A new heritage intern begins with the assumption that preservation belongs mainly to experts and specialists, then gradually recognizes it in storytelling, family memories, personal objects, and the everyday desire to understand why things matter. Encounters with folklorists and other practitioners shift heritage from something distant and technical into something immediately human. The piece offers a useful outsider’s discovery: preservation becomes meaningful when it keeps the past relevant rather than merely keeping old things.
Category Archives: Public Knowledge & Culture
Work about access, shared knowledge, interpretation, institutions, communities, cultural meaning, and the systems through which knowledge becomes public.
Finding your online voice to advocate for heritage resources
This reflection argues that social media could broaden who gets to participate in conversations about cultural heritage. Specialized disciplines bring essential expertise, but public understanding also depends on listening to the experiences and interpretations people bring with them. Drawing on Jeff Guin’s own gradual move from commenting online to blogging, podcasting, video, and teaching, the piece connects digital participation with personal agency: finding a voice can be the first step toward becoming an advocate.
Are destroyed heritage resources still relevant? It’s a matter of interpretation
After fire destroyed the Kate Chopin House in rural Louisiana, heritage students faced an unusual interpretive challenge: how do you help visitors value a place when much of the physical structure is gone? Their response used the remaining landscape, ruins, history, architecture, and literary associations to create interpretive stations across the site. The project argues that loss does not necessarily end a place’s cultural meaning; interpretation can help communities understand what remains and why absence itself matters.
CRM Journal Review: Key Ingredients Exhibit
This review examines Key Ingredients: America By Food, a Smithsonian traveling exhibition that uses everyday foodways to explore American history, identity, work, migration, family, and community. Designed to travel to smaller communities through the Museum on Main Street program, the exhibition demonstrates how an ordinary and universally recognizable subject can open much larger cultural conversations. Food becomes the interpretive doorway through which visitors encounter both shared national stories and distinctly local experiences.
The 1st Law of Hometown Dynamics: You ALWAYS go home again
A conversation with interns about the inexplicable pull of Natchitoches prompts a reflection on hometown identity, escape, return, and the influence of place. Drawing on southern literature, folklore, family, and personal experience, Jeff Guin considers how identity forms through both resistance to where we come from and eventual reconciliation with it. The piece anticipates a recurring Voices theme: place is not simply a backdrop to human stories; it actively participates in shaping them.
Using Ning to talk about the future of museums
Angelina Russo discusses Museum 3.0, an early Ning-based professional network created to connect museum, gallery, library, and archive practitioners around questions of social media, learning, and institutional change. The conversation quickly moves past the technical ease of creating a network to the harder challenge of sustaining one: developing participation, identifying shared concerns, and making a digital space useful enough that professionals choose to contribute their knowledge to it.
Social media for a cause: How “Invisible Children” can serve as a model for the heritage field
Dylan Staley looks at Invisible Children’s large-scale use of social media and public action and asks what heritage advocates might learn from it. The comparison is less about copying a campaign than recognizing that digital networks can coordinate people around causes rather than simply distribute information. The piece challenges preservation organizations to think beyond awareness and toward mobilization: what would it look like if people were given meaningful ways to act on heritage values?
Nina Simon on museum participation and curating a second life in the social space
Museum 2.0 founder Nina Simon argues that the most important lesson of social media for museums is not necessarily the technology itself, but the participatory philosophy behind it. This conversation examines audience involvement, the time required to sustain online engagement, and ways museums can redesign visitor experiences around contribution and interaction even without a digital tool. It captures an early articulation of participation as an institutional practice rather than a social-media campaign.
Social Media: New playing field for PR, where everyone wins
Written when blogs and social networks were still unsettling traditional communications practice, this essay argues that the important change was not another set of media channels but the removal of gatekeepers. Individuals and organizations could now initiate conversations, find one another across distance, and create public influence without owning a printing press or broadcast outlet. The piece captures an early conviction that communication was becoming less about controlling messages and more about creating relationships.
Heritage resources define community, even in their loss
The destruction of the Kate Chopin House and Bayou Folk Museum by fire becomes a test of what heritage actually means to a community. The building and its collections represented decades of stewardship and local memory, but the response to their loss—students, preservation organizations, government agencies, businesses, and residents immediately helping one another—revealed another kind of cultural resource. The piece argues that heritage survives not only in objects and structures, but in the relationships formed around caring for them.