What’s your unpublished case study?
Thursday, June 11th, 2009 by Wendy PollockFrom what I’ve heard, it sounds as if there are quite a few of us who’ve started writing case studies, but haven’t quite finished – or haven’t gotten around to hitting “publish.” I started a post some time ago about an exhibition called Rotten Truth that I worked on with Kathy McLean, Beth Redmond-Jones, and colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, about 15 years ago. (The exhibition was never actually built – which is part of the story.) One thing that’s held me up is that this all happened so long ago that records aren’t that easy to pull together, few were in digital format back then, and documents will need scanning. It was such a collaborative project, shouldn’t we all consult on the case study? And then there were some sensitive issues – what Gretchen referred to recently as “exhibition frictions.” Should those be mentioned? What are the “frictions” or tensions that would be meaningful to recount? I gather others are stymied by those “intellectual property” issues Paul was commenting on earlier this week. In the interest of sharing experiences that may save some reinventing-of-the-wheel – one of the reasons we created this site – I think I ought to take on those challenges and finish this case study. I hope others will overcome hesitations and do the same. The stories, however imperfect they may seem to us, are part of our collective memory, the foundation of the “wisdom of practice” that informs our field.
