Raven Bishop and Sara Clarke-De Reza visited the University of New Hampshire to create a virtual tour of the exhibit “How the Other Half Lived: The Isle of Shoals and the Nineteenth Century New England Seacoast.”
Part of the mission of the DSMP Project is to support other museums, researchers, and scholars who are interested in developing their own capacity for creating and integrating digital assets into their work. This May, we partnered with Dr. Ellie Harrison-Buck, Professor of Anthropology (and former collaborator on the Crooked Tree Museum and Cultural Heritage Center Museum project) to build a virtual tour of a temporary exhibit currently housed in the University of New Hampshire Dimond Library.
Ellie developed this exhibit with her student Kieran Mulligan and Dr. Jordan Fansler, professor of history at Great Bay Community College. The development and digitization of the exhibit was supported with funding from the Mellon-funded NH Humanities Collaborative and a Hayes Fellowship from the UNH Center for the Humanities. This summer, Ellie will use her new skills in object digitization and ThingLink development to complete the virtual tour. This summer she is working with a research intern, Sarah Aznive at the Vaughn Cottage Museum on Star Island, Isles of Shoals. Their aim is to digitize more nineteenth century collections from the Shoals and further build on the virtual tour, making these materials publicly available for the first time ever.
Check out the virtual tour of the exhibit that is in progress. The exhibit explores “the intersection of color and class that gave form to racialized identities for Irish, Norwegian, and other poor communities who came to New England looking for a new start” in the mid- to-late 1800s.
Our work with How the Other Half Lived represents the second capacity building collaboration that the DSMP team has undertaken, after the work with the National Museum of Belize in 2019. For more information on our vision for growing a community of technology-empowered museum stakeholders, visit this page of our website.