My Year at Wolfsonian-FIU: An Instructive Leap Toward Today’s Systems Building Focus

My time at Wolfsonian-FIU was only a year, but a deep AI-driven dive into the corpus of work I produced in that period demonstrates an important transition in how I was thinking.

I arrived in 2014 after several years at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, following a decade at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training before that. Much of what I produced at Wolfsonian was media: curator interviews, exhibition documentation, installation videos, participatory storytelling, and other attempts to extend the museum’s interpretation beyond the gallery.

Those projects were useful in their own right, but they were also exercises. Each one gave me another way to test how collections, expertise, audiences, technology, and participation might connect. The lessons from that work began feeding into something larger: strategy documents, project concepts, grant proposals, app ideas, and a proposed digital engagement space.

Looking back now, that progression is what makes the period instructive. The videos and public projects were not separate from the systems work that followed. They were helping me understand what a larger digital system might need to do—and what conditions would be required to build one.

Six weeks in: making the case to the board

That progression becomes visible surprisingly early. About six weeks after I arrived, I was charged with presenting a digital outreach report to the Wolfsonian board. The deck opened with a question that now reads like an early marker of where my thinking was heading: “What does it mean to be ‘Wolfsonian’ in the digital age?”

The presentation started with visible work I had already created—YouTube optimization, exhibition video on Myth and Machine. It focused on the way the museum was beginning to take more control over how its content appeared online—but it quickly widened. I talked about digital outreach as a relationship with audiences, about partnerships with local cultural and technology communities, about storytelling that could move across platforms and devices, about integrating digital work into institutional processes, and about making interpretation globally accessible through multilingual media and mobile experiences.

One line from the speaker notes stands out to me now:

“It’s possible to sustain content that can work across devices, platforms and interfaces. It just requires planning digital integration into our processes.”

I was not yet presenting a finished systems model. I was using the media work already underway to make a larger case about how collections, staff expertise, audiences, partnerships, platforms, and internal processes could fit together.

I was told the presentation needed to be a quick win for interim leadership and I remember the presentation landing extremely well with the board. At the time, that felt like validation of the work I had begun. Looking back, it is also evidence that the leap toward systems building was already taking form in public and in writing, not simply in my head. The experiments continued filling out the strategy as I went.

Inviting people into the story

One of the clearest examples was Great War Stories, a project connected to the centennial of World War I and the museum’s Myth and Machine: The First World War in Visual Culture exhibition. The idea was not simply to publish information about the war, but to create a way for people to connect family stories, memory, and personal history with the museum’s collections and exhibitions.

The original Great War Stories Tumblr is still online. It describes itself as a “digital mosaic” of personal World War I stories, photographs, documents, and letters. The project used the social platforms of the moment as places for interpretation and participation rather than simply promotion.

Great War Stories also drew on relationships I had built long before I arrived at Wolfsonian. Lisa Louise Cooke of Genealogy Gems was one of my earliest friends from the social-media days; I had interviewed her for Voices of the Past back in 2009 about podcasting, genealogy, and building an online audience. When Great War Stories came along, she signed up for Tumblr specifically to contribute and then shared the project through her blog and e-newsletter, bringing it into a genealogy community that Wolfsonian did not already reach well. Jon Voss was another friend from those early years. I first introduced myself to him at SXSW in 2011, while I was still at NCPTT, and by 2013 I was introducing him at my then-employer, the Chemical Heritage Foundation for his talk “Can One Story Change the World?”, which used his grandfather’s World War I diary and Historypin to explore participatory history. When Jon later told me about the World War I centenary work underway through Historypin, we asked his opinion on how we were framing Great War Stories. I no longer remember how much direct crossover there ultimately was between the projects, if any, and I do not want to reconstruct a collaboration the archive does not support. What mattered was the habit of testing ideas through relationships with people already doing adjacent work.

Looking back, the technology is very much of its time. Tumblr, hashtags, and platform-specific campaigns occupied a much larger place in digital strategy then than they do now. The underlying idea, though, has stayed with me: institutional collections become more meaningful when they can connect with knowledge and memory that exist outside the institution.

Share your #GreatWarStories with The Wolfsonian

Letting expertise travel

Several of the videos were straightforward attempts to make curatorial and scholarly interpretation portable, including in non-English languages.

Watch the curator and expert interpretations

Silvia Barisione, curator, interprets “The Completed Buildings of Schultze and Weaver”

Sculpture “La Vittoria del Piave” by Arrigo Minerbi symbolizes Italian resistance in World War I

#MythandMachine overview with curator Jon Mogul

John Stuart on humanity’s complicated relationship with cities (Takeover Tour Part 1)

These were not elaborate productions. That was partly the point. The Canon Vixia I was using was a relatively lightweight way to get interpretation out of the gallery and into circulation while preserving the particular voice of the person doing the interpreting.

That seems ordinary now. At the time, institutions were still working out how much of their interpretive authority could move outside traditional formats such as labels, catalogs, lectures, and formal educational programming.

Making the work of the museum visible

I was also interested in the activity surrounding exhibitions themselves.

Watch the installations and behind-the-scenes work

Time lapse of Wolfsonian “Intricate Pattern Overlay” mural painting

Wolfsonian at Work: Time-lapse of World War I exhibit installation

Installing Philodendron: Partnership with Urban GreenWorks

Installation, collaboration, and making were not just things that happened before the public arrived. They could themselves become part of the interpretation.

That idea has become much more familiar across museums: behind-the-scenes work, conservation, fabrication (stellar team there), installation, and collaboration are now routinely treated as public-facing content. At the time, I was interested in what happened when you simply turned the camera toward the work already taking place.

