Voices from the Grave

Quite by accident while researching freeware backup solutions, I stumbled upon a web site that did not back up my systems, but instead tried to convince me to back up my “vital digital property.” Legacy Locker, which has been around since Spring 2009, sells services to protect families in the unfortunate but inevitable event(s) of “loss, death, or disability.” Basically, for a small fee of $30 per year, they will store passwords to your online accounts. (I immediately think of my super important Facebook page and the millions stored in my off–grid PayPal bank account.)

The brainchild of Jeremy Toeman, Legacy Locker begs your serious consideration as an online service filling a legitimate, contemporary need. "I have young children that can't read yet,” Toeman enthusiastically reveals. More importantly, “One day my blog will have meaning to them in the same way you find an old photo of your grandfather and wonder what the story was.” With measured testimonials from news organizations (Wall Street Journal and Yahoo! News), Legacy Locker postures for position in a market already saturated with personal e-solutions for [fill-in-the-blank].

The visuals of the Legacy Locker landing site are tidy but pedestrian, a formulaic web delivery to help the target audience feel comfortable with the untidy topic of death. The page has a carefully structured layout and calming baby blue palette. Prominently featured is a white, middle class, heteronormative family, back dropped by a pseudo-Craftsman suburban split level. (What world am I living in? Not this world!)

Legacy Locker exemplifies the kind of niche entrepreneurial opportunities modern digital culture has created for hobby archivists. Capitalizing on the momentum of personal digital archiving, these often trivial markets target consumers interested in creating a personal narrative of themselves: children and anniversaries, accomplishments, careers, memories and memorials, lots and lots of pictures, and...passwords.

At what point does archiving of digital minutiae, the minutiae of the minutiae, become a ridiculous exercise in self-absorption? MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (and OMG, Tweet-a-Watt) are among the better known venues. The fascinating sociological cult of self is exhibited by a near frantic mania to preserve our own legacies, an eagerness to establish social relevancy via real time scripting of our story, the preemptive writing of tomorrow’s history.

Archival functions are a system of preservation. Within historiography, digital archiving of objects and documents has the broad mission of ensuring preservation of materials for access by current and future generations. Archivists, like everyone else, have particularities of standpoint—education, generation, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, politics, geography—which shape perspectives concerning appraisal and retention. These inherent biases complicate the measurement of value, those objects important enough to be documented. There is obvious and significant difference between the professional and hobby archivist, and value-of-self creates opportunities for passionate, explorative discourse.

“On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Nietzsche’s canonical essay, speaks to the unanswerable questions of historical ownership and relevancy: "The fact that life does need the service of history must be as clearly grasped as that an excess of history hurts it... History is necessary to the living man in three ways: In relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism and reverence, his suffering and his desire for deliverance." Nietzsche discusses at length the painful fear of irrelevancy humans impose upon themselves: "The fiercest battle is fought round the demand for greatness to be eternal... For they wish but one thing: to live at any cost". Perhaps, through archiving the self, we hope to “balance the ledger of life,” and through calculated e-conservation efforts we will successfully establish eternal personal mandate. We will have succeeded in defining our historical selves and will have attempted to preserve (our)selves for others who we hope encounter our dutiful archival efforts.


Technology is growing at an exponentially fantastic speed. The archive grows in unison. But do my loved ones really need a web service to help them cope with my LinkedIn account when I “pass?” At the risk of exposing myself as trapped in the same tar pit as my ancestors, I seriously think they do not. My survivors can find the crayon drawings from first grade in a box in the garage, clearly labeled. The legal papers are filed with the attorney, copies in the desk. Passwords? For the time being, I’ll continue to use a freeware password application. The super secret code to that is on the Post-It under the keyboard. See you on the other side. We’ll look at pictures of our grandfathers.

~ Anne Gehr

Cleopatra's Allure

“Cleopatra, the Search for the Last Queen of Egypt,” which premiered at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute in June, is probably the most widely hyped exhibition I’ve seen in a long time. Philly has adopted the exhibit as its own, promoting it on the Amtrak line to DC, and on every Philadelphia tourism website I’ve seen, even so far as to create a “Cleopatra VIP Hotel Package” available at 11 area hotels.

