librarypunk - 107 - Mütter Museum

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

We’re covering updates on the Mütter Museum’s exhibits, digital collections, and human remains policies.  Media mentioned Segment: https://www.wired.com/story/prisoners-training-ai-finland/ Article that named Mütter Museum as one of Philly museums still holding indigenous remains: https://www.inquirer.com/news/native-american-remains-penn-temple-mutter-20230113.html (January 13, 2023) Original article that gained traction, there was an earlier one on the digital collections going down that might have prompted it: https://www.inquirer.com/news/mutter-museum-oddities-review-new-plan-20230603.html (Updated June 3, 2023) Petition in response to article: https://www.change.org/p/protect-the-integrity-of-the-m%C3%BCtter-museum  Pro Quinn article that came out with Guardian piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/science/mutter-medical-museum.html (Aug 13, 2023) Most recent: https://whyy.org/articles/mutter-museum-public-engagement-program-collection-future/ (Sept 17, 2023) https://www.inquirer.com/arts/mutter-museum-human-remains-debate-town-halls-20230918.html ( Sept 18, 2023) Three Identical Strangers: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7664504/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Life_of_Henrietta_Lacks Twin Rabbit - Plains Sign & the Myth of Indigenous Illiteracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pogA7PQCtu0 

I'm Justin. I'm a Skalkham library, and my pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. And I'm Jay. I'm a music library director, and my pronouns are he him. Speed run. We got news. Finland. I'm on to you. Finland's in the news. Finland, Finland, Finland. I posted about this, and then like four days later, a big account, which only repost news reposted. And then I went started retweeting that.

And I was like, fuck you. I was the one who had the Google alert for prisons, prison labor and universities. And that got picked up. This got picked up by it. But Finland, there are click workers. And you'll never guess where they are. Prison. So they need people to do click work.

They need people to do click work in Finnish. And since people, since Finland didn't get on the colonizing game and spread their language around the places where they can now get people to do the work for a dollar an hour. They just use slaves to do it. Sorry, prisoners with jobs. That they totally get paid for. Yeah, they get paid $1.30. Totally.

Ever in their lives. This is pretty good reporting from Wired, quite honestly. It didn't fall for the propaganda that was pushed at them that this was rehabilitative. It kind of said at a couple points uncritically that this was preparing people for jobs. but they were like, there's no clickwork jobs, and the people who are getting trained just sort of stared blankly while they were having career prospects explained to them. I enjoyed the one researcher that the author sits down with. The researcher says, comparing the money I get as a researcher and what the prisoner gets for

their prison labor, it doesn't make sense. There you go. It doesn't make sense. That's the end of the argument. So he says it's good for people. You can only do it three hours a day. And at the very end, it's like Metroc is the name of the company. And at the very end, it's saying, oh, yeah, we should expand the prison labor project to other countries.

It's something we need to explore. So there you go. No perverse incentives. Definitely doesn't cause conflicts of interest. So it's news. Whole episode of news. Well, this is a research episode. I just used news because there's nothing else.

But we're now doing a full. episode of Well, it's a museum. It's got off time. We're going to talk about Motor Museum, a museum in Pennsylvania that people like. So we covered this before

a couple months ago, probably back in... It was the Descent episode. Yeah. Yeah, so it would have been May. God, that was May when we did Descat? I thought it was like June or July. Oh, no, it's June. It was June.

Yeah, when the Inquirer article came out, that was June. So we initially reported on this when it came out in the Inquire. in June, I have been tracking it ever since to see when we would have enough to talk about for a full episode. So I've just had my Google Alert running. I'm going to put all of the articles that I've tracked in the notes. Reporting that got picked up by the Inquirer piece that we originally talked about in June was from WHYY reporting in May 2023 about a living donor

to the Muddard Museum, Robert Pindarvis, who gave his acromegaly heart to mutter after a transplant. He was upset that the video about his donation had been taken down. The physical display was still public, but all of the museum's online exhibits and YouTube videos were put private. Basically, from what I've read, the original thought was that the original reporting kind of wasn't clear if they'd been deleted or not, but subsequent reporting was pretty clear that it had all just been taken down and made not public, and it was going to be restored after a review. So then the inquiry piece came out that we talked about at Gain Traction. Robert Hicks, a major donor and a consulting scholar, resigns and cuts mutter out of his will,

