Chapter 2: Critical Making

In this chapter, I will discuss the pedagogical and emotional value of physical interaction with objects. Critical making provides a framework for hands-on experimentation in an educational setting, but the value is not limited to the formal classroom environment or traditional course structure. The IKEA effect is a term describing individuals’ investment in objects which they have personally constructed. Taken together, these two concepts illuminate ways in which students can learn about artifacts and a mechanism by which they may be motivated to care about doing so.

I will also devote some space to the question of disciplines and rubrics. Public history is, fundamentally, interdisciplinary in nature.¹ Archival education and practice in particular embrace many influences. The dual STEM/historical nature of a digitization and materialization project—or digital humanities projects in general—are not unfamiliar to repositories. The creation of rubrics allows work by students, academics, independent scholars, and professionals to be critiqued and legitimated. Examination of my modest digitization and materialization project provides the opportunity to consider the way these issues impact public history theory and practice.

The remainder of my discussion is devoted to defining publics. Projects involving digitization and materialization can target a variety of publics: children, high school students, college students, makers, and public historians are all discussed. The strategies I outline focus primarily upon public historians and college students. They assume a certain comfort level with the process of research and material culture methodology. But it is worthwhile to note ways in which other publics might be invited to participate.

Critical Making and the IKEA Effect

Matt Ratto makes a case for the power of individual engagement in the activity of making. The pedagogical framework of constructionism, commonly found in STEM fields, can also be applied to social sciences and humanities. Participants who both understand the connection between concepts and objects, and who have a personal investment in the object being made, become critically engaged with their material.² The learning experience becomes more collaborative and subjective.

The more effort expended, the more the result is valued. Researchers concerned with consumer behavior and psychology have quantified this “effort justification” through experiments in which objects were assembled and then valued by their builders and prospective customers. Whether assembling IKEA boxes or folding origami animals, creators consistently valued their works more highly than did others.³ Additional experiments revealed that completion is a vital component of what is dubbed the IKEA effect. Lego sets which were prebuilt or built and then unbuilt were valued less highly than sets which participants built, and IKEA boxes that were only partially assembled were valued less highly than fully-assembled boxes.⁴ Mere ownership or contact is insufficient to increase value.⁵ This fact should be remembered when devising making projects. Students should have an attainable goal and tangible end product to take advantage of the IKEA effect.

Public historians are familiar with the importance of emotional hooks and material objects. The Presence of the Past continually emphasizes the ways in which personal stories and physical objects encourage public engagement with the past; the narrative construction Tilden advocates in Interpreting Our Heritage relies upon the physical backdrop of a park as well as a reading of audience interest; the history of the George Washington Birthplace National Monument when read as a contest of relics.⁶ Ratto’s critical making scenarios do not involve the use of pre-existing artifacts, but suggest that creating one’s own object can be at least as effective as using period artifacts.

The pedagogical implications of critical making and the IKEA effect are relevant to archivists and other employees of cultural institutions. Ratto’s concerns are geared toward educational institutions—he is an academic and references the intellectual and physical geography of the university campus.⁷ However, archives have an educational responsibility, even though it is not their sole mission. Such routine tasks as conducting reference interviews, writing finding aids, and engaging in public outreach may be viewed in this light. Ratto’s case studies involved projects undertaken at conferences and colloquia.⁸ Critical making experiments need not involve the expenditure of resources necessary for a semester long academic course. They could be adapted for the outreach opportunities already available to archivists. Norton and his co-authors view personal engagement in the context of consumer behavior, marketing, and employee motivation.⁹ Though cultural institutions are not typically run with an eye toward increasing profits, there is a service component to reference and outreach functions. Strategies for attracting and interacting with paying customers may be adapted for the non-profit realm. Public historians straddle the scholarly, professional, and popular realms, and should make use of a similarly wide range of tools.

