Response

Geologic “Antiquities” Participatory Exhibit

I have to assume there are many lazy persons who, like myself, often pass under a tree and wonder what kind of tree it is; who often say to our walking partners “I wish I was the kind of person who knew the names of the trees and birds and rocks” (that is a kind of person: that aunt, cousin, or friend who seems to have effortlessly absorbed the taxonomy of the world around them, much to my silent jealousy); and who often recall that there are guides, in print and apps, to learn to identify these things and never do anything about it. I would like to see a participatory online exhibit/forum where people can post images, videos, and descriptions of geologic oddities (formations, residues, or Martin Rudwick’s “antiquities” (methodological underpinning of this exhibit), or narrate stories of their personal experiences with geologic phenomena or fossils (read: “things dug up”), from around their communities. In so doing, members of various “publics,” would co-create a permanent online exhibit. Each post containing a geologic oddity or narrative could be geo-tagged with a lat/long, and aggregated onto a dynamic map of all the items in the exhibit. Other users, (auto)didactically educated on these matters, could comment on the items in the exhibit identifying the mineral, stratum, or fossilized species, or explaining the process of a phenomenon represented. An online community could participate in the creation of new, aggregation, and dissemination of localized geologic knowledge; connect that digital knowledge in the “clouds” to localized physical space through the map, where it can be palpably experienced; and, most importantly, spare us lazy people from ourselves and allow us the opportunity to acquire that field-knowledge we’ve complained about for so long.

Drilling Deep into Personal History Vernacular Science Participatory Exhibit

Oklahomans are coming to have an increasingly personal relationship with earthquakes (We also happen to be  in range of the New Madrid fault). I thought an interesting participatory exhibit idea would be to create a live oral history machine where community members can record their stories about earthquake experiences, or their thoughts on Oklahoma’s nation-leading seismicity of late. At tablets or televisions posted around the exhibit space, community members can watch videos of earthquake effects in Oklahoma and record their stories and opinions. Their recordings will automatically become part of the exhibit for other participants to listen to at those same tablets, simultaneously creating content for the exhibit and a digital archive of oral histories of earthquakes in Oklahoma, in the spirit of Conevery Valencius’s vernacular science methodological approach.

Stories of the Source from the Source of the Stories

Oklahoma is blessed, despicable though the initial circumstances were, with thriving communities of indigenous Americans. We too often (at best) ignore the American Indian population in Oklahoma (state tagline: Native America, emphasis on “America”). I want this fictional participatory exhibit to broaden the concept of participation to its most inclusive potential. Every year, the Native American Studies department hosts the “Native Crossroads” Native American film festival. This exhibit will partner with the NAS department and participating local tribal governments to create digital storytelling projects centered around the creation stories of respective Native American tribal groups in Oklahoma (in the spirit of Adrienne Mayor’s methodology for Fossil Legends of the First Americans). The videos created by tribal members will be combined and edited-in with supplemental expertise from respective tribal leaders/historians, and scholars at OU to create a feature length documentary for each nation. These documentaries will be submitted to the “Native Crossroads” film festival and will be on display looping in our exhibit. It might be interesting to go above and beyond with the Kiowa Nation’s origin story. As one of the few tribes who inhabited Oklahoma not as the result of a forced death march, the Kiowa origin story includes their trek from the Black Hills of the Dakotas to the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma. This part of the exhibit could be coordinated with Kiowa rituals that take place in the Wichita Mountains, with the permission of the Kiowa, and under their auspices. The Wichita mountains are of supreme spiritual significance to the Kiowa and are under constant threat of gravel mining.

Exhibit Layout

These three exhibits will intermingle in a single large exhibit hall. The floor will be filled with an outline map of the United States, showing only the lines of rivers and geologic faults, and not the boundaries of states or the names of cities. Within what would be Oklahoma there will be points marking the epicenters of every earthquake, color-coded by date and sized according to magnitude. Sites of significance to the indigenous American origin stories will be marked with excerpts from those stories, and the paths of their migrations through the ages will be marked and labeled. The geological “antiquities” will be displayed on daises positioned according to where they were uncovered the antiquities were unearthed, with the height of the dais correlated to the rock stratum from which each originates (these will be open air when curatorially acceptable).

---

Notes

Science is a Story

• Galileo’s World invites our students to ponder why one of the most impressive works of the scientific revolution portrays Galileo in Middle Eastern dress, and how the so-called Scientific Revolution was influenced by the natural knowledge of the natives of central Mexico.
  • What about this second part?

 

Conevery Bolton Valencius – The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes – Introduction

• 6 – “Stories of earthquakes powerful enough to remake the topography of the midcontinent became just another part of the tradition of American frontier tall tales told by larger-than-life figures like Davy Crockett. Down-home narratives like this hunting tale might strike most of us as quaint Americana, not as evidence for serious and sober analysis. Narratives like Crockett’s cast doubt upon the very events they chronicle.”

 

• 8 – “Like Davy Crockett, The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes crawls down into the cracks left by these dramatic New Madrid quakes. In dim crevices, we can find the traces of environmental and social upheaval. We can reconstruct broken shards of long-neglected history and bring into the light this story, once well known and now virtually forgotten.”

