That's TMI: Time, Memory, and Interpretation

“Whether or not “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man,” or its source material that animates Hawke’s documentary, lays bare those things in the way Newman himself would have wanted is itself a complication, or a function, of legacy. Lest we forget, Newman himself burned the tapes, perhaps having grown resentful or ambivalent to the whole idea of revisionist history. And yet our stories find ways of getting told, even when we’re not around to supervise.” (Kenyon Alumni Magazine) When I read the article “What Makes a Legend” by Kenyon alumnus, Eileen Cartter '16, I was floored by how the image of Newman was captured and recreated. He was a man who was very well aware of his legacy, and how his image had changed as time passed. In the article, for example, college archivist, Abigail Tayse, wrote that fewer and fewer Kenyon students each year knew who Newman was. He was an actor, a racecar driver, an entrepreneur, and a philanthropist, among many other things. Therefore, when my...

  Rory Engel The Morality and Biases of Remembrance   For our final week of fine-tuning our case for Notable People, Liv, Julián, and I took two different trips to Archives and Special Collections. We used our first trip as an opportunity to curate our items for John Crowe Ransom, and our second trip was dedicated to writing our text labels and finalizing our layout. On the first day, we struggled to pick between two items for Ransom, one of these being a document that he had written and the other being a poem written by someone else for Ransom. We decided it would be nice to include an archive that might give a sense of how others viewed him, so we chose to include the poem. On our second day, we struggled with writing summaries of each of these individuals and their importance in the world in such a small amount of words. What specific information was necessary to include, and what might be irrelevant? Aside from making sure we gave context to the items we picked, we chose...

 When dealing with representing people as emblems of the college, the morality of the person you represent feels important. Whether or not someone is ‘good enough’ to be the face of Kenyon’s past and to represent its progress over the years typically comes down to positive impact and intention. In writing our bios this week, my group defined people into four sentences, meant to invoke the goodness of the person we’re representing. It boiled down to noting achievements – honorary degrees, Academy Awards, Nobel Peace Prize nominations, and charity proceeds. These are symbols of greatness for the college and its alumni, but after reading Yazdiha I felt these symbols brought to light the differences in moral perceptions people face based on their identities, and how it erodes the ability to gain honor, respect, or be seen as a representative force.  In The Struggle for the People’s King, Hajar Yazdiha writes “Moral meanings – meanings that signify ‘right’ from ‘wrong,’ ‘good’ from...

Since we completed a ‘rough draft’ of our display last week, my group worked on various finishing touches this week. This included tweaking its layout (e.g., should the bell ringer be the centerpiece? Should we or should we not put a paperweight on the campus map?) and writing up labels and a case summary. Like last week, a good deal of our thinking this week was concerned with our narrative/case summary. To that end, we talked a lot about the tension between having multiple items with multiple stories and one overarching case summary. We also thought a good deal about the representativeness of our display, particularly since the time frame that we’re working within (1824 - 2024) was chock-full of social change. Lastly, we also spent some time comparing our display to the one on exhibit. As a result of reviewing it several times, we tailored some of our writing and layout to somewhat match its tone/style. In addition to working in the archives, I also spent some time thinking about Cha...

 This week in the archives my group spent much of our time together writing out the labels that will accompany our selections in the case. This was no easy task, as we quickly realized that we had limited space to write everything that we wanted to include in the cases. In the main description of our case there is a very limited number of words that we can use, so we spent a long time cutting sections and deciding what was most important to include for our audience. When writing this main description, I realized how important the framing of information was for displaying Kenyon's impact on the world. Some of the artifacts that we chose don't directly relate to Kenyon's campus, but they are still a piece of Kenyon's history, so when writing out the information it was difficult to teach our audience how they connect back to this campus. Through this writing, I realized that it would be very easy for us to over exaggerate Kenyon's involvement in some of these artifacts...