Extending the exhibition

The Myth and Machine material also included documentation of the exhibition opening itself.

Watch the Myth and Machine exhibition opening

Myth and Machine exhibition opening remarks

Together, the videos extended some portion of the exhibition experience beyond the event and beyond Miami Beach. They were modest forms of digital interpretation, but they were also evidence of a larger shift museums were beginning to make: exhibitions no longer had to end at the gallery walls.

The larger idea behind the experiments

The videos make the work easy to see, but they were only one part of the story. And one correction matters here: I did not arrive at Wolfsonian to a digital blank slate.

The museum already had a stockpile of neat little projects underway. Derek Merleaux, the Digital Asset Manager—and one of the people instrumental in bringing me to Wolfsonian—had already been pushing the digital collection in experimental directions. The open API, Labs, crowdsourced annotation, data visualization, in-gallery StoryMap interactives, and panoramic exhibition tours were already taking shape. My contribution was to connect that existing work more deliberately with audience engagement, interpretation, media, participation, and the broader strategy I had been brought in to develop.

One project I did get into place was the mobile tour for Women, Art, and Social Change: The Newcomb Pottery Enterprise, a major 2015 exhibition of more than 130 objects exploring Newcomb’s Southern Arts & Crafts tradition and the women who built it. It extended interpretation into visitors’ own phones and tablets and, according to the project reporting from the time, was used by nearly 600 visitors who viewed about 4,200 pages. Some responses even came from people using the tour away from the museum. That mattered because it moved the work beyond publishing media and into an experience that connected content, visitors, devices, evaluation, and the gallery itself.

At the same time, the videos, Great War Stories, multilingual interpretation, audience metrics, exhibition documentation, and other public offerings were giving me practical evidence about how people encountered museum knowledge. Those exercises were informing the strategy as I went. They helped turn a series of projects into a larger set of questions about discovery, participation, access, workflows, staffing, partnerships, infrastructure, and continuity.

From experiments to strategy

By 2015, the experiments were beginning to resolve into a more explicit framework. In my last months there, I began to pull the individual projects into a common direction rather than treat video, social media, collections access, mobile interpretation, and audience work as separate channels. I had a 21-page Wolfsonian Digital Strategy written that was organized around seven broad goals: making the web presence easier to discover and explore; putting human interpretation around collections; documenting and preserving institutional knowledge; making content more broadly accessible, including across languages and devices; building partnerships for digital learning; measuring and understanding audiences; and producing media that could be timely, interactive, and reused across platforms.

Underneath those goals was a more important shift. I was arguing that The Wolfsonian could function as more than a place that published information about a collection. It could become a platform through which resources, expertise, data, tools, and public participation reinforced one another.

The working documents make clear that this was not abstract strategy written after the fact. The videos, Great War Stories, multilingual interpretation, audience metrics, mobile tour, staff conversations, grant concepts, and the digital work already underway at the museum were feeding it. The plan was an attempt to name the system those experiments seemed to be pointing toward—and to identify the staffing, workflows, infrastructure, partnerships, and institutional support that would be needed to sustain it.

One of the more ambitious concepts growing out of that period was a Propaganda Tablet App that would have used the museum’s propaganda holdings to teach visual persuasion through making rather than browsing. It never became a product, but the surviving proposal is substantial enough—and contains enough early idealism and brain fever—to deserve its own retrospective rather than a long detour here.

The plans ranged well beyond social media. They addressed search and discovery, multilingual access, livestreaming, mobile interpretation, visitor research, staff training, digital scholarship, website infrastructure, podcasting, multimedia production, workflows, and the people needed to sustain them. A separate FY16 human-resource plan proposed a multimedia journalist, a videographer/editor, and a short-term Wikipedian-in-Residence. The Wikipedia role was tied to a broader GLAM-Wiki idea: training staff, contributing collection knowledge to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and convening a GLAM Café where museum people, editors, hackers, and journalists could work together. That mattered because the strategy was beginning to treat capacity as a combination of people, relationships, workflows, and platforms—not just technology.

Another item jumps out now because of what came later. In the Digital Project Ideas working document, I proposed acquiring basic 3D-scanning equipment and training digitization staff to begin experimenting with capturing shape as well as images. This was before Vizcaya. The proposal never became a major Wolfsonian program, but the impulse is familiar: preservation technology, collections access, staff learning, and experimentation were already starting to occupy the same frame.

Some proposals pushed further. I developed a plan for a public-facing digital studio and engagement space where visitors, students, and staff could work with touchscreens, digital collections, visualization, annotation, multimedia, and experimental interpretation. I also developed the propaganda tablet-app concept as a way to use the collection not simply for browsing, but for learning through making and media literacy. Neither became the larger institutional system I imagined, but both show where the experiments were leading me.

The broader strategy itself was developed, but it was never formally launched as an institutional program. Some public-facing projects did get made and tested; the larger operating model did not get that opportunity. I do still have it though, and wonder what outcome its application would have resulted in today.

What I see now is less a jump from “media” to “systems” than a process of learning how systems emerge from connected practice. I was working inside an institution where important digital pieces already existed, adding projects of my own, and trying to understand how all of those pieces could reinforce one another rather than remain separate initiatives.

That thread runs directly into what came next at Vizcaya. By then, the question was no longer only what digital projects could be made. It was how to create the shared understanding, institutional agreement, roles, resources, workflows, and technical foundations that would allow digital work to become durable capacity.

That is why I now think of Wolfsonian as an instructive leap toward systems building. The leap was not that I suddenly began thinking in systems. It was that it brought into focus the required conditions under which systems could actually be built—and to discern those conditions from the presence of good ideas, talented people, or promising individual projects.