AHW News: Telling Lives

Reprinted from Museum News, January/February 2004.
Copyright 2004, the American Association of Museums. All rights reserved.

Tell and Show

It’s the question faced by history museums everywhere: how to collect the voices of the “unknown citizen”—the ordinary man, woman, and child. While the lives of the famous often are recorded for posterity, museums are finding that everyday 20th-century life is harder to document, particularly in our disposable society.

Enter Telling Lives (www.tellinglives.com), a new computer-interactive public history project that videotapes people talking about their daily lives. This “memory video bank,” described by one staffer as an “ATM of ordinary people’s history,” aims to encourage visitors to see themselves as experts on their own history. Telling Lives will turn museums, libraries, schools, and community centers into “two-way learning places,” says project director Richard Rabinowitz, who is also president of American History Workshop, Brooklyn, N.Y. “We’re talking about, maybe, 10 or 12 minutes of dialogue. But when it’s recorded [a museum] can learn a lot about who these folks really are, what’s on their minds, how they think about themselves and about history, and why they come to museums.”

Developed by American History Workshop, a consortium of historians, educators, and artists, the project is currently in its pilot phase. Over the next 18 months, the Telling Lives kiosk will travel to three to five institutions in the United States and Canada, helping them develop a collective self-portrait of Americans and Canadians in the 20th century. “History museums don’t have the resources to develop a way of using new technologies,” says Rabinowitz. Telling Lives gives them a tool for collecting “a new kind of artifact”—in this case, people’s memories. The pilot phase’s approximately $500,000 budget was funded by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the University of Toronto and in-kind contributions from the participating institutions.

The public was introduced to Telling Lives this summer at the New-York Historical Society (NYHS), where participants recorded their memories of “Going to School,” one of a series of themes that includes “Behind the Wheel,” “Family Vacations,” and “Getting that First Job.” The technology allows each participating museum to develop its own topic, but “Going to School” was an appropriate and “democratic theme . . . because everybody had to go to school,” says NYHS museum director Jan Ramirez. “Had the question been a little more open-ended—what do you think about race relations in the United States, or what’s your favorite collectible—I don’t think the results would have the quality, the texture that they have.”

To help focus their responses, visitors were asked to recall their first memory of school, the learning experience in the classroom, and an important experience from their early school years. Then guided by screen prompts, aural instructions, and a (human) facilitator, they recorded 10 to 12 minutes of memories at a digital video console. Before and after each session, they could look at photographs depicting school life during the past century, read information about the history of New York City schools, or watch videos featuring stories told by other participants.

“We discovered it didn’t really matter what questions we asked,” says Rabinowitz, “most people were going to tell us 12 minutes of stories.” Says Ramirez: “What was surprising was how intimate some of the stories were, how willing people were to talk about . . . corporal punishment or the fact that they had stolen somebody’s lunch.” Some people seemed to think they were in “a session with a psychiatrist,” she says. “The memory became less about school and more about a very painful childhood. I’m not sure if we were really prepared for that.” Others seemed to revert to childhood, says curator Amy Weinstein, who coordinated the project at NYHS: “You could see a 60-year-old man become a 6-year-old again as he remembered . . . a favorite teacher or his first day of school.” Most participants, she says, responded positively to the experience, which encouraged them to see their lives as “part of the bigger picture.”

NYHS staff are determined to build on their new relationship with visitors—an important goal for an institution that, according to Ramirez, only started thinking about the public in the 1990s. Telling Lives also functioned as a collecting aid, leading the museum to two desks from opposite ends of the 20th century and other school-related materials. Taken collectively, says Rabinowitz, the 300-plus stories NYHS collected revealed how people interpret their own histories and envision the present as well as how day-to-day school experiences have changed through the decades. Project organizers expect that the other institutions on the prototype Telling Lives tour—including the Atlanta Historical Society and public libraries in Los Angeles and Hartford, Conn.—will have similar results. Each participating museum also will have access to a central database of memories and, at some point in the future, visitors will be able to download their own and other memories from the Web.

Project organizers will seek funding to expand the project so that one day all history and other types of museums will own or have access to a Telling Lives kiosk. Though a kiosk’s estimated $50,000-$75,000 price tag might be beyond the budget of smaller institutions, Rabinowitz envisions regional partnerships, in which 10 or 12 organizations share the cost, as well as smaller, portable versions, which museums could take to different sites in their communities. “I’m hoping that people will see it as a tool for getting to know their community better,” he says. “Those of us who work in this business can’t learn enough about who is actually coming in the door.”