Multidisciplinarity in the Archives

The pedagogical goal of bridging gaps between disciplines should resonate for public historians. Ratto’s concern is not merely bringing together the “hard” STEM fields and the “soft” social sciences and humanities. He is well aware of the divides that exist within those softer fields.¹⁰ Others conceive of experimentation as a tactic outside of STEM disciplines: for example, Devon Elliott stresses the importance of experimentation and model building to explore the history of the senses.¹¹

This examination of the implications of multidisciplinary complication and cross-pollination is relevant for the archival profession. Formal archival education programs may be housed within history, library science, or IT departments. The Association of Canadian Archivists’s 1990 guidelines for a Master’s of Archival Studies emphasize the benefit of diverse educational backgrounds; they highlight the advantages of affiliating archives and library programs with information science, but also acknowledge the potential of siting programs within history or law departments.¹² The Society of American Archivists advocates 18 credit hours of “core archival knowledge” at the graduate level and acknowledges the many fields (including history, information studies, law, economics, technology, and management) that can provide valuable supplementary knowledge.¹³ The program-agnostic approach doubtless has a practical element, a concession to the existing structure of academic programs and lack of organizational clout. But the repeated references to the manner in which a core archival curriculum intersects with other disciplines suggests that a multidisciplinary approach is (and should be) viewed as a feature, not a bug.

Two individuals with the job title “archivist” and equivalent certification may thus have fundamentally different approaches to their work, and individuals with superficially similar roles as information professionals may in fact have significantly (if subtly, at least to outsiders) different professional priorities. Eun G. Park’s 1998 survey documented the diverging language and priorities of archivists, records managers, and librarians.¹⁴ Kathryn A. Scanlan outlines the professional friction between archivists and records managers—two groups who, based on Park’s survey, are at least linguistically similar.¹⁵ Terry Cook conceives of increasingly close bonds between archivists and records managers, information technologists, librarians, and museum curators, with the traditional bond between historians and archivists becoming weaker. He highlights the subjectivity of the selection process (often ignored by historians), the privileging of a record’s content rather than context, and practices which marginalize archives.¹⁶ One can imagine that a historian with formal archival training might have a greater appreciation than others in her cohort for the less-than-objective (and often alarmingly haphazard) means by which records enter the archives, and an archivist with training as a historian would be more sensitive to historians’ professional assumptions than his colleague with a background in IT. Diverse professional backgrounds can be a repository’s strength, allowing staff to synthesize theoretical and practical advances in a variety of fields to the benefit of the collection and its users.

Rubrics in the Classroom and Wider Ecosystem

No discussion of pedagogy or intellectual work is complete without touching upon rubrics. Ruth Mostern’s roles as creator and grader of digital works forced her to confront the manner in which such works are assessed by tenure committees, classroom instructors, and the academic community in general. Drawing parallels to analog works can offer a useful guideline. A digital work that is similar to a book should be declared complete at a distinct point, after which it enters the academic ecosystem. A digital work that is analogous to a library should be considered constantly in flux as its virtual collection expands.¹⁷ Mostern’s calls for peer review of digital works are reminiscent of Thomas Schlereth’s calls for peer review of museum exhibits. The difficulties which Schlereth cited—the challenges of assigning responsibility for collaborative works and the ephemeral nature of the product—can also apply to digital works.¹⁸ Identifying a genre which requires rubrics and mapping its similarities and divergence from other genres, is a necessary step in legitimizing the value of scholarly work in non-traditional (or traditionally overlooked) forms.

Ideally, museum exhibits can be photographed or otherwise recorded, and digital works need not be ephemeral. In fact, digital works may serve as a means of preserving physical exhibits of limited duration—though in this respect, digital works are best viewed as archives or records of the exhibits and not fully representative of the original work.¹⁹ Digital works may remain available indefinitely, or grow in scope over time. But the potential volatility of digital resources cannot be ignored in the face of changing technologies, limited infrastructure, and varying degrees of personal or institutional support. If the longevity of the product—digital work or museum exhibit—is in question, then timely and systematic peer review is an even more important tool for drawing the work into scholarly conversations.

Identifying Publics

A digitization and materialization project could be tailored for different publics. The parameters of the projects, and the rubrics for evaluating its success, would shift based upon the group chosen. Students in elementary school, high school, or college could embark upon such a project in conjunction with their regular classwork. Self-identified “makers” may find such a project interesting, either as independent researchers or participants actively solicited in the course of the repository’s outreach efforts. Public historians are also a public: we should not overlook new opportunities to examine our collections.

The strategies I outline focus primarily upon public historians and college students. They assume a certain comfort level with the process of research and material culture methodology. But it is worthwhile to note ways in which other publics might be invited to participate.