over CEO Myra Irons and Mudder Executive Director Kate Quinn, who started in September 2022. So that was late last year. He cited admin shakeups of the last six months, but both, Quinn and Irons had been there longer than that. So I think it was that series of resignations that we talked about, which we were not sure if it was churn, like regular churn, and it seems more or less like it is just like typical academic kind of churn of administration because the people who were coming in and out were like the head of development, which handles donations and other sort of purely administrative roles. Yeah. So the main issue was taking down the mutters online presence, backing off programming, and questioning the appropriateness of popular mutter exhibits like the one in teratology, which examines fetal deformities and abnormalities and displays several fetuses and jars. There was a particular line that got a lot of pushback, which was to make the mutter a contemporary institution focused on health and well-being, not death, which was not direct quote. This was one of my critiques of the Inquirer piece was every time I wanted a direct quote, it wasn't a direct quote.

And the direct quotes that I got were kind of useless. So it's been a while to get any kind of interesting, straightforward information out of mutter and in the reporting. So that's why we've had to wait to actually do this. The takedowns could also be viewed as a way to control who would go poking around to find remains that needed to be repatriated because some remains had been discovered on the mutters digital exhibits and maybe YouTube channels, which led to people making inquiries of mutter and then led to repatriation. So a cynical reading of this is that taking those down stops the external scrutiny so that they can control this in-house with their own review,

rather than not having control over it and people going, hey, wait a minute, what's going on there? And then going to the news or whatever, which is, honestly, as an admin, I mean, kind of a straightforward decision to make is do it in-house because why would you wait for other people to figure out your mistakes for you? But it did have a lot of critique of these takedowns. A little bit later, as a side note, the Wall Street Journal had a piece come out that called it cancel culture coming for mutter and was trying to reframe this as like the woke baristas are coming to take away your mutter museum. but then it says the woke leaders are anxious to sanitize it. The guy is called Stanley Goldfarb, which doesn't sound like a real name.

He was a former director of the college, and he wrote that Museum's new woke leaders appeared eager to cleanse the institution of anything uncomfortable. So I don't know who's the woke here. Is it people critiquing it or the leaders or whatever? I feel like our initial sort of conclusion back when we first talked about this, that everyone's kind of wrong and that like it's good that they're like doing what they're doing but they're also being a little reactive and missing their own mission. It's like they're going like they're overcorrecting in a lot of ways.

So it's like everybody's wrong. There's bad decisions. There's bad decisions being made everywhere and everyone's got wrong opinions, probably including us. Yeah. Well, the thing I think, which is I predicted that we wouldn't be able to do this. until fall, and we literally just got the pieces out. We're always so right about everything. I mean, yeah.

I hate being right. The reason was, is I figured that's when people are going to be able to be on committees and stuff, and then they'll announce that the committees are going to start meeting. So that's how long, they're not going to be able to get everyone in the room until, like, all the academics are back from summer, and they can actually put these review committees together. So that's why I figured nothing was going to happen over the summer. And then a couple days ago, some more reporting came out that, yeah, they are going to, but we'll get to that.

But yeah, I mean, it could be, you could read it as an overcorrection or, I mean, it was maybe just a calculation of we're going to get a certain amount of backlash for taking everything down. But it's better than continuing to do nothing at once. Yeah, I think I agree with at least one of the conclusions of the petition that, Kate, that Dr. Irons is perhaps. perhaps ill-suited, at least with, like, mission ideas of, like, what the museum is. Like, I feel like a lot of people in the admin are maybe just ill-suited for being admin of this particular collection and museum. But that what they're doing is things that should be done, but then they're, like, doing it bad. And they kind of hate all of the patrons of this museum and what the museum is. Yeah, it's definitely taking the museum in a new direction.

but I mean, museums do have to change. Like, I don't disagree. Yeah. Like, a lot of this, I'm like, yes, this is correct. Like, yeah, I mean, things change. Like, the museum has not always been that way and it won't be the same thing in the future. Like, you know, exhibits contextualized things and people got mad about that as elitist, but it's like, no, I mean, it's just, that's what their job is,

is to contextualize things for visitors and patrons and researchers. That's the whole fucking point of museums. I was supposed to say, do you want a museum? Or do you want Ripley's believe it or not? Yeah. Right? Or do you want a museum or do you just want something for students of this college and not the public? Because I remember that was one of the big things of then, like, bemoaning that this is a collection open to the public and not just students of the college.

