Exhibition Catalog Assignment
Algaze Track
Enclosed is a Powerpoint presentation with 10 images or sets of images of representative material culture examples that directly relate to the various topics, issues, and periods of human social development addressed in our class. The artifacts span a little over 2 million years of human culture/technology.
Imagine that you are a curator in a museum and that you have to prepare these artifacts for an exhibition, entitled Key Highlights of the Human Career.
An illustrated analytical catalogue will accompany this exhibit. Your assignment is to create that catalogue. The catalogue should consist of three parts.
The first part is an introduction, about a page or page and a half in length (double-spaced), where the curator explains to the viewer/reader what are the principles of organization of the exhibit. More specifically, please explain if you would you place the artifacts in several (small) separate display cases or in a larger display case. If the former, please explain how you would group the artifacts and the (sub)title you would give to each separate display case. If the latter, please explain whether the exhibited artifacts are arranged by chronological period, by function, by cultural affiliation, by geographic area of provenance, by level of technological achievement/complexity required for their creation, whether they are they arranged based on aesthetic criteria, or any combination of the preceding?
The second part of your catalogue consists of a concise description of each illustrated artifact. This will accompany each image and will detail what the image is, its chronology and areas of distribution (in broad ranges), and its significance in human history. Each such description should be ca. three quarters of a page to a full page (double spaced) in length. This section will require a significant amount of work checking for reliable sources of information in pertinent books and scholarly article databases (the most pertinent are: Web of Knowledge, JSTOR, AnthropologyPlus, and Google Scholar). Please note that the title of each image or set of images in the 10 Powerpoint slides is intended as a database search keyword.
The third part of the catalogue, in turn, will consist of an essay explaining to the viewer/reader the ways in which the otherwise disparate artifacts are connected in terms of the processes and mechanisms of human social development discussed in class. In other words, you have to present the viewer/reader with a narrative that explains why the exhibit can be seen as some sort of coherent whole that sheds light on the trajectory of human history, with a capital H. This essay should be ca. 5 pages in length (double-spaced).
A useful source, both as a source of information and as an example of an elegantly made catalogue, is available at The BBC & the British Museum's website for the History of the World exhibition, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/
-- a site which "uses objects to tell a history of the world" (click "Explore the British Museum's 100 Objects"). Here too there are object descriptions, along with narrative commentary from the curator, videos, and transcripts of short radio programs.
Attachment:- images.rar