Children and High School Students

Angela Hegadorn, a children’s librarian in the Delaware County Library System, articulated some of the difficulties designing community events for a younger audience. Tight age-targeting allows the designer to tailor the program to the audience. An “all ages” program encourages broad participation, but runs the risk of boring older children and being beyond the physical and intellectual capabilities of younger children. However, in a mixed-age group older children will help the younger ones; the participating children all have an educational experience, even if it is not the same educational experience.²⁰

Shawn Beckett, a high school history teacher in the school district of Philadelphia, offered advice for implementing making projects at the high school level. He advised against a field trip in which the entire class visited a repository to conduct research and hands-on work with artifacts. There would be a good chance of at least one or two students finding disruption more entertaining than participation. The logistics of dealing with troublemakers could sap attention from the other students. Beckett proposed two alternatives: offering the project as an opt-in enrichment opportunity, or limiting participation to the potential troublemakers. Soliciting volunteers would guarantee a certain amount of enthusiasm from each participant. Targeting the troublemakers would place them in a smaller group, minimize the entertainment value of causing disruptions, and confer the benefits of more individualized attention. These students might also be the ones most likely to benefit from hands-on learning.²¹

The teacher’s first obligation is to the students. The public historian’s is, in a complicated fashion, to the collection. Its physical safety must be safeguarded, and the condition of some materials may necessitate limited handling. But access is still important. No matter how well-preserved, -secured, and -described, the most impressive collection in the world is ultimately pointless if no one ever uses it. Balancing the responsibility to the collection’s physical well-being with the needs of users is a perennial concern.

Students who voluntarily participate in this sort of project may be assumed to be trustworthy researchers, but the teacher’s assessment of the students’ probable behavior should be actively solicited. No familiarity with primary source research should be assumed, and they should all be informed of repository policies in advance.²² They should also be informed of the rationale behind those policies. Rules such as “pencils only,” “no flash photography,” and so forth may seem arbitrary, but explanations may not only make students more mindful but also encourage thinking about the materiality of the collection. A dose of humor, and signals that professionals can laugh at themselves, could make the experience feel less pedantic and may even spur interest in the field of public history.²³ When designing such a program, the public historian may choose to guide students to less fragile materials.

In that respect, my chosen artifact—a metal meat grinder—is a good choice. Mishandling (inadvertent or intentional) is unlikely to result in damage to the meat grinder. Its very solidity might encourage interaction and more detailed object analysis. Some students might be inclined toward tentative interaction with historical artifacts, particularly after having been briefed on repository protocols. Encountering a decidedly non-fragile artifact could provide reassurance and encouragement. In a hands-on project such as this, convincing students that they can and should physically interact with artifacts is itself an educational goal.

College Students

A project of this nature offers the opportunity for a repository to partner with a local college or university.²⁴ In the formal context of a particular class, the students will have a set schedule and assignments. The course in general, and project in specific, will receive a grade.

Selecting an endpoint for the project is an important part of developing a grading rubric. Is the goal the production of a 3D model? A printed object? Twenty pages examining an artifact’s history and material attributes? All of these are easily-defined endpoints with clear deliverables that can be evaluated. (Is the model printable? Does the printed version replicate the original in the ways intended? Does the paper demonstrate engagement with primary and secondary sources?) They are analogous to books, in Mostern’s approach to rubrics: completed academic work products ripe for critique. Broader goals—gaining proficiency with digital tools, fostering a positive (and potentially ongoing) relationship with the repository—are less clear. They are embedded in such a project, but do not easily lend themselves to the percent-of-grade-based-on breakout that is a ubiquitous, if not universal, section of the syllabus. Potential benefits beyond the end of a semester—such as the creation of a virtual collection of artifacts which grows over time—may be a goal for the professor and repository, but will not come to fruition during the period when students must be evaluated. Projects associated with a discrete course should have an easily-identifiable endpoint.

Makers

The self-identified maker community is another potential public. Or, rather, publics: the term “maker,” like “pornography,” relies on “you’ll know it when you see it,” and is less specific than the other publics I have identified. The specific background, interest, age, experience, and requirements of makers will be highly variable. Some may have expertise with 3D printing. Some makers may have a native interest in historical inquiry, or may even have discovered their interest in making via history. But the material culture angle of materialization projects should appeal to a broader cross-section of the maker public.

While individuals may approach repositories and can be served as regular researchers, repositories may also wish to engage in outreach activities. Publicizing the repository’s holdings on mailing lists and other maker-focused forums can increase awareness of local historical resources. Digitization and materialization projects may be suitable proposals for hackathons. As in the younger student groups, familiarity with theory, research practices, and repository guidelines cannot be assumed—but given the voluntary nature of makers’ involvement, interest and enthusiasm can.