Yeah. Well, they were basically saying we wouldn't have to work as hard if it was only medical students because they're not the general public. It was kind of their point, which was a stupid point to make and I shouldn't have said it because that's not the situation they're in. Yeah. They were saying, like, originally this collection was only for medical professionals. Maybe that's the problem. Or one of them. It's definitely, yeah, I don't know.

There's definitely, like, medical collections that we get where it's like, we can't open this to the public because there's, like, personally identifiable information in here. But there's nothing wrong with it being an internal collection for students of a course. Yeah. That, you know, because that falls within, like, the original permissions that the records were taken under. So it's just like a difference of ethics of like, can this be public or can this be like used in teaching medical students? Because usually when you ask like someone, can I write up this report to be public? Can I write up your case to be published or can I take a photo to teach with? You know, that's the consent you got at the moment.

And then later they come to the library and go, can we make this like a big database? And we go, no, because that wasn't the terms under which you've got the information, right? You said this was for teaching. We can't put it publicly. There's actually, so there's this. documentary called Three Identical Strangers. Have I mentioned this ever on the show? I think I wanted to do an episode on it at

some point. I know about this I think. Yeah, where it was like this set of triplets that were like separated at birth as part of this like nature versus nurture study. And this is, you know, this is why we have IRB kids. You know, people are just doing shit.

People are just doing shit. But like the records of that study, like the notes of that study are in the archives that you say, yeah, there's Stanford somewhere, but they're like sealed until a certain time, even though the subjects of that study are adults and want to see what medical notes were like written about them as like children, but they like weren't allowed because of like the terms of like how this collection like went into this archive and everything. I think they eventually did get permission. It was just after the documentary came out. But, like, you know, libraries and archives, we are very, like, culpable in this sort of patient confidentiality thing and ethics around what we keep sealed and what we don't and why, you know? Yeah, I did a whole, like, thing about this because we always get people wanting to do oral histories with undocumented people. And I go, don't do that.

Yes. Because we can't make it public. Yes. I use that example now when I talk about, like, archival silence and how sometimes it's, good thing, you know? Yeah, we basically took, what we did was we imagined the worst case scenarios for undocumented oral histories. And it's like, okay, let's do like digital forensics to these computers.

Like, don't use your regular work computer to process it. Like, we really got, like, paranoid. Like, what if someone did digital forensics on these hard drives? What if someone went looking through the de-identified things? Could they re-identified data? How do you collect the data? We went all the way down to, like, copyright. Like, you have to transfer copyright to the university so that we can take it down and issue DMCA's if it starts circulating on external websites because we want the power to do that.

So we would like add in if, you know, if someone is anonymous, we want the copyright because we can't then verify who the copy to the original person is because we're going to destroy those records. So we're not going to know who donated that material. So they need to transfer ownership to us, which is true for a lot of things like the transfer of ownership. But now kind of the new thing is like people retain their copyright, but they give us like a license to use it. It's kind of the newer way of doing digital collections. But in cases where you need anonymity, it's like now because we're not going to know who it is. So we can't know whose copyright it is. Yep.

So you've got to give us the copyright and we're going to destroy all records of or we're not going to even get the records of who these people are. So we have a whole set of like protocols for that. But I mean, I worked at places that had law collections that were sealed. And of course the archivist's peak, but like no one else is going to. I mean like patron privacy and stuff is like part of our professional ethics, right? Yeah. And another thing, I think we've mentioned this before, but like very few states have archival privacy laws. So like if it's just on us.

Yeah. If like the government comes and says like, can we see this? There's not really like any law we can point to. So like this happens with like politicians too. like people start going through like the Clinton's donated materials to their alma mater or whatever. They start poking around in the files. And it's like, yeah, I mean, I don't understand why we take politicians' papers. Most of it's just fucking junk.

And it's always a huge amount of fucking boxes. And it's like no one's ever going to look through it. And they don't want anyone looking through it. It's like, then throw it away. I don't know. Send it to the National Archives. They're going to put it in a cave. I have a tangent about the National Archives.

How they rock because they don't do any work. They're just a pure bureaucracy. That the tweet from Senator John Federman going, I figure if I take up vaping and grabbing the hog during a live musical, they'll make me a folk hero because it's coming from a federal politicians going in the National Archives. Oh, that's sick. It took me so long to figure out why everyone was talking about Beetlejuice,

like a week before anyone. told me why. Listen, public sex is is, is, is cool. Fuck her, though. But people going, she should be in jail for public sex. I'm like, but not though. Are you listening to yourself? It's not as cool when you're not a teenager. You've got a house. Yeah. I mean, she sucks, but yeah. It is, it is very teen behavior. Homsdomunk says hasn't fondled someone in a, in a theater, you know. Yeah, but I also lived at home. I'm just saying it's not as cool when you're like 50. Public sex is cool.

