Document Type
Article
Abstract
This hybrid work uses examples of audio history profiles from an undergraduate introductory radio and TV news course to illustrate how audio storytelling can supplement museum exhibits to provide the functional context of items in an archived collection. Broadcast journalism students in the course researched, designed, recorded, and produced audio histories of museum objects from the 1920s "Stanley's General Store" archive exhibit at the Michigan State University Museum. The final audio files can be attached to the objects and displayed through a digital interface, which museumgoers access with their smartphones.
The project enables students to blend their traditional research and reporting skills in expansive, flexible ways, and connects physical archives with digital humanities works. I argue that journalism students at the early undergraduate level should be presented with praxis-based assignments; doing so, I assert, helps students re-engage and re-apply foundational knowledge, learned in other academic disciplines, of how to search and use archives and library sources in order to help them conceptualize and expand what "radio reporting" with multiple sources means for different audiences.
Repository Citation
Ware, Jennifer. "Archives, Museum Objects and Digital Humanities: Supplementing Exhibits with Aural Object Contexts." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–16. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss1/7