The Franklin Institute, known for its kid-friendly focus on scientific process and the history of innovation, seemed like an unlikely site to jump on the Egyptology bandwagon, but I was certainly intrigued and excited by the prospect of an immersive day of learning and entertainment, from a “Mummies” IMAX movie to lunch at “Cleo’s Portico,” to, of course, the exhibit itself. But could it possibly live up to all the hype?

Cleo is splashy, no question, but there’s genuine science, history and museological practice behind all the glamour. The 4-minute introductory video for the exhibition is reminiscent of a promo ad for a new HBO miniseries, but it clearly lays out the exhibition’s central question: who was Cleopatra, really, and how can we learn more?

Cleverly divided into sections based on key places in Cleopatra VII’s life and associated archeological expeditions by Dr. Zahi Hawass (searching for Cleo and Marc Antony’s Tomb) and Franck Goddio (the underwater archeologist excavating ancient Alexandria and its surrounding environs), the exhibit uses theatrical lighting and a first-person narrated audio tour detailing Cleo’s life in the best tradition of historical fiction. The exhibit is anchored by some truly amazing artifacts, including a piece of papyrus, signed by the queen herself with the emphatic phrase “make it happen.”

At the same time, the exhibit plays a lot with visitors’ notions of authenticity. Yes, identified artifacts are from the right time and place to be associated with Cleopatra, but were they truly encountered by her? For example, a stone statue of a Ptolomaic queen is identified as an artifact that could have represented Cleopatra. Cleopatra’s enigmatic nature seems to hold the whole exhibit together, maintaining the attraction of the mysterious unknown. Since all images of Cleo were ordered to be destroyed by Octavius and his Roman cohorts, Egyptologists are quick to claim that no one knows exactly what she looked like. Herself a Greek in the line of Ptolemy, who adopted Egyptian culture and espoused a hybrid religion, Cleopatra knew a thing or two about image control. She portrayed herself in the style of Isis in a statue or on a coin as a generic Roman queen. Over the years, she has been portrayed as an unrepentant temptress and, more recently, as a smart political leader, but always in a thoroughly gendered fashion, wielding uniquely female power.

The exhibit waxes so enthusiastic about Cleopatra’s lasting allure that I had to test it for myself. Do people really care that much about Cleopatra, or is this a product of Philadelphia’s, National Geographic’s and a couple of archaeologists’ wishful thinking? Despite its claims within the exhibit to the contrary, the exhibition website does not open many avenues of exploration into Cleo’s legacy. National Geographic’s Cleopatra home page provides mostly passive video links that continue to claim Cleo’s importance without a whole lot of contemporary backup. (Even the interactive Cleopatra game is behind a download and cost barrier...) So, I tried a different tactic. A google image search for Cleopatra yields 1,910,000 hits ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Halloween costumes to computer games. Perhaps most fascinating to me was a Daily News article detailing the controversy over Angelina Jolie’s selection to play Cleopatra in an upcoming Scott Rudin film. Paired with a detailed computer model of the ancient queen whom no historian would claim can be fully physically described, Jolie is criticized for being too white. I suppose that a place in the contemporary debate over race, power and image is quite enough to prove relevance.

So in the end, what role does this blockbuster traveling exhibition play in the public history endeavor to spread critical, engaged historical scholarship to a wider audience? Exhibits like this act as gateways, bringing people into institutions which likely have less splashy but no less provocative exhibition gems hidden away in their anterior wings (although the Franklin’s mainstay science exhibits never seem to be lacking for foot traffic). More importantly, exhibits like these offer opportunities for partnerships between far-flung universities, collecting institutions, consultant historians and exhibition designers who can work together with the promise of their product reaching diverse audiences, hungry for “something new” in their favorite museums. Collaboration is a public history buzz word for a reason. When more people work together, topics broaden (pop culture meets artifact connoissureship meets environmental history) and that ever-elusive relevance is achieved.

NOTE: The photo, taken by a member of my family, is of me in the “Cleopatra shop” in the Franklin Institute on 7/10/10.

~ Adina Langer

The Curated Boutique

As an avid reader of fashion magazines and blogs, I’ve noticed a curious trend over the past few years. Upscale boutiques are described as “curated,” selling “discerning” and “careful” collections of items. Are they just borrowing the language of museums or is something else at work when the worlds of retail and curation collide?