I don't care. But yeah, no, grabbing the hog is now in the National Archives. Thank you for your show. I mean, I'm sure Nixon said something worse. Anyway, continue. So where was I? Wall Street Journal. Let's back up to January, 2023, beginning of this year.

Muddermuseum is listed among U.S. institutions still holding Native remains in a pro-publica investigation. This is also reported in the Philly Inquirer, and there's a quote here, this is the only quote from Mudder Museum. Upon my arrival last year, so it had been like three months before, four months before. The museum committed to re-engaging this process, and so have conducted additional research, additional outreach to known tribes. To date, we have successfully repatriated two sets of remains, and we have received three additional requests as a result of our outreach. So she's talking about a process that started like 40 years ago.

So the museum has been really dragging its feet on the shit. But let's talk about the petition. This petition was way fucking longer than I remembered. So I couldn't even like put in all the bullet points. So if you want to jump in with part of the petition that you thought was more interesting, I just picked the parts that I thought was interesting. Right at the top, I'm assuming these are an order of importance. So that's why I kind of went from the top.

Kind of the top thing was repost all YouTube videos as well as the MementoMutter website. The removal of these videos makes museum content inaccessible for everyone unable to physically visit the museum. True. But we can't digitize everything that's physically impossible for most cultural institutions. While there have been claims of surveying for feedback and wider discussions, these have yet to materialize. Also fair took until September, and these haven't happened yet. They're going to happen in October. and content has been absent for months, months, which it still is.

So all of these are fair points. They are annoyed at the speed at which changes are being reversed, but I think the admin was very aware that this wasn't going to happen. They weren't going to walk it back unless they got fired. Let's see. They talk about how Kate Quinn thinks the museum should be less gross. Not a real quote here. Dr. Irons, in the interest of reassessing how the museum moves forward.

forward. Okay. That's what an admin is supposed to say. Quinn believes the mission of the college and the motor is to facilitate health and well. This is not the mission of the college or the museum. Okay. They also talk about disdain for the membership public visitors in the collection and mention the thing about subject matter expertise to contextualize the information that this is offensive and runs counter to the mission of museum college. And it's dangerous. Reserving medical information displays solely for medical professionals as elitist. So they've kind of conflated a couple statements there.

So I didn't like this petition. I didn't sign it. Yeah, no. It was bad. It was too rushed and it was very long. But did you have any other things from the petition that stood out? No, my main thing is talking about like the most recent article and one of the points brought up in it. My main comment about the petition was my original statement back in the desk episode that there was a bunch of like cringy Gen X goths who were mad.

Again, sorry to all our Gen X goths fans and friends. Yes, we love you. So this was kind of just funny, but there was clearly a PR push in like August for pro-director Quinn stories. It was basically, they came out the exact same day in the New York Times and the Guardian, which is like the UK, New York Times. So they're both liberal rags. They came out the same day. They covered basically the same stuff. They had no new information, except that they were very kind to director Quinn.

It says Quinn's test 13 unnamed people, medical historians, by at the same. assist disability advocates and members of the community with providing feedback on the digital collection. And they start calling it a post-mortem, which I just think is funny. It's actually really good. Actually, it's really good. I was like, all right, points. I can see this one good choice. One good choice calling it a post-mortem.

I was like, yeah, everything in history and the entire world and the entire history of the universe has all come together in this moment for that perfect title. My opinion on Quinn is that she's a capable museum's exhibit specialist and knows what she's talking about when it comes to museum exhibits. And everything else is just whether or not she's a capable admin and PR person. And is she capable or well-suited for this collection? Yeah, exactly. I mean, she's doing a lot of stuff that I would do, just not in the exact same way I would do it. Yeah, same, exactly.

That's my whole thing is like they're doing the right thing. They're just doing it wrong. Yeah. Because, like, she was saying, like, the digital collection was dog shit. I'm like, yeah, most of them are. So that's fair. But I just, like, highlighted some of the framing. It was like, blowback to Ms. Quinn's ethical review was ferocious.

