Unpinning Poster Archive: Building a Class Exhibition Digitally During COVID-19
Rebecca Corbett, Curtis Fletcher, Rika Hiro, and Anne-Marie Maxwell
Rebecca Corbett is Japanese Studies Librarian at the University of Southern California where she manages print and digital collections in Japanese and provides reference and liaison services to support research, teaching, and learning in Japanese Studies at USC. She received her PhD from the University of Sydney and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. Research interests include the history and practice of Japanese tea culture (chanoyu), and early modern Japanese women’s history. In particular, her work has focused on reevaluating the role of women as practitioners and producers of Japanese tea culture historically. Her book Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018) analyses privately circulated and commercially published texts to show how chanoyu tea practice for women was understood, articulated, and promoted from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries.
Curtis Fletcher is the Director of the Ahmanson Lab at USC Libraries. His research draws on key questions in the fields of media studies, visual studies, science and technology studies, and the history of technology. His published works examine the history of educational technology, the history of the digital humanities, and the relationship between academic libraries and digital scholarly communications. His work in the digital humanities focuses on multimedia and multimodal authoring and publishing, digital pedagogy, and critical making. He specializes in digital research and writing, with particular expertise in new models for authoring, credentialing, and publishing born-digital humanities scholarship. As a Co-PI on Scalar, he has been instrumental both in the development and design of the platform and in building out and coordinating the institutional infrastructure--academic presses, museums, archives, and humanities centers—that make up its core userbase.
Rika Hiro is a Dornsife Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California where she teaches Japanese and Asian art history as well as postwar art on nuclear politics. Her doctoral dissertation looked at the aftereffects of the atomic bombs in arts and exhibition culture in postwar Japan. She co-founded the non-profit art space Art2102 of Los Angeles and co-curated Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970 and Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art, 1968-1988 at the Getty Research Institute. Dr. Hiro has also served as a research assistant for the Costume and Textiles Department at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is currently researching on Japanese diaspora artists in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles for which she received the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion Graphic Culture Research Grant.
Anne-Marie Maxwell is a curator, writer, and researcher. She graduated from the University of Southern California Master of Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere. Before her work at USC, she served as Assistant Director of Admissions and Portfolio Review at the Art Center College of Design and Gallery Director for Mixografia. In her work with the USC Libraries Planning & Communications department she has curated the library exhibitions A Case of Hysteria? The Altogether Shocking History of Women’s Mental Health; 500 Years of Utopia, Automata: From Robots to A.I.; True Crime Detecting Fact and Fiction; What Makes a Monster?; Velocity and Vulnerability: Baseball Pitchers and the Limits of Human Performance; and Subversive Works/Sustainable Art: Latin American Artists Books. Additionally, Anne-Marie is the lead researcher for the Emmy award winning KCET/USC Libraries television documentary series Lost LA.
The Instructor: Rika Hiro
As an art historian with a background in art museums, I consider object- and archive-based learning an imperative part of my teaching. Thus, when I learned about the USC Libraries’ unique but largely unexamined collection of Japanese posters from the 1910s and the 1920s, I suggested an exhibition of select posters as the following year’s class project. In doing so, the collection would be better-taken care of and readily available for outside researchers, while my students could attain practical and analytical skills through intense hands-on experience and individualized research on posters of their choice. This was the impetus behind the online exhibition, Unpinning History: Japanese Posters in the Age of Commercialism, Imperialism, and Modernism, that my Spring 2020 class of Later Japanese Art collaboratively curated.
The Librarian: Rebecca Corbett
As Japanese Studies Librarian a large part of my role is overseeing a collection of books, e-resources, archives, and ephemera in the Japanese language. While having robust collections in support of research, teaching, and learning is important, an equally important part of my work is effectively linking the Libraries’ collections to students via collaborations that promote discovery and learning through intellectual and creative endeavors, such as Unpinning History.
The Exhibition Designer: Anne-Marie Maxwell
As a Curator, Writer, and Researcher for the USC Libraries Planning & Communications department, I develop and curate 4-8 exhibitions annually at the USC Libraries. In my role, I innovate and manipulate existing display and exhibition sites and reimagine possibilities for the libraries' physical collections. As part of my role, I facilitate teacher and student-led exhibition projects in our libraries' limited and often confining physical spaces.
The Digital Scholarly Communications Specialist: Curtis Fletcher
As the Director of the Ahmanson Lab at USC Libraries, I support and oversee the production of digital projects, publications, and exhibits by USC faculty, staff, and students. Of special interest to the Lab are projects that make use of USC Libraries’ resources, and in particular, those that offer faculty and students imaginative ways to engage, showcase, analyze or visualize materials from our library collections. To that end, we support a variety of collections-based digital projects like Unpinning History, leveraging Scalar, an authoring and publishing platform developed, in part, at the Ahmanson Lab.
Our Project
Our initial goal was to have a physical exhibition of Japanese posters from a USC Libraries’ collection curated by students and installed by Anne-Marie Maxwell in our Treasures Room at the end of spring 2020 semester. Dr. Hiro designed approximately half of the class content to fulfill this aim (the rest was dedicated to the trajectory of Japan’s artistic and cultural masterworks from the premodern period on so that students could contextualize the poster collection.) This included visits to Special Collections facilitated by Dr. Corbett to closely examine the posters, generate condition reports, make selection decisions, and write extended object labels that were appropriate for a university research library exhibition. While the Japanese posters collection had been digitized in 2013, the physical collection remained unprocessed, scattered among boxes of other international poster collections in a Libraries storage facility with no catalog record or archival finding aid. In tandem with the class visits the physical collection was processed and moved to USC’s Doheny Memorial Library, with the posters rehoused in archival folders and a Finding Aid created. To spatially imagine a poster exhibition and materialize displays within a gallery space was also a necessary process for the class. The Doheny Library is a historical and architectural majesty and a bit of a curatorial nightmare given the persnickety cases and display designs that demand custom alterations and adjustments for each new project and exhibition. Much of the libraries' curatorial scope highlights time-sensitive research projects that are developed and designed over 1-2 years. Physical installations can exist for a mere 24hrs to at the longest six months. It is always with a heavy heart and great curatorial regret that these undertakings are quickly dismantled.