In our collection, my group and I have decided to highlight the emergence of different student groups at Kenyon. Within the history of clubs and organizations, we saw a large increase in the number of groups centered around diversity. In our case, we specifically highlight the Black Student Union (BSU), a student group that became an official campus organization in 1970. In the past 50 years, BSU has accomplished many different goals including starting a Black student scholarship fund, establishing a Multicultural Center on campus, and hosting events that bring in different Black artists and writers to Kenyon. Thinking more critically about groups such as BSU, it is necessary to both consider their importance for the inclusion of all students, yet also acknowledge how Kenyon is still exclusive in many ways. From doing more thoughtful research on BSU, I am left wondering how to celebrate the accomplishments of BSU while still holding the institution of Kenyon accountable for its exclusi...

 My group spent this week planning where to place our objects in our case, and writing labels for each item along with a cumalitive summary. This process has been so thought out, to an extent that suprises me.   The reason for this extensive thought is that fact that the way we frame our case will directly affect interpesetations of it, and collective memories of it. Our case is based on the past 100 years of Kenyon, and the 200 years ahead. We have decided to put an emphasis on the Old Kenyon fire, because it is a big event in the schools history, and happened right around the time we start to focus on. Putting an emphasis on this fire has a big affect on how our case is framed. For example, the center peice of our case is a bell clapper. It is facinating to look at, but hard to connect with the rest of our archives. That being said, we found out the clapper was from Old K before the fire. So the way we are framing it is that this clapper was in Old Kenyon before the fire, an...

      This week, my group spent time finalizing our case selections and writing labels for the artifacts that needed descriptions. While writing labels, I found myself reflecting further on each artifact and asking myself how a viewer might interpret them. This process forced me to look through the eyes of my audience and think about how much the artifacts speak for themselves. For example, newspaper articles with eye-catching headlines are fairly straightforward, and we felt that adding our own descriptions could take away from the historical value of the artifacts. The images, on the other hand, required descriptions since the average viewer would not be as familiar with the history of women at Kenyon and the people in the photos as we did - simply because most people viewing our case will not have spent time in the archives learning about the topic. It was difficult to walk the line between providing sufficient descriptions so that the viewers could understand what the...

In the archives this week, my group spent our time finalizing the selections for our case, and drafting descriptions for the objects we chose to display. In this stage of the process, the task at hand was to decipher the through-line and cultivate a cohesive depiction of Kenyon’s student life over the past one hundred years. After reviewing our artifacts, the focal point of our case is centered around the emergence of student groups and organizations over the last century, which championed diversity and expression. Our selections–pamphlets from Black Student Union and Hillel, an issue of a literary magazine, and a photograph of WKCO– reflect the expansion of not only Kenyon’s student body, but the possibilities for connection and outlets for creative expression. Our reading this week, The Struggle for the People’s King references the civil rights movement to highlight the ways in which different groups deploy, distort, and falsify collective memory in order to define their identity. Th...

This week in the archives, my group focused our attention on writing the blurbs that will appear alongside the objects we have curated for our case. This was not an easy task, as we had to write something that properly presented the narrative we are trying to construct. The narrative must adequately explain why we have chosen our specific objects and why we have chosen to order them in this specific way. Although it is easy to explain these choices to each other, putting these explanations down on paper was a more challenging task than expected. We had to deploy our marketing skills to write prompts that were both compelling and precise, qualifying exactly how the artifacts we have chosen are the best representation of Kenyon’s place in the greater world over the past 100 years. One thing that was particularly hard about this was deciding on whose behalf the prompts should be written. Are they coming from the school, shamelessly boasting about its accomplishments over the past centur...

  What is the relationship between feeling and sense experience and the collective memory associated with an event or landmark - how does your bodily experience impact it? In thinking about the question I was stumped by the emotional effect of one person on their own memory. It seems to me that emotional attachment of any kind makes the memory what it is. Positive and negative emotions make events more meaningful. In this way, a neutral experience would have the effect of neutralizing the event, yet people seem to have positive reactions to entirely meaningless events.  It would have no effect on the whole community, the back sheep doesn’t reflect the sentiments of the flock. But in the same breath, each and every person is an individual, the idea of the flock seems to both hold true and be entirely false. The factor I’m missing is social cohesion. The environment of each individual in the time surrounding the event will dictate the way in which they remember the event. Even i...