Panicky rumors on social media. Dr. Irons, a physician who treats children with rare genetic diseases. And I just put in brackets, helps kids. Fuck them kids. Lee Edelman, Time. These were puff pieces. They were so fucking funny. I listened to the Weird Signal

podcast episode interview with Lee Edelman today, so I'm on it now. Nice. It does mention that Quinn was a director of exhibits and public programs at Penn Museum, so that's why I say she's experienced. She knows what she's doing. Yeah.

Quinn was surprised the mutter had no ethics policy or human remains policy, things you probably definitely should have. Yes. Quinn is trying to keep ahead of rapidly changing legal and ethical landscape by doing the first audit since the 1940s.

And then she just says Robert Hicks sucks, which was like unnecessary, but whatever. That was the guy who cut the mutter out of his will. I think we should bring back academic beef, you know. I didn't go anywhere. It just became worse. Yeah, this is funny, though. Bring this back. Yeah.

So now most current plans, most recent, there will be a two-year-old. public comment. So the museum, the College of Physicians will host public discussions, workshops, and exhibitions, and post online videos addressing the issues of consent and ethics. The first public event will be a town hall style discussion October 17th. And the College of Physicians received a $285,000 grant from Pew Center for Arts and Heritage for the engagement project called Postmortem Mudderm Museum. I hope whoever was the one that said, who came up with that title got a raise. Yeah.

You got to come up with something. I mean, you're writing grants all day. You got to have fun. Yeah. So my, I think I really wanted to pull out of this most recent article that was in the, is this the Philly Inquirer? Yeah. Most recent.

This paragraph that says, some of these critics say the lack of records of explicit consent. And so there was like a statistic that it was like 10% or less. of the things in the museum had explicit consent about being in there, right? 1%. Oh, it was less than 1%. They've gone through 10%, less than 1%. Quinn thinks when the audit is completed, it'll be 3.5%.

Gotcha. So some of these critics say the lack of records of explicit consent does not necessarily mean the anatomical specimens were obtained unethically. This is true. And even in cases in which they were, the critics say, and this is the part that I think that I also said this in our last episode on this.

This is part of medical history and should be aired. Quinn says post-mortem will attempt to do just that. My thing is, okay, but how? Because this is actually what the problem is that all of this together is that like there's this legacy

of this museum of how it has obtained its specimens. Right? And now it's like how do we reckon with that history. What do you do about it? Do you obfuscate it? And by obfuscating not actually do anything about it? Or do you talk about it, but are you talking about it and bringing attention to it in the actual right way? Right. So I'll actually be really curious because I know I saw

that they're working with a lot of scholars and experts, especially people who talk about like displays of remains of like black bodies, which that phrase I've heard a lot of criticism of of black bodies because it's really dehumanizing. Just academic talk that was never meant to escape academia. Yeah, exactly. Like, it was meant to be this specific thing. But, like, you know, people whose whole gig it is to talk about, okay, what do you do with the remains of oppressed and marginalized people, right?

That, I think, is, like, my whole thing with this is I don't think they should erase the legacy of where they got a lot of their specimens. but what they do with that is going to be tricky. I thought it was weird that there was no explicit mention of indigenous representation. Yeah, because they mentioned the remains, but not. Yeah, but they mentioned twice that they will have an expert on displays of black people's remains, but not indigenous people's remains. I think they're just trying to repatriate the indigenous remains as much as they can.

Yeah, I mean, legally they have to. Yeah, so. Well, one thing I noticed in, I don't remember which article was the collection of human skulls that somebody, like some doctor or researcher used to help discredit, what is it, phrenology. Yeah, which is good. Which is a good thing. But again, there's no consent for those skulls. So I can see that's probably where, you know, I would think that why they're putting the emphasis. on like black people's remains maybe is because that collection in particular is like seems

more famous than maybe the rest of the museum. I don't know. That's the impression I got. That makes sense. Plus the legal framework's different. Yeah. Did you ever read that book about Henrietta Lax? No, I never did actually. I've had that on my list for like years. It was a one book, one community at some point at one of the libraries I worked. I had the opportunity and I absolutely did not take it. Yeah, it was the one book, one community when I was at USF. So they had all the freshmen read it when I was in library school. And I was like, all right, I'll read it.

