PreserveCast: Come along with us as we explore the broad world of preservation and the work being done to preserve, interpret, and save our past in a 21st century world. From aquaculture to historic foodways to forensic modeling, we're talking weekly with experts from across the globe. This is your host, Nick Redding. Welcome to Preservecast. This is Nick Redding, your listener Preservecast. And today we're thrilled to be sitting down with Dr. Cheryl Fogelhatch. ⁓ And she founded MuseumSenses LLC, which is a consulting firm that helps museums develop multi-sensory exhibits for everyone, regardless of their visual acuity. And we're going to be talking with her about this really fascinating world, an important world. of making museums accessible to everyone. ⁓ I've wanted, was telling Cheryl before we hit record, I wanted to do an episode like this. And I was so glad that we had the opportunity to get her on the podcast and talk to her about it. But like everyone that we bring on, we love to get to know them a little bit, ⁓ understand their background and how they got into this. So ⁓ Cheryl, why don't you introduce yourselves to the audience? Tell them a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, your background and how you got into the museum world and then we'll talk more specifically about your firm and the work that they do. But tell us a little bit about yourself and what listeners should know. Well, I grew up in the southwest United States. I grew up in Arizona. I went to the University of Arizona as an undergrad. Really fell into archaeology ⁓ and anthropology. I did not go to school to start with that. I basically took some courses to fill general ed requirements and found that I enjoyed them quite a bit and went from there. So my first exposure to anything related to historic preservation was through archeology. And my first exposure to archeology after I did a class was, hey, there's a museum and they're seeking student volunteers to do different basic artifacts. I don't even remember exactly the tasks, but I got to go behind the scenes and these tables with these bags and pulling out these stone flakes and these ceramic shards and pottery and all sorts of cool things that you get to touch in museums and in the back of the house, in the behind the scenes, in the collections areas with some care to make sure you don't get the bags mixed up. You get to touch stuff. And in the front of the museums, when display cases, you don't. I happen to be totally blind. And so for me, touch is a way that I derive information about objects. And so a glass case is not effective for me. So that's my lived experience. And then I did my graduate degree at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and stayed in archaeology and got more deeply into collections. did my research on museum collections. stone spear points from about 10,000 years ago. ⁓ Kept with that, did ⁓ a couple years. Well, my first job getting into that ⁓ was actually as ⁓ a technician, a museum technician, because they had a collections area that had sustained some water damage from a burst pipe. And so the staff put everything out on these long tables to dry. And then at some point, This was spring and then at some point in the summer, they hired a few of us students from the university to basically ⁓ systematically put everything back in new bags and make sure that all the information was recorded and everything matched in the database. So that was my first ⁓ paid job in museum world. And then I did a few years stint as a student employee with a federal agency and learned a bit about all the review processes and learned about Section 106 and historic preservation review. And then I left that and then I taught ⁓ the inter-level classes in archaeology ⁓ at my university and then I got my PhD. And midway in the middle of writing my dissertation ⁓ for personal reasons, ⁓ my spouse got a job in Maryland and we moved from New Mexico to Maryland and I was still writing. and I needed something to do, I needed to learn about Maryland archeology and had no network here. So I contacted the folks at Archeological Society of Maryland. ⁓ We got here at a good time. My first excavations in Maryland were the Patterson Park Pagoda, if you remember those in 2014, I think. And so I was screening and asking all the dumb questions about Maryland archaeology, like what are these square metal things? ⁓ it's a nail. ⁓ And just the square cut nails because I wasn't familiar with those. And asking all those, I'm new to Baltimore, tell me about Maryland archaeology and mid-Atlantic archaeology and ⁓ tell me what books to read and just how to just get into this on the fly. And then I've been volunteering to do that for a bit. And then Lisa and Jason with Herring Run, I volunteered with them to wash artifacts. That might have been where I was asking about nails, but I always had a lot of nails at Herring Run and other things. And then I started basically networking like crazy. And then I went, finished my dissertation, went back out to New Mexico, defended it, and then came back here and started looking for something to do. one, you As my network was growing, people would start asking for my feedback about particular ⁓ instances and things