North by Southwest: Interactive Kiosk
Part of Exhibition: North by Southwest
Topic: Culture Subtopic: General
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Museum: Maxwell Museum of Anthropology Focus: Anthropology
Collaborating Organization(s): Ideum
People who worked on this: Catherine Baudoin (co-curator), Jonathan Lee, Kemper Barkhurst
My role: Our firm worked closely with the Maxwell to develop the electronic exhibit.
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Description and goals
The kiosk exhibit in this case study shares the same name with the exhibit, North by Southwest: Bering Sea Communities, Collaborations and Collections. The exhibition is currently open at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The multimedia kiosk is divided into two main sections.
The first is an electronic version of a 1901 photo album. This remarkable photo album was created by Suzanne Rognan Bernardi, who documented her stay in Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska at the turn of the last century. We developed a custom “page turning” application that allows visitor to go from page to page. Many of the pages are vertically oriented, so we added the ability to rotate the image and caption. In addition, plain text was added, as the hand written notes are sometimes hard to read.
The second section allows visitors to pan and zoom high-resolution images of five hand-engraved walrus tusks. These intricately engraved tusks are from the same period as Bernardi’s photo album.
Both interactive sections allow visitor to see things they normally wouldn’t. The book is too rare and fragile to be out on display, while the details of tusks wouldn’t visible without some sort of magnifying device.
Exhibit Opened: April 2007
Location: Albuquerque, NM, United States
Estimated Cost: $10,000 to $50,000 (US)
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Website(s): http://www.dailylobo.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticle&ustory_id=6dbfdabe-1e11-4dbf-8588-17d37be19af9, http://www.ideum.com/portfolio/north_southwest