Yeah. So in The Immortal Life of Henrya, Dlex, that's what's called. So that one really goes into how informed consent was like not really a thing until the 50s. And so there's just no precedent for a lot of modern medical ethics because none of it existed. And so it talks about, it also talks about something that I actually believe, which is that Johns Hopkins abducted black children for experimentation, uh, because children disappeared. And that's one of those things that's like, that's a conspiracy theory. Black people are crazy. They're making this up. And that's always something that like 20, 30, 50 years later,

it's like, yeah, that actually happened. So my money's on that being a true story. So, or that someone was kidnapping them, killing them and giving the bodies to John Hopkins. I mean, that's also possible. but from what I remember, there was no follow-up on that lead, but I believe that. You mentioned something that got me on to Maria de lax. I guess it really was just consent that no one, doctors didn't think to ask consent for procedures, never mind like just taking cells and stuff and then growing samples of them all over the place. What Quinn said is they knew that 10 people absolutely wanted to be in this building on display out of 6,600. but we certainly know a vast number of cases, people who did not all give consent to be here,

and many of them are on display today. They've reviewed about 10%, and of that less than 1% of the people who make up the specimens gave their informed enthusiastic consent. I think it's kind of funny, informed, and enthusiastic. I always think of that as like sex consent talk, but okay, we're just going to use that for I really, I dislike the conflation of sexual consent with other kinds of consent, and the language being merged to all be the same thing, because people have been using that just to say,

I'm uncomfortable in public and using the language of sexual consent to make it almost seem like they're being assaulted. And that kind of same language is now being used to fire teachers for teaching people things that make them uncomfortable. So I think as a society, we should move away from conflating those kinds of consent in our language. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Ten experts will guide the two-year post-mortem project

in collaboration with mother staffers, including a disability activist and ethicist, medical history experts, community engagement specialists, and someone who studies how museums display black bodies. So that was the list of people that I was thinking of, which I think this list was mentioned like twice in the same article. Or I just read two different articles that came out at the same time because there were two. There was one in an inquirer, but I'm just usually the inquirer one. Who's going to ask about the cabinet of curiosity's design, if it's still appropriate, or if it's outdated and should be modernized. And then it went back to, and then it went back to

Anne Hoskins, who was the person who I believe did the petition of Protect the Mudder, and that they planned to attend the town hall session to see whether the museum officials will address the negative criticism they've received. And made a good point saying the town hall forum will make feedback easier to police, but harder to ignore. So that's true. It will make feedback easier to police, but I think, uh, you know, that's what an administrator would always have done instead of letting this run out of hand is just shut down the external exhibits and start doing a review like they're doing. Yeah, the, the cadent of curiosities thing, I think is interesting because like while I, I kind of like leaning into the morbidity and

sort of celebrating, not, not celebrating, but like, like, you know, not sanitizing the reality of having a body and illness. And like kind of like, Philly's weird, right? And so, of course, it's going to have a weird museum. And I, I kind of like the sort of goth morbidity of it. It's very like, it could be a sort of like death positive thing. But it also very quickly turns into Ripley's believe it or not. And so I think it's like, I would like,

love to keep it weird and spooky in the most ethical way possible. But how can that, like, how can that sort of heart of what this collect, what people like about this collection, of sort of facing the reality of a lot of the fucked up things that happen to bodies in a way that doesn't try to like obfuscate it? How do you keep that spirit? I think is like what really interests me most about about all of this. I don't know what y'all think. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm pretty much on the same page, like, hearing the, you know, it should be about well-being and health. I'm like, eh, that I can see why people are pissed off that they don't want the museum to become that, because there is, yeah, that, like, sort of morbidity and acknowledgement of, like, death and the weird

ways that biology goes wrong. Like, I think that's a totally normal fascination. But, yeah, I, but I, but I that the whole refocusing on well-being and health, if that is indeed the direction the museum is going to go, is pretty much a cop-out. It's a way to not have to, like, confront those things. Like Jay, you were just saying, having to actually really dig in and figure out what's the most balanced ethical way to keep that sort of feel that is why the museum is beloved, but also, like, in an ethical, like, way that you can continue doing moving forward. So like if the keep the cabinet of curiosities have like what it means to be a cabinet of curiosities and the history of that as part of it as well. Like I feel like this museum has the opportunity to set an example. Right. That's what I was going to say. This is how you reckon with what it means to be a museum in America because all museums in America are soaked in blood. Yep. All of them. So, what do you do with that? What do you do with that? Well, and that's why I thought it was interesting. I wonder if that's part of the reason why they're moving so slow and not necessarily responding to a lot of this criticism because they could really be setting sort of a precedent

or an example and making it into a whole two-year in-depth necessarily slow and methodical process. Like, I don't disagree with that approach. Like I know a lot of people. Yeah, exactly. It's like a lot of people are always like, you know, oh, this needs to happen now. And if you delay doing it, that means you don't really want to do it. And it's like, no, there is actually a lot of good, a lot of good reason to not just turn around and do something because it sounds like the good thing to do at the time.