While I’d scribble a critical comment in the margins of any student paper that began this way, the Oxford English Dictionary defines curate (v) as both “to act as curator of (a museum, exhibits, etc.)” and “to look after and preserve.” This scanty definition raises two key issues. To “look after and preserve” suggests that there are certain objects that have been accorded value, either individually or, more likely, culturally, while the first half of the definition invokes a person whose job it is to preserve such objects (in a museum, for example), and also to arrange them, as in an exhibit. Such arranging suggests something further, which is that the arranged objects will have more meaning because of the process of exhibition and the knowledge of the curator.

Both of these aspects are clearly at work in a curated boutique, such as Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a store that sells the work, especially jewelry, clothing and home accessories, of a group of Philadelphia area artists. Its name, of course, is that of a famous essay by Walter Benjamin on the impact of mass production on the meaning of objects. Art in the Age is not coy about their retail philosophy:

“Rather than exist at a distance in the white cube of the gallery space, we weave our offerings into the collective surface of myriad personal contexts. In this troubling epoch of industrial commodification, standardization of reproduction, and fomentation of a society of shallow spectacle, Art In The Age issues a challenge and rally cry. We fight fire with fire, subsuming the onslaught of watered down facsimiles and inaccessible displays with thought-provoking products of real cultural capital.”

Curation, in this instance, is a counterpoint to a retail environment defined by dollar stores and Targets, where items are produced and sold in huge quantities as cheaply as possible. Art in the Age displays its wares as if in a museum, with lighting, for example, to emphasize its unique qualities. They are usually accompanied by information about provenance: Where is it from? Who made it? What is it made of? Older techniques and materials, symbols of a bygone age of hand or small batch production, are highlighted. While the art gallery is the most obvious reference point, the history museum and archive, as storehouses of forgotten and potentially fascinating trifles, is playfully hinted at too. Indeed, any distance between the museum and the store is collapsed in a set of stationery with Civil War images from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

However, unlike the gallery or museum, the shopper is encouraged to touch, wear or imbibe (at least in the case of the liquors made by the store) the objects. Rather than hold the distanced but appreciative viewer as an ideal, the curated boutique creates a shopper who is knowledgeable but emotionally invested. The most important overlap between the curated boutique and the gallery or museum is in their role in the lives of the people who frequent them. Visiting a gallery or museum is a performance of cultural capital. Invested with the power to confer significance on objects, the museum becomes a space where knowledge about taste is transmitted. Similarly, the objects in the curated boutique require knowledge to “get.” The curator in each instance is the guide--or to use a term of Pierre Bourdieu’s, the “cultural intermediary”--whose touch inscribes an aura on the newly fetishized objects of the age of mechanical reproduction.

~ Mary Rizzo

(All photographs by Whitney Strub)

Eat, Shop, Learn

An effective model to present community history?

In El Paso, you can find delicious Mexican food on every major street, but Mercado Mayapan offers more than a tasty, affordable meal. Recently, while enjoying a plate of enchiladas Zacatecanas, I started thinking about Mercado Mayapan through the lens of this “Off the Wall” blog. Mercado Mayapan is an offshoot of La Mujer Obrera, an organization that provides vocational training and other services to Mexican immigrant women. Mercado Mayapan is self-described as a “social purpose business.” Aside from providing work experience and training, Mercado Mayapan seeks to celebrate Mexican culture and heritage. The complex includes four sections: a market specializing in Mexican food staples like fresh tortillas and pan dulce (sweet bread); a commerce area with stalls selling artisanal, fair trade products from Latin America; a museum and cultural area; and a food court that serves traditional foods from Mexico. Mercado Mayapan also offers cultural programming each month that range from showcasing foods from different Mexican states to music and dancing. These dynamic activities make Mercado Mayapan an intriguing choice to address intersections in history, culture, and politics outside a traditional museum setting.

