Starting day at #spnhc2022 in session "Connecting Communities to Natural History Collections"

Helen Barber-James leads off with "Integrating African Natural History specimen data; current progress and future needs". Huge collections of African material in European museums. But she points out there is also lots of material in museums in Africa and activities happening to both collect, digitize and curate materials.
(Reminds me that I need to figure out how to visit some African museums on my extinction project.)

Our session Exhibiting Extinction and Endangerment now happening at #spnhc2022!

After my brief introduction, Verity Burke @DrVerityBurke talking death masks Burke @DrVerityBurke turns to her work on the death masks of Alfred the gorilla 🦍 . His taxidermied body is in Bristol Museum, but other things like his bust appear in zoo.

Looking forward to this session on Civically engaged natural history museums.

@TheMuseumOfLiz setting the stage. What do we mean by public engagement? Education, community building, communication, citizen science, & outreach all within scope. Miranda Stern on museums, health & wellbeing. There are overlapping conversations between culture, health & wellbeing; nature, health & wellbeing; and nature connectedness through museums.

Made it to Edinburgh for the keynotes at #spnhc2022 ! Starting with Mark Maslin on the Anthropocene. Yikes! An extremely Euro-centric view of the “modes of human society” on a timeline presented by Maslin (who is a geologist).
Just shows that we historians are doing a terrible job of breaking down this kind of narrative.

Just got back from a road trip in Texas & New Mexico. A few personal observations on America today: 1. Televisions/video is playing everywhere all the time. Every shop has tv or video. It’s bad enough that there were four competing screens (w sound) in the hotel breakfast room, but when the gas pump also invites you verbally into the store & plays videos, it’s too much.