So, you know. And this isn't a like, you know, because sometimes it's like things move slow because it's like gets tied up in bureaucratic. and is kind of an excuse to not actually do the immediate or direct action kind of thing where it's like, no, there's something that we need to do now, but we're getting tied of in bureaucracy. There is no such thing as a library emergency, you know, and this is a museum, but I think the point stands. I think they're allowed to take their time on this. They just need better PR, I swear to God. Yeah, I don't actually have a whole lot like against the way that the,

museum seems to be moving forward. Like, again, I'm not like a curator or an archivist in any way. So complete outsider's perspective. But like it seems like they're actually trying to approach it in a thoughtful way that could possibly help other museums grappling with the same issues moving forward. Hence the Pew Grant and everything. So like, yeah, like I think there's a discussion to be had about doing that in a reactionary way of like we're doing the right thing, but we're being. reactionary or over-correcting about it. Like, I think that's a discussion to be had. But I would rather that side of that coin than the other side of that coin where it's like, you're not doing the right thing, you know? Purposefully avoiding doing the right thing.

I'd rather they just do the right thing morally. Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how this, how the post-modom Morton project will play out and how it will affect similar institutions in the future. Yeah, I think it's a good idea for them to take their time and kind of keep the whole project open. I'm trying to find something I was posting about. I got distracted looking for Batai stuff that I was looking for. Because the Cabinet of Curiosity's thing is very much like what kind of experience do we have facing death. And there was this thing that...

Yeah, I started listening to the Batai episodes of Asset Horizon. There's a thing that Ruby from Postponies mentioned, which was like this sort of carnival of limit experiences that someone proposed. And she thought it was Batai, but I can't find it. But anyway, he had this whole idea that it was him or someone else in his area who had the idea of like an absolute limit experience. And so it would be this carnival where there would be like live executions and viscerer on the floor. And it would be like an experience that you could, you know, kind of story of the eye stuff. where it talks about like goring and murder and all kinds of horrible things happening. How razor shit.

And so I was trying to find that and I got distracted. Sorry of the eyes a lot of piss that. Yeah. Yeah. But someone on Blue Sky was talking about pre-conquests or early, like not quite conquest, I guess, but post-contact, Meso-American codices and Library of Congress. And so I started clicking around on some of them. and the ethics of like how things were moved around is very funny because obviously these were

uh myan p like uh books manuscripts calendars and they were bought by they ended up in like the french national library and then they were stolen and is currently in mexico and mexican authorities are like we're not giving it back which is the correct position to take it's good Correct. So it's just, it's very, but in the Library of Congress, there was like this description. It's like, the precious manuscript was subsequently stolen and is currently in Mexico. It's like, what do you mean subsequently stolen? Like it was, there was still, like, I put the, the Princess Bride thing.

It's like, you're trying to kidnap what I rightfully stolen. Mexican authorities who are refusing to return it, have entrusted it to, return it is a funny word there, I've entrusted it to the country's National Institute of Anthropology and history. Just give up France. Just let it go. Like in France. Yeah. But there are some really cool early contact codices in the Library of Congress if you want to look at them.

Unfortunately, a lot of those got burned by the Spanish, so we don't have them anymore. So there's a lot of, I think we have some pre-contact books, but not many. I don't know. I remember watching a video about playing. sign language and writing systems in Recontact Americas and, you know, how Spanish burned a lot of books. So we know that there was a lot of writing going on, but we act as if these are preliterate people. But anyway, the whole, like, I think I wrote that down when Jay was talking about how we have like a, libraries and the archives and museums have a role in this trail of ownership and rationalization of ownership and legitimation of,

of who gets to own what? Yeah, I mean, like, when a thing that, like, archives and special collections, like, deeply cares about is, like, provenants, just tracking how something has moved through hands throughout time, like, who has owned this, right? I say deeply cares, but, like, constantly loses this information, too. That is true. But, like, you know, we're in, like, some, um, uh, schemas, like, that is a tag, right? is providence.