• 9 – “This book answers many of the mysteries surrounding these dramatic early nineteenth-century earthquakes. First, how did these frightening events matter at the time? Careful investigation reveals that they were key events in the social, political, religious, and territorial upheavals of the moment. They were well known not only to those whose lives and livelihoods were transformed by them, but by people across the country, who gave voice to a uniquely American vernacular science as they debated the import of the quakes. Second, how could earthquakes that mattered so much, to so many, be almost completely forgotten i nthe decades and centuries following, especially when they carried the threat of a repeat performance? No one factor could erase these earthquakes: rather, a combination of changes — social, environmental, and scientific — combined to submerge knowledge of the New Madrid earthquakes for much of the modernizing twentieth century.”

• “Third, how did scientists come to rediscover these earthquakes after centuries of neglect? Even as seismology became a science of instruments and careful measurement, old narratives of long-past quakes turn out to have surprising salience for contemporary investigation. And finally, what should we make of the threat of future earthquakes in the New Madrid seismic zone, given this history? What might seem a set of question about the past become challenges still unresolved about priorities for the future.”

 

• “His account serves both to introduce the exciting events of the earthquakes and to show us how people of his ear investigated and came to understand puzzling natural phenomena: through sometimes chatty first-person narratives that included evaluation of trading routes, measurements of sand blows, and commentary on religion as equal ingredients. Making knowledge about the natural world was not separate from other kinds of reporting and conversation. Rather, early Americans folded the creation of knowledge into storytelling and the work of building commercial networks.”
• 12 – “Bodily knowledge, once a common form of information about earthquakes and then utterly rejected as unscientific, is once again a form of information about the severity and extent of seismic shocks. Such reassessments suggest further ways that once-valued and subsequently rejected information about the earthquakes, especially earthquake reports from Indian communities, information about the response of animals, or testimony about the lights and weather associated with tremors, might usefully inform some of the questions asked in our modern sciences of the earth.”
• “How do we know what we know — or what we think we know — about the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12, and possibly of the future? The smelly barking dogs of a famous American backwoods bear hunter might seem a strange setting for the search for thinking about natural events in the United States. Yet in such places, and through just such records, was knowledge about natural processes created in early American life.”

 

Martin J. S. Rudwick – Earth’s Deep History: How it Was Discovered and Why it Matters

• 34 – “So the artifacts studied by antiquaries, even if undateable, might help to throw light on the earliest periods of human history, back before the times from which any reliable textual documents survived. In effect, they might replace, and not merely supplement, the more traditional sources of historical evidence.”

 

• “There was also no reason why these antiquities could not be supplemented in turn, or even replaced, by other ancient material objects, which were not artifacts because they were not human but natural in origin. Nature might, metaphorically, have its own antiquities.”

• 37 – “The question was, in which ‘fossils’ was the resemblance to plants or animals due to their origin as parts of such living beings, and in which others was any resemblance accidental or a matter of chance? Only those that were truly organic in origin could be regarded as nature’s own antiquities, and therefore be used to supplement, or even replace, other forms of evidence about the history of humanity and its terrestrial environment.”

 

• “In fact, the problem was not as straightforward as this suggests. The ‘more-or-less’ resemblances between many ‘fossils’ and living plants and animals were widely attributed neither to chance nor to a simple causal connection, but to a fundamental analogy between the inorganic and organic realms of nature. The inorganic or mineral world was widely believed to generate forms that, although they had never been truly alive, bore some resemblance to, or had some ‘correspondence’ with, the forms generated by the organic or living world . . ..”
  • A kind of biomimicry … i think we could really tap into young people’s engagement by encouraging them to play with metaphor like this
• 39 – “Two such savants, whose studies of the fossil problem became especially signficant, were the Danish physician Nils Stensen (more usually known as Steno, the Latinized name under which he published his work) and the Englishman Robert Hooke.”
  • The same Steno as the password?
• 48-9 – “Hooke . . . deliberately applied the antiquaries’ methods to the study of the Earth. . . . Rocks and fossils were nature’s monuments and nature’s coins. These were metaphors, but far more than ‘mere’ metaphors: they did serious explanatory work. Rocks and fossils could even be treated as nature’s own documents, written as it were by nature’s own witnesses to events long past. But then, like ancient human records, they would have to be deciphered and their meaning interpreted. ‘Nature’s Grammar,’ the language of nature, had to be learned before nature’s antiquities could be used to reconstruct history . . ..”

 

Adrienne Mayor – Fossil Legends of the First Americans

• [CHAPTER 5 – THE HIGH PLAINS: THUNDER BIRDS, WATER MONSTERS, AND BUFFALO-CALLING STONES]
• 221 – “Many paleontologists working today remember an illustration in a popular children’s book of the 1950s, depicting a band of Sioux warriors discovering a Pteranodon skeleton after a lightning storm. The remains of those huge flying creatures are often found together with the skeletons of marine reptiles in Cretaceous sediments. Such a discovery would provide strong physical evidence to confirm the idea of hostility between Thunder Birds and Water Monsters.”
  • Analogizing between Native American Myth and observable reality – Euhemerism — recursive, the presence of the fossils may have influenced the myths (fig 66, p. 222)
• 226 – [paleontologist doing actual archaeological work]
• 227 – “I examined some cylindrical fossils with complex fractal patterns — baculites. Because the internal structure and patterns of these cephalopod marine fossils sometimes resemble bison shapes, the Blackfeet, Cheyenne, and other Plains tribes invested baculites with an ability to summon buffalo herds. Buffalo-calling stones, known as Iniskim among the Blackfeet bands of northern Montana and Alberta, have also turned up in archaeological sites across the Dakotas, Montana, and Canada, indicating that the Iniksim tradition goes back at least a thousand years.”