Digital Matters | Megan Weiss, Spring 2020 DM Graduate Fellow

Jul 23, 2020 Megan Weiss, Spring 2020 DM Graduate Fellow

Blog by marisa

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Scanning a 10,000 year old Haskett Point at the Natural History Museum of Utah with the Artec Space Spider 3D Scanner.

Megan Weiss is pursuing an MA in US History with a Public History Certificate. Her area of interest is Utah pioneer history and its intersections with race, gender, and material culture. She has worked in the field of public history in Utah for a little over three years and is currently the Collections Manager/Curatorial Assistant at Fort Douglas Military Museum. She is also a volunteer at the Salt Lake County Archives and a docent at the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum.

Briefly describe your project and the challenges, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome in the execution of it. What were the professional, academic, and personal motivations underlying your project?

Through my fellowship at Digital Matters, I worked with Creativity and Innovation Services (CrIS) staff to 3D scan and 3D print historic objects relating to Utah’s history. I wanted to experiment with the resources offered at the Marriott Library to help museums and heritage institutions across the state know what 3D replicating technologies are available and what they could be used for when sharing their historic objects.

The challenges and obstacles I faced when working with CrIS staff to capture these historic items were sometimes as simple as figuring out how to scan something as large as an MK6 atomic bomb, or something as reflective as a 2,000-year-old Haskett point. But sometimes the challenges faced were more theoretical: will reprinting a historic artifact at a smaller scale help Utah’s youth meaningfully connect with that history, or is it just another plastic gizmo cluttering the classroom?

All of these questions helped me explore what lies at the heart of my graduate studies – how we connect with Utah’s material history, and what that connection says about the place of things, belongings, and material in our everyday lives.

Megan attempts to scan the cockpit of a C-130 Hercules airplane at the Hill Aerospace Museum with an Xbox Kinect.

How did the Digital Matters Graduate Student Fellowship dovetail with your academic pursuits? What interested you in applying for this fellowship?

As an M.A. student in the U.S. History program at the University of Utah, I have focused on the broader field of public history. My scholarship and passion in this field have always been concerned with Utah’s material history held in museums and archives across the state. Many of Utah’s historical items are stored away in dark basements or collections vaults. More recently, coronavirus and structural damage from the May 2020 earthquakes have made Utah’s material public history even more inaccessible.

My Digital Matters fellowship allowed me to think creatively to make these objects more available with new technologies, many of which were unfamiliar to me before I applied. With the valuable training with CrIS staff, I brought my expertise about material culture, and museum collections care and combined it with this new information about scanning approaches that could open up a whole new world of historic material accessibility.

What insights have you gained in regard to your specific field as a result of your project and fellowship experience?

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Walter Benjamin talks about the replicability and wide distribution of artworks, such as the Mona Lisa, and how their material replication compounds their fame. But during this replication, Benjamin also talks about how they lose their “aura,” an essence from the time and place they were made that give “testimony to the history which it has experienced.”

This idea also holds for historic artifacts. I can print 1,000 small WWI trench boots, but only the real leather pair was worn by a Utah veteran in the trenches of the Western Front a hundred years ago. This singularization of historic objects draws us to them as historians, and what makes them such useful tools in sharing history with the public.

As 3D replication technologies develop and become more readily available, it will be exciting to see how institutions experiment with them to translate this “aura” and convey the importance of the material in history itself. But in a way, I found 3D scanning and printing artifacts just compounded their singularized “aura” as a sensory source of historic information. In this way, the 3D printed copies of objects served as a complement to their originals, not replacements.

What would you tell potential fellowship applicants to help them shape their own digital scholarship project?

I would encourage them to think outside of what they know and be open to trying new things. Digital Matters and CrIS provide an environment where experimentation and failure are not only OK – it is encouraged! As technologies are constantly evolving, and we are learning more about how they can be applied to humanities fields, it is best to come in with that wild, crazy idea you have always dreamed of trying out. Digital Matters is a supportive and creative place to give it a try.

What do you see as the upcoming important issues surrounding digital scholarship in your field? What areas/issues could students and scholars investigate to extend the knowledge in this area?

In the world of digital heritage preservation, there is simultaneously a lot of excitement and a lot of skepticism about the place of 3D printing historic artifacts. During this fellowship, I think I opened a sort of Pandora’s box when it came to theoretical questions around object ownership, replicability, materiality, and copyright. But I believe it is important for heritage professionals to experiment, challenge, and play with these questions.

On one end of the spectrum, some museums are putting a copyright directly on their shared printable 3D scans of heritage items. On the other, databases like MyMiniFactory advocate for collective ownership of heritage items through a decentralized, crowd-sourced 3D scan database. The best approach likely lies somewhere in the middle, as 3D printing technologies can help us ground our cultural interpretations of material history in a way that emphasizes their material reality in interesting ways.