I'd like to propose a session for the St. Louis Conference and I'd be
grateful if you folks would read this draft of my proposal. I gave a
related paper about photographs of the anthropological exhibitions at the
St. Louis Exposition at the VRA /CIHA Satellite meeting and it was
published in the VRA Bulletin, v. 23, no. 4 (winter 1996,) but this would
expand the scope considerably so I don't think it would be redundant. It
would be great to have participants from both ARLIS and VRA and I hope to
contact a St. Louis local (any suggestions or volunteers?) particularly
from the Missouri Historical Society. Thoughts, reactions, suggestions and
last but not least...participants would be appreciated.
THE WORLD'S FAIR TO THE WORLD WIDE WEB: A historical perspective on visual
information
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the largest World's Fair held in the
United States opened in St. Louis Missouri nearly one hundred years ago in
1904. It occurred at a time central in the evolution of the theory,
arrangement and technology of visual information and education. The Fair
was called "an illustrated encyclopedia of civilization" by G. Brown Goode
who was Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian at that time. Like other
international expositions, it was arranged according to a classification
scheme. (Although never acknowledged, it now seems apparent that Melvil
Dewey had based his decimal system on the ten department classification
scheme that had been created earlier for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial
Exposition)
I'd like to propose a session that would provide a historical context for
our emerging digital world centering around the period of the St. Louis
Exposition and making comparisons to the present.
Topics to be included:
The evolving technologies for presenting visual media, e.g. from
stereographs, lantern slides through mass media and the web, and their
social context and impact.
Social aspects of the organization and classification of visual
information from exposition classification schemes through card
catalogs, databases and encoded finding aids.
The exhibition and educational uses of visual information from the
world's fair to the internet.
I think this could be both informative and fun just like World's Fairs and
the Web.
thanks,
Barbara
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