The mercado’s bright streamers, artwork, and soft folk music encourage visitors to spend time in the comfortable atmosphere. The mercado's open floor plan allows visitors to move easily through each section; ideally, somebody who goes for lunch can walk off their meal in the commerce area and museum—eat, shop, and learn under one roof. Most programming draws on Mexican culture, yet the Museo Mayachen focuses on history from a US-Mexico border perspective. The museo currently has two exhibits documenting the experiences of garment and migrant workers and Chicano activism in El Paso. The museo declares itself the “first community museum in El Paso.” That effort is visible in the large amount of photographs and objects donated by individuals. The photos and objects are placed prominently in the exhibits and are accompanied by short, bilingual text panels. The informative text panels provide a starting point for these topics that are underrepresented in El Paso history. However, there are no hands-on educational activities, options for visitors to leave their comments or personal experiences, or guidance in finding other sources to learn more about these topics. This absence makes the exhibits one dimensional rather than interactive and limits how much the public might take away from this experience.

For an organization with limited resources and an expansive vision, Mercado Mayapan is a notable achievement in empowering low-income women, relating history from a bottom-up perspective, and celebrating the border’s Mexican heritage. La Mujer Obrera has traditionally worked without assistance from other community organizations in El Paso for fear of their vision being co-opted. I wonder how much collaboration with local history organizations, museums, or universities might enhance the museo’s exhibits without straying from their commitment to community involvement. Without this kind of input, the museo may be unable to move past conventional exhibitry, leaving it lagging behind the commerce area, food court, and marketplace. So far, eating and shopping are the most interactive and compelling activities at Mercado Mayapan. The potential exists for learning, as embodied in Museo Mayachen, to become a fully developed aspect of the mercado as well.

~ Vanessa Macias

Don't touch that dial!

Public historians sometimes see our our academic counterparts as tradition-bound and reluctant to engage the general public or to embrace new technologies. So it's worth taking note of a terrific radio program hosted by three academic historians: BackStory - With the American History Guys. The show bills itself as a "public radio program that brings historical perspective to the events happening around us today." Historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh "tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths." The shows are topical and typically include not only the hosts but guest historians with special expertise in the topic at hand, other guests with something to say about the topic, historic sound clips, and short interviews.

A recent episode, Independence Daze: A History of July Fourth, illustrates the approach. Guests include Pauline Maier, who draws on her book American Scripture to talk about the creation and changing meanings of the Declaration of Independence; a history of fireworks and the Fourth provided by James Heintze, author of The Fourth of July Encyclopedia; and David Blight narrating a reenactment of Frederick Douglass' famous address "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro." Other guests include public officials in charge of Fourth of July celebrations, fireworks vendors, and listeners calling in. Along the way the hosts discuss popular support for the American Revolution, the political uses of the holiday in the 19th century and in the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder,and how a secular holiday has acquired religious overtones in the 20th century. The program is a thorough and entertaining survey of the history of this iconic American holiday.

Other recent show topics include Scales of Justice: A History of Supreme Court Nomination, Climate Control: A History of Heating & Cooling, and Coming Home: A History of War Veterans.

As impressive as the show itself is the associated website. Each episode has a page that includes not only downloadable MP3 files but audio excerpts of show highlights, really extensive links to further readings, and a discussion board where listeners add their own perspectives on the topic. And of course you can subscribe to podcasts of the show via iTunes or through various RSS readers. The website is a wonderful resource for teachers--every episode could easily become a lesson plan with primary documents, short and accessible secondary readings, and audio.

Not every episode or every part of each episode works equally well. The jokey interchanges between the host sometimes feel forced, some guests are more scintillating than others, and speaking extemporaneously the hosts sometimes indulge in generalities or even get some minor point wrong. As an example of the latter, one of the hosts on the Fourth of July episode repeats the old myth that John Adams described Americans as divided over the revolution with a third in favor, a third against, and a third neutral. This is a myth that I frequently repeated myself until J. L. Bell set me right.

Quibbles aside, BackStory is a terrific public history project from three leading American historians, building on strong institutional support from the Virginia Institute for the Humanities, the University of Virginia; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the University of Richmond; the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and others. Backstory is model of what academic historians can do when they go public!

~ Larry Cebula

You give me fever?

I would like to consider a selection of contemporary artists who utilize archives and history in their work as a method of reconstituting the meaning of history, past, place, identity, exhibitry and authorship. Since there are many interesting artists working with history and archives I will concentrate on a couple and continue with more in my future reviews.

I had the opportunity to see the exhibition “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” in the spring of 2008 at the International Center of Photography in New York City. A piece from the “Archive Fever” show titled Intervista (1998) by Anri Sala is a twenty-five minute documentary video which takes place in Tirana, Albania, several years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Returning home from his art studies in Paris, Sala finds a reel of processed 16mm film while helping his parents move into a new house. He takes the film back to Paris and restores it.