in museum exhibits. And one thing led to another. And someone offered me a stipend. And then someone else said, why don't you start a business? So that's my story. what a, you know, there's, there's a lot of different interesting pieces in there that we could tease out. mean, I think one that a lot of people would have questions about and would be really curious about, and I'm sure this leads into the work that you do at MuseumSenses is this idea you mentioned that as a blind person, being able to touch an object ⁓ has a profound impact on your way to understand it. Talk to us about the challenges, or not just the challenges, but also the unique abilities that you have when it comes to doing archaeology as someone who has blindness. Talk to us about what that looks like, because I'm sure some people are curious about that. Yeah, I read about my first experience in archaeology. I used to read National Geographic and stuff like that. And so that's when I had the chance to take an archaeology course in college. I jumped in it. And so I spent a couple of months kind of reading and doing course stuff. I found that it was something I was really interested in. I was getting to my class early, and that was an 8 a.m. class. I was getting there early, three days a week, like, okay, I really like this. So when I had the chance to go check out artifacts and museum, and then there was an excavation they were seeking volunteers for, and I asked, and with excavation, you have the square in front of you is the scale at which you're working, a half meter. So a meter is like three feet, so between a meter or half meter. And so you can really kneel in the excavation unit and reach in front of you. And so my technique became using the trowel in my right hand and feeling along behind the edge with my left hand. And so that real visceral immersive experience of being right forward in the square, ⁓ hands on, I had when I did my archaeological field school. they knew that I hit an ash deposit because I was leaning forward and I got ash on my face. And they looked at me as, she's got an ash deposit. This was a historic Pueblo site and this was a residential unit. But you can tell a lot by touch with the soil, if it's sandy soil or if it's hard clay soil, ⁓ a root feels kind of long and woody compared to a rock. compared to a piece of ceramic, compared to a stone tool. ⁓ As you're kneeling in your unit and you're reaching to map with your tape measure, I got a tape measure that had a speech, it had a little battery thing you attached to it so that it would read the numbers as you were pulling it out. And you could press a button and have it read, you know, two meters. And it was a British accent. So I'd say, 20 centimeters. I did a horrible British accent, but yeah, because to get a metric tape measure with the device that helped it speak, I had to go to a catalog and they had to supply from a country that used metric measurements because all the American ones were in inches and archaeology, particularly pre-contact archaeology, the measurements are metric. Contact archaeology and historic sites, the metrics can be in inches and feet, but the standard for pre-contact has been meters and centimeters. So that was an interesting little side note. So being in an excavation, I understood what the squares were, how you mapped, how it's laid out. So then when I'm in museum collections and getting information about an artifact and it's collected, it's like, I know to keep track of that's unit three of site, whatever the name of the site is, and excavation area two. this is in what particular area and to learn that knowledge of this is where you found it ⁓ is key. And archaeology is a small percentage of archaeology is fieldwork. That's the fun thing that everyone likes to do. That's the fun thing that the public thinks archaeologists do, but there's all sorts of analytical skills and non fieldwork skills, but you really need the basics of this is what it looks like to excavate a site. This is what it looks like to to keep track of your locations of objects. Because once you pull them out of the ground, if you don't record that locational information, you lose it. And the locational information, the context is almost as important as the artifact itself. And so that understanding is key. ⁓ I have not done field work in a long while. I do kind of miss it, but it's, as I said, it's such a small percentage of what archaeologists do. One of my faculty members years ago advisors used to say, you know, that you need to find your niche. And for me, it was particularly important to find my niche. And that's part of why museum collections became my niche, because I understood how to interpret all the information with the artifacts. I understood how to, you know, that I can look at information about the artifacts, you know, shape and texture and some other things by touch. But I also had the book learning to when it was time for me to collect research, to be able to set up my protocols and figure out what visual information I needed to keep with my data collections. What's the color of the stone tool? Because that's the material it came from. And so I devised a protocol of visual information, very targeted questions that I would ask