     This week, as my group starts to finalize what our case looks like, I've started focusing more on some of the individual objects that we've selected. One of the things that caught my eye this week was an article about Kenyon in relation to the Kent State shooting because we're planning to put it in the center of our case. We've been focusing a lot on how to tell a story through the presentation of our objects and decided that the Kent State shooting was one of the most impactful stories to include, thus why it took the middle spot in the case. The topic of the shooting is a sensitive one, but it's an incredibly important part of Kenyon's history that needs to be shared. It doesn't show Kenyon in a bad light, in fact it displays Kenyon very positively, but it does talk about a negative period of history.      Robyn Autry's writing on how museums must represent the past while showing both the good and the bad sides of history is a big issue for museum...

  Ode to a Drunkard: Paul Newman, the actor, the entrepreneur, and the student Last Tuesday, Rory and I journeyed to the Special Collections Archive, where we discussed how best to arrange our display. We had a myriad of data at our disposal, yet we struggled to determine what should and should not be remembered. By determining what memory should and should not be remembered, we understood that we were simultaneously determining what memories will and won’t be canonized. It was a difficult role to perform, and there was some discomfort over our decision. How could we know how a person wanted to be remembered? How would an audience react to our display? In one of the articles I read from the Kenyon Alumni Magazine, for example, former Kenyon alumnus, Paul Newman wrote that “the most barometric incident in my college life was entrepreneurial, not theatrical: it was my laundry business” ( Kenyon Alumni Magazine ). Two key findings can be interpreted from this passage: (1) there is a...

  Rory Engel Building a Narrative of Pride and Hope   This week, our group narrowed down our case to four people: Paul Newman, Bill Watterson, Carl Djerassi, and John Crowe Ransom. In picking these individuals, not only did we try and determine what makes these people notable, but we also began to think about what sort of narrative we wanted to create for each person and what archival items would help to produce these stories. Though we are still working through what the message behind our case will be, it was important to us that all of the individuals we picked had a great and impactful presence both at Kenyon as well as in the outside world. Julián and I kept this in mind as we did a more thorough sift through the archives on Tuesday. We decided that we liked the fact that the current notable people case has a photo of each person on display, so we started with finding these photos. As Julián contemplated two photos of Paul Newman, one being a headshot after his time at K...

 This week, my group and I focused on how/ if we could present ideas that may lean on the negative or darker side of Kenyon's history. Because our group is "Kenyon in the World," we have done a lot of extensive research on how Kenyon's presence exists in the world. Although we weren't surprised by this finding, not all of "Kenyon in the World" is positive or "good." Of course, my group's goal is also to maintain the integrity of our case and show our viewers a display that accurately and truthfully represents Kenyon's presence in the greater world. Hence, it was much to our surprise when we came across the images and objects representing "Stewie," a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity who was killed in one of the United States' first reported hazing deaths. We were shocked by this discovery but also it assured us in some ways that we could continue to uphold our original mission of keeping our display case accurate, d...

       During this week's archives search, my favorite find was a book packed full with interviews of Kenyon students living in Old Kenyon at the time of the fire. It was a very traumatic time for these students, along with a very memorable one. What stuck out to me was the amount of physical feeling descriptors that were used to tell the story of what happened. It was apparent that these students were brought back to the scary moments when they were talking about it. One student described how it felt when he opened the door of his dorm room to the awaiting flames. He said it felt so hot that he expected major burns. He had no time to check before jumping out of his window to escape. Another student described the feeling of hitting the ground from a jump multiple stories up. The pain hurt him to talk about, and brought him back to the traumatic experience. This collective memory of the Old Kenyon fire all starts within the body.      In Lynn Spillman a...