The footage is situated in communist Albania and shows his mother, Valdet, at about the age of thirty meeting Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxa and delivering a speech followed by an interview for the Communist Youth Alliance. Sala is unable to understand what his mother is saying in the interview because the audio reel is missing. With Valdet having very little memory of the interview, Sala must search for other sources of information to uncover the mysteriously missing audio. Sala questions the film interviewer and several political officials that were present at Valdet’s interview, but he is still unable to get any worthwhile information. In a final attempt, Sala takes the film reel to a school for the deaf and a team of people agree to work with him on deciphering his mother’s words by reading her lips. The film continues with the newly translated audio subtitled over the original footage and interspersed with conversations of Sala and his mom in the present day watching the restored film.

The film exists in the present while also living as a historical document of communist Albania and revealing his mother’s forgotten past. She goes through stages of denial, embarrassment and eventual acceptance of the historical footage, which implicates her as a youth party member saying the predictable slogans of the Communist Albanian era.


Another piece in the “Archive Fever” exhibition by artist Lamia Joreige titled Objects of War (2000-2006) consists of various video testimonials from Lebanese citizens living in Lebanon during the fifteen year Lebanese War. Joreige has each of the interviewers choose a personal object that reminds them of the war and then describe their memories associated with the object and of that time.

Both the object and the testimonial of the individual act as evidence. The collection of videos seemingly attempts to paint a picture of a collective experience of those living through the Lebanese War. However, while each account is true to the individual recounting it, the intention of the archive is not to provide a statement of truth. Rather, its purpose is to show a diversity of discourses and testaments of what happened during the war. This highlights the question of how accurate history can be with devastating events such as war when personal experiences can be so wide ranging.

The title of the ICP exhibition “Archive Fever” was appropriated from a paper delivered by French philosopher Jacques Derrida at a conference at the Freud House in London in 1994. In the paper Derrida traces the etymology of the word “archive” to its Greek origin, “arkhe,” to illustrate the power structure of the archive. Here, documents are collected and sorted into an ideal system and put into a repository, which are presided over by an authority. The documents are seemingly publicly accessible yet sheltered away. Those entrusted to watch over the documents yield the power to interpret them as they please.

The “fever” of the archive Derrida refers to is not so much an obsession with using the archive as it is with presiding over it and looking for an absolute beginning. The search is infinitesimal and Derrida relates the repetition in archiving to the Freudian death drive. He states that archive fever (mal d’archive) is a desire to return to the origin, the most archaic place that preceded our birth. In a sense, looking for a way to obsessively memorialize or restage something/oneself is a means of moving toward an earlier stage of life. Derrida theorizes that this tendency of archive fever would also cross over into computer information technology, especially email.

The relationship between the title of the exhibition and Derrida’s theoretical paper suggests parallels with artists attempting to undermine the authoritative power of the archive and make information democratically accessible to the public. With grand hopes of emancipating a forgotten past, the pieces are still trapped within the art institution that houses them, another kind of archivist. The pieces might also be considered to invoke nostalgia and an aestheticizing of the past (and illustrate archive fever itself?). Regardless, I think that the attempts to produce an alternate archive, as shown with Intervista and Objects of War, make poetic and powerful attempts to shake up and redefine history.

Intervista and Objects of War are examples of alternative historical displays that I believe are contemporary and engaging compared to many historical site-seeing exhibits that I have seen in my travels. While art exhibits like “Archive Fever” may not be taken totally seriously as places to learn about history, I think that we are seeing increasingly blurred lines within historical exhibits. Many exhibits are taking the form of becoming more interactive, creating immersive environments, and using art and performance to engage their audiences. Historical exhibits have often used art such as sculptures to mark a place of importance and provide a monument to memorialize an event. This kind of exhibitry seems slightly outmoded to me and I think there will be an increasing trend toward more interactive installations and video based exhibits.

