Agency in and around the period room
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
I visited the Met two days ago and found myself in the period rooms of the American Wing. I was interested in the new interpretive tool, the screen with a menu of options, in place of the old static placard that listed all the objects in a horizontal format. It puts a whole lot more information at the visitor's fingertips and seems to give us more agency as well because we choose to navigate: we can focus on "people" rather than "objects" and so on.