Navigating from the landing page to one of the exhibit's thematic essays via the main table of contents
With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to shift to working remotely and digitally. This prompted us, at the end of March 2020, to move the exhibition online using Scalar, an online publication platform supported by USC Libraries’ Ahmanson Lab.[1] Maxwell quickly began to learn how to use Scalar under the guidance of Dr. Curtis Fletcher. Over several weeks following an accelerated learning model, Maxwell created an online exhibit layout design to use as a template for the final exhibition. To recreate the in-person and collaborative work with professor and student lead installations, she gave a tutorial via ZOOM to Dr. Hiro and the class, walking through the Scalar platform and presenting a preliminary layout design. Dr. Hiro and the students were invited to actively translate their research and curatorial selections into the digital showcase. The ZOOM session allowed students to give feedback about the template design. They were invited to join the Scalar community and become readers/editors for the project and make adjustments to the existing design template.
Learning a new publishing platform had its ups and downs (all visual elements were uploaded and deleted numerous times). For Maxwell, translating the experience of curatorial give and take and physical site situation with a group of collaborators was challenging given the time constrictions and new publishing platform skills. The final stages of exhibition installation and execution are physical work that was impossible to experience in person, given the current circumstances. Using the Scalar platform, the class and professor could simultaneously give direction on the layout, alter, and present the exhibition throughout two class sessions. The digital presentation stripped away wood encasements and leaded glass barriers and highlighted student research. Truncated material labels expanded to extensively researched essays linking and directing readers to additional resources, metadata, and extensive supplemental reading resources instantaneously. The digital exhibition's execution and design required more time than a physical installation. However, unlike the more ephemeral showcases of similar research undertakings at the USC Libraries, the student work, Japanese poster collection, and research will remain an invaluable tool readily accessible online.
Scrolling through the Exhibition Categories page
Central to the Scalar exhibition were the technological proficiency of Dr. Curtis Fletcher at the USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study’s Ahmanson Lab and the superb design provided by Anne-Marie Maxwell, with the help of a student design liaison, Kelli Reitzfeld. Without their expertise and assistance, the class could not have transferred their exhibition storyboard in an Excel spreadsheet and texts to Scalar site in the matter of a month. However, the online version entailed more pedagogical responsibilities. For example, with our time constraints, we could not discuss a possible need to tailor texts for lay readers, especially concerning some of the racially or ethnically charged posters, or design a site that looks alluring and is easily navigated both on computers and smartphones. Above all, the online exhibition is somewhat akin to the featured posters that moved widely across the oceans—to advertise steamship companies, promote travel to Japan’s colonies, or provoke Japanese nationalism—despite the objectives being different.
Rolling over an image annotation in the project
The biggest challenge in this shift was executing a collaborative project entirely online. Luckily, all posters had been digitized, and the class had completed the majority of condition reports, which facilitated in-depth research. In a way, the poster is a perfect medium for object-driven study. With its assortment of forms, colors, and letters, crucial information is printed directly on it. If not, it defies the purpose. In addition, digital images allowed us to magnify visual elements we could otherwise easily miss, such as small Japanese national flags in Sugiura Hisui’s design for the Shantung (Shandong) Railway (1918). Moreover, working digitally minimized further damage to the already fragile posters, which are meant to be ephemeral. The major benefit to the online exhibition was that we could disregard the posters’ conditions, the number of exhibition objects, and the length of explanatory texts. Indeed, some students selected severely damaged yet visually intriguing posters. We also increased the number of exhibition objects from fifteen to twenty-four since there were no longer physical space limitations. Furthermore, the majority of us produced longer and more informative texts, which were edited communally, on individual posters. As we have noted, there were certain constraints with the exhibit determined by the exhibition space, physical and virtual. In the end, the class experienced conceptualizing the exhibition in two different ways.
While it would not make sense to replicate the process we went through of moving from a physical to digital exhibition plan, necessitated as it was by the extraordinary circumstances, there are some benefits. If there had never been plans for a physical exhibition and we had gone digital from the outset, the collection would likely have remained unprocessed and inaccessible to researchers except for the digital surrogates. Now the physical collection has been moved to a safe and appropriate environment, and is available to researchers and students. Through their class visits to view the posters, students learned about handling rare and primary sources and how to “look at” archival ephemera. These include experiencing physicality of large posters, examining different materials of what seemed to be simple mechanical reproductions (paper, metal, and cotton twill tape), speculating how objects had been used, displayed, and/or circulated through wears and tears, and comparing printing processes.
The project is a powerful testament to collaborative endeavors and what students can discover and achieve with libraries’ collections and capabilities both physical and digital. While our plans for having a physical exhibition were derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this online version reveals unique possibilities of remote learning and teaching, and what arts and culture can offer—potency, wonder, provocation, and relief—in the midst of this chaotic moment.
Notes
[1] Scalar is an open source authoring and publishing platform designed for researchers, educators, and library and archive professionals to create media-rich, multimodal digital scholarship and exhibitions. Scalar allows its users to import and assemble media from scholarly archives and repositories and to juxtapose that media with their own writing in short- and long-form works.