- Melissa Boyajian

Dulwich OnView: Not Dull

Is it possible that something interesting might come from a place called Dulwich? One suspects that the people who reside in this area of South London try extra hard at dinner parties to appear lively and witty given the name of their place of residence. It’s a bit like hailing from the town of Hicksville on Long Island. Hicksville at least has Billy Joel--he grew up there. What does Dulwich have? Apparently, Dulwich has . . . a Picture Gallery. Actually, they have England’s oldest public art gallery (it was founded in 1811). And, judging from Dulwich OnView, the community’s website that is dedicated to “celebrating people and culture in and around Dulwich,” they have a healthy measure of civic pride and quite a few interesting things to say.

Winner of the 2010 Museums and the Web “small” award, Dulwich OnView is a combination fan site, visitors’ guide, local historical journal, and community bulletin board. Organized and maintained by a dedicated group of volunteers “who love Dulwich Picture Gallery and the local community,” the site provides news and reviews on arts events, local history, food and drink, health and fitness, and, of course, the Picture Gallery. Subjects of recent posts include a brief explication of a seventeenth-century painting, an ab workout in “Kevin’s Fitness Tips,” background information on the winner of an art competition, and an interview with Robin Hardy, director of the 1973 cult classic The Wicker Man. In this last piece, Humanities and Media student Daniel Pateman, who enjoys red wine and David Bowie according to his bio, not only provides a transcript of his interview with Hardy but also describes the local cinema’s “Wickerman Sing-Along”--an event that sounds almost too strange to be true.

Living in a town that (un-ironically) bills itself as “America’s most perfect village,” I can certainly understand civic pride. Like Dulwich, my town (Cooperstown, New York) is best known for a museum--actually, we have three--and residents are justifiably proud of the amount of “culture” in their small upstate New York hamlet. We do not have a Cooperstown OnView, however, and reviewing Dulwich’s website made me wonder if this was, in fact, just what we needed. We certainly don’t need any more self-promotion. Such a website, however, might actually serve a more useful function than bolstering local pride and attracting tourists. Even in a place with only 2,000 year-round residents, communication can be a problem. When I moved here two years ago, I often complained that I had no idea what was going on around town. There seemed to be an insiders’ network that knew about things like the Pumpkin, Garlic, Apple, and Harvest Festivals. Reading local newspapers helped, and the Chamber of Commerce’s website was occasionally useful, but in general I found out about local goings-on, if at all, through word-of-mouth. By my second year, I could at least guess when and where most things were going to happen, but I still occasionally felt clueless.

Then something happened that, in my estimation, transformed the nature of communication in my small town. Many of the local institutions started to appear on Facebook, and suddenly I knew exactly when the next exhibit opening was happening. I knew when the baby lambs had arrived at The Farmers’ Museum. I knew when the farmers’ market was opening. I knew when and where the creative writing workshop would be. I was an insider. Facebook, more than almost anything else, had made me feel a part of my community. As a late adopter and self-ascribed Facebook skeptic, it was hard for me to admit it, but I liked how social media had changed my life.

Connecting this train of thought back to Dulwich OnView raises two questions for me: first, I wonder if Dulwich OnView bestows the same kind of insider status on Dulwich’s denizens that local institutions’ Facebook pages did for me, and, second, with the advent of Facebook (and Twitter, Foursquare, etc.) and the proliferation of personal blogging sites (Wordpress, Blogspot) has such a website become unnecessary? Anyone can volunteer to contribute to the site, so it feels inclusive--although the posting of articles does not appear to be instantaneous and there is definitely an editorial process in place. Judging by the range of contributors, they have not had trouble recruiting. The stories that volunteers write are decidedly local and are likely of interest mostly to people who live in and around Dulwich. In that sense, then, the site performs the same function as a Facebook page. However, it is superior to Facebook in that it has its own appealing design and allows for more in-depth content. Dulwich OnView reflects the place in a way that the boilerplate design of Facebook cannot. On the other hand, Dulwich OnView lacks the dialogue that one typically sees on social media sites--even though it does have a comment function.

The key difference between institutional Facebook pages and Dulwich OnView, however, is that the website is volunteer-run. It is, as DOV author Ingrid [no last name given] writes, “community driven, not museum driven.” Ingrid, who has worked in the education department of the Picture Gallery for fourteen years, argues moreover that the website is “more about [Dulwich Picture Gallery] within the community than [Dulwich Picture Gallery] itself.” Ultimately, the website is like a community newspaper, just cooler and without the annoying editorials from disgruntled townsfolk.

~ Will Walker