Like that's a thing that you record. Yeah, like, I understand that it's important for authenticity, but even then, like, talking about authenticity, it's like, I don't know, it's interesting what we care about in our metadata. Like, what goes into, and like, there's different kinds of metadata, right? Like, what goes into administrative metadata? What goes into descriptive metadata?

What is metadata meant for the public to say? what metadata gets indexed, what metadata is just for bookkeeping, does the public need to see the provenants? I don't know. It's just a question of just the Markfield print and stuff like that, but I've definitely had collections where I'm worried about the provenance or migrating from one digital system to another.

I'm worried about notes getting lost. So what I had them do was keep a notes document that then became an item in that collection. So there'd be like a photo collection and there would be like a PDF in that collection. It's like, here are the notes on what we changed or like what we fixed. Yeah, because it was just like, I don't want to lose any of this information because we were basically

migrating from another platform. We're going to get rid of this platform. So whatever we don't preserve now is going to be, you know, whatever was administrative back end stuff is going to be gone. So if we change the numbering system, if we change titles, you know, because sometimes you'll have like 50 things that are titled the same thing because someone was just like, we just got to process this. So if we change titles, we'll just mention that we changed a bunch of bakery retitled or

reprocessed it. It's usually not that long, but we did put a lot of processing notes when we were migrating. Yeah. Because I've just seen how bad provenance data can get lost when people don't care about it. And like, you know, it happens. There are people who just aren't very diligent about that kind of stuff. They're just like, yes, we'll take it. And they don't do good paperwork.

Oh, the other sort of example I like to use about, like, our role in like the obfuscation of the history around an item is that the University of Virginia, where it was university archives documents around a suicide of a grad student who got McCarthyed, basically, you know, where they basically said everything, but he was a confirmed bachelor in his obituary after he committed suicide. And there was like a some sort of meeting with university admin after that was all redacted. And I found this out because there's this great book called Queer Philologies by Jeffrey Maston, his sex language and affect in Shakespeare's time.

And this student had been someone who studied like the people who go like this person compiled this folio and this folio, but this person compiled this folio of like Shakespeare's work. And a lot of those people also worked in wars as cryptographers. And this person, like, the author was, like, looking at this person's work and, like, saw all this. And this author is gay and is like, hey, I know what this means. And when they requested this information from the University of Virginia, because it was, like, in their catalog, right? It was in a finding aid and everything. When they looked back, they were denied being able to see it.

And then when they looked back, it had been removed from the public catalog completely. This book was written less than 10 years ago. I think so the University of Virginia within the past 10, 15 years is still going. Sorry, you can't see this to the point of removing a record from the public catalog. So, like, that's shitty, you know. And they probably weren't the ones who made that decision. You know, university, you know, admin probably was. But, like, we play a role in the obfuscation of horrible shit that institutions.

do. Oh yeah. I mean, fucking your books at universities, those have been taken down left and right because they're like, oh shit, everyone's in blackface like more than 15 years ago. Uh, so I know a lot of, this became like a whole discussion point because so many places were just taken down there, they're digitized your books. Especially flagships because all the politicians go there. Yeah, it's like this discomfort thing. This is also criticism I have often of the like harmful language statements is like people assuming what will cause harm and what won't and choosing removal and obfuscation to like it's like the freedom from versus freedom to kind of thing and so just like oh well like do we deregialize that article talks about this a lot it's like if we just

remove our mistakes if we just cover it up if nobody sees it if we just fix it right away instead of actually reckoning with these legacies right like removing discomfort is isn't actually the answer. Thank you for coming to the sequel to my Tech Talk. That guy is like still maybe a sex pest. I think there was like a thing that came out that they couldn't substantiate all of the accusations against him. But that doesn't make me feel good, feel better. So, you know.

I was right to never stop using them as drops. My drops have been vindicated in the court of law. layer legal drops now. We can't cancel the drops. You're going to get DMCA it on your soundboard. I think that's, we've covered it. We'll come back whenever there's more. I've still got my Google Alert going.

So if anything big happens, we can always follow up. I tried having a Google alert for Lexus Nexus to see like what cop shit Elsevier gets up to. And because it's all like software for landlords and cops, people are just writing like a million. in AI-generated articles that are getting picked up by my Google Alert. So they're like incoherent articles that say absolutely nothing. And I had to get rid of the alert because I don't know what keywords to use to filter out those. Because like the business world of just making fake articles is all just the things. It's all garbage.

But normally Google Alerts is good for filtering out bullshit because it's not Google Search. It must be running on an older version of Google Search. It still fucking works. All right, good night.