A New Venture for Me…
I’m very pleased to announce the ‘official’ birth of a new and exciting venture for me, working as a collaborator on the board of E-Conservation. I am both thrilled and honored to have been able to accept this position. I will be writing a regular column for the section ‘News and Views’, in which my pieces will mostly be my thoughts and opinions on issues and ideas pertaining to conservation, in the widest sense of each of those words. My first piece is entitled: Let’s Pin the ‘Long Tail’ on the Conservation Donkey. This is an opinion piece that in many ways teases out one aspect of a peer review paper I previously published with e-conservation, concerned with cyber-conservation. Please feel free to leave feedback directly in the comments section of this post both about the article, and about other issues you think I should or could raise in my column. I cannot, of course, promise to include them, but, I would be interested to hear your ideas.
www.e-conservationline.com/
“It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties – everything we mean by the word ‘culture’.” (Herbert Read)
Conservators often consider ourselves natural collaborators, and we do tend to play well with others, but, what do we actually mean by collaboration, and could there be scope for wider collaborative efforts? In many respects collaboration entails more than simply ‘working together’, the hope is that through bringing different people together the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts; creating a result that could not have been achieved had the people been working individually and collated their results. Collaboration then suggests that in fact 1 + 1 really does equal 3.
Read more….
This piece appears in Issue 12 of e-conservation, and the whole issue can be downloaded from the e-conservation website. The contents of this issue are included below.
Issue 12: Now Available For Free Download
CONTENTS: Issue No. 12, December 2009.
NEWS & VIEWS
* Let’s Pin the ‘Long Tail’ on the Conservation Donkey By Daniel Cull
REVIEWS
* I Symposium on Conservation-Restoration of Golden Woodcarving and Sculpture. Preserving the past, Securing the Future. November 26-27, 2009, Porto, Portugal Review by Rui Bordalo
* COST Training School: WoodCultHer Wood destroying insects, fungi and moulds decay on wooden
cultural heritage objects and constructions. March 16-20, 2009, Hamburg, Germany. Review by Oana Chachula.
* The 3rd Conservation-Restoration Workshop for the Artistic Components of Historic Monuments
October 14-16, 2009, Bucharest, Romania. Review by Anca Dinã
EVENTS:
* UPCOMING EVENTS & CALL FOR PAPERS. January – February 2009
PROJECTS:
* Conservation in Action: Welcome to the “CSI Lab” by Virginie Ternisien
ARTICLES:
* Examination of Some Inorganic Pigments and Plaster Layers from Excavations at Saqqara area, Egypt
Optical Microscopy and SEM-EDS Microanalysis by Hussein Hassan M.H. Mahmoud
* Les dilemmes philosophiques de la conservation-restauration by Pierre Leveau.
ARP PROCEEDINGS:
* Detached Mural Paintings in Portugal. The Conservation-Restoration of the Fragments from the Alberto Sampaio Museum in Guimarães. by Maria Alice de Sousa Cotovio
* Mudejar Ceilings. Study, Conservation and Restoration by Carlos José Abreu da Silva Costa
** Please note: all my e-conservation related posts on this blog will now have a new category ‘e-conservation’ under which it should be easier to keep track of them on this blog.
Hi Dan,
I haven’t seen you since we left UCL. I liked your article. I am now working at the British Museum and I am leading ‘Conservation in Focus’, a programme to promote the Conservation and Science Department to the public. The BM is using Facebook and Twiter to promote the museum and conservation projects. This is great fo Conservators to collaborate but also for us to engage with the museum visitors.
Best Wishes,
Amy
Hi Amy,
Great to hear from you! That programme sounds very interesting, I remember the BM doing a similar short term “public lab” a couple of years ago… I can’t recall the name it used though? Where I am now we’ll have a full time open lab, I’m very intrigued to see how its going to work out.
The link is: http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/all_current_exhibitions/conservation_in_focus.aspx
I couldn’t find the facebook/twitter links though… could you (or someone else if they beat you to it) post them up here.
I totally agree, twitter, facebook, etc, are potentially very useful means of conservator to public engagement, interaction and collaboration.
Since I’ve been in the States a few years now its difficult to keep up-to-date with what’s going on in the UK as well, so it’s very interesting to hear about what you’re doing.
I guess the question is how would the BM conservation department use/apply the feedback loop of social media, which is I am sure a situation public programming and education had to face a few years ago, but, if the conservation labs are going to be increasingly ‘out in front’ the same issues will I would have thought come up, I’d be very interested to hear about what sort of comments/suggestions/thoughts/opinions had come up through either forum (web or open lab).
Thanks for the comments,
Cheers,
Dan
I strongly believe that nature conservation in the future will be shaped by the internet and social media. Social media is not only a very effective vehicle to pass social messages, but equally so for education.
Http://www.veldfundi.co.za is a South African initiative to promote conservation through the use of Social Media. This is not only create awareness, but also to use video as a means of recording wildlife clips in documenatry style and to promote conservation in a visual medium.
To quote the saying “Perception is reality”
i liked your article in e-conservation..finally some modern minds for conservation issues..
Thank-you for your comments, I’m glad you liked the article, these as it says on the e-conservation frontpage, will be regular articles on a variety of topics, as I said above these regular short articles will be linked from the blog, and I hope to see your comments on them as I progress… as well as ideas about what topics should be covered in such a venture.
Also, I love your website, it looks great – I understand it is new – if so it looks incredible in a very short space of time.
Cheers,
Dan
A third ” force “. Yes, indeed. (Bridges,bridges and more bridges,please.)
Haha… Ta Steve, I’m actually just about to write a blog post announcing that the article to which you refer has been published.
Cheers, Dan.
I am reminded of the conference session I participated in many years ago entitled “Current Issues in Ethnic Museums”. Every one of us spent the first 10 minutes of our talk disavowing the term “ethnic”. Perhaps “culture specific” would have been more appropriate. Of course, in Chicago, where I lived at the time, “ethic neighborhood” always meant Polish. Go figure.
Hi Janice,
I feel like you’re commenting on a more recent article? http://dancull.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/e-conservation-issue-19-is-on-your-digital-shelves/
That’s kind of a funny story, I can totally see a conference where everyone starts by disavowing a term, and even trying to out do the last person in how much they disavow it.
Talking about the term “Ethnic” is funny, in the USA I find food from my homeland in the “ethnic” section, which I found a bit odd, but then the fact that there is an “ethnic aisle” is a bit odd too.
In a book I’m reading right now there’s an interesting discussion of the term ethnic and how it has moved away from being related to a racial or descent group, first towards referring to any number of cultural markers, and then more recently has moved again to refer to a situational (contextual) nature of a group. Which seems an interesting approach and would suggest that the word ethnic can mean both the things suggested by your examples.
Although, I guess it’s one of those words that in many ways has expanded its meaning so much to become nonsensical within the museum context. And its original connotations of “othering” seem inappropriate and hardly worth arguing for a return to! haha.
Cheers,
Dan