I surveyed Kickstarter projects in order to get a sense of how 3D printing is used and envisioned among backers.²⁵ Kickstarter campaigns involve the cultivation of communities, the development of a compelling narrative, and setting realistic goals.²⁶ To a very limited extent, those qualities allow me to use Kickstarter backers as a stand-in for the fuzzily-defined “maker” public, and consider how that interested and motivated public might approach questions of material culture as well as technology.

The survey of Kickstarter projects suggests that the audience with the interest in (and means to) support projects related to 3D printing cares about devices—printers and pens—that can print objects. Project backers do not particularly care about 3D printed objects—they care about 3D printing their own objects. Creative projects are most rewarded when they provide others with the tools to be creative.

This propensity for personal, hands-on use is not particularly surprising. Read alongside discussions of critical making and the IKEA effect, it suggests an interest in process rather than outcome.²⁷ It is, perhaps, somewhat ironic to propose a material culture project in which the actual object is somewhat irrelevant. But material culture is about human interaction with the material world, the encounter between the human and the object. It is the intellectual stimulation of that encounter which is important for my purpose, not the nature of the object which serves as a catalyst.

Public Historians

The final public is one I broadly term “public historians” but could easily be dubbed “information professionals” or “knowledge workers.” I use the term as shorthand for the archivists, curators, librarians, and other professionals who work in repositories. In some ways this is a counter-intuitive definition. The “historian” aspect often derives from the place of employment rather than formal training, and it does not address the practice of public history outside cultural institutions. Nonetheless, I am inclined toward this interdisciplinary and functional definition, as may be inferred by the nature of my studies, professional activities, and this project: I study American history, specifically public history, with a concentration in archives; I work as a processing archivist in the manuscripts department of a research library; I have selected an artifact in a museum as the focus of my thesis. Nor should the impact of cross-training be ignored: many repository employees hold graduate degrees in more than one field, offering them formal training in different methodologies and further muddying the practical distinctions between disciplines.

Strict definitions of institutional activities are often elusive. The second edition of Describing Archives: A Content Standard specifically references the “growing convergence” between museum, library, and archival practice.²⁸ Peter Hirtle predicted and encouraged special collection librarians’ emulation of archivists and museologists, emphasizing their manuscript and archival holdings, and treating their collections as museums.²⁹ Local examples illustrate the porous nature of institutional identity. The Friends Historical Library documents the history of Quakers, but also houses the archives of Swarthmore College, where the Library is physically located. The American Philosophical Society has a Museum and a Library, which includes organizational archives and manuscripts as well as bound volumes; the Library also creates exhibits to highlight particular objects in the collection, independent of the Museum exhibits across the street. The Germantown Historical Society likewise includes a museum, library, and archives, and has recently merged with Historic Germantown and its component historical attractions. One of those institutions, the Wyck Association, operates a house museum as well as a garden and farm, and the Association’s papers are housed at the American Philosophical Society. I prefer to simply acknowledge the cross-over nature of the organizations, their functions, and their staff; assert the value of allied fields (such as archival and library sciences) remaining in active dialog; and view the occasionally strained, forced interdisciplinary results as an opportunity.

These individuals are responsible for the care of artifacts and facilitating access. But intellectual engagement is also important. On the most basic level, intellectual control of a collection enables and informs other functions: selection, description, preservation, access. Increased engagement with the collection, intellectual and hands-on, serves to make public historians more expert. They are in a better position to properly care for their collection and direct users to the material they need.

Public historians are not passive actors, even if their roles are sometimes transparent to outsiders. Cook notes that, outside the field of archives, attention to the subjectivity of sources rarely extends beyond the records themselves to the process by which they were selected.³⁰ The broader public is generally unaware of the actual work performed. I have been asked “What’s an archivist?” when filling out forms with a space for job title, and my work with material of recent vintage has been greeted with surprise that archives contain more than “old” things. News stories about archives either call them dusty or make a point of saying they are not dusty.³¹ Stock images of women shushing patrons and the recent interest in librarians’ tattoos likewise serve as a testament to professional stereotypes and a desire to challenge them.³² Archivists may work exclusively with born-digital objects untroubled by dust, curators may focus on interactive exhibits rather than objects, and librarians may program and run makerspaces.³³ Publicizing these activities may help change public perceptions of the professions. On a practical level, this may eventually lead to tangible benefits, such as increased funding. But a more nebulous goal may also be accomplished. By revealing the scope of the work performed by such professionals, their publics may acquire an increased appreciation for the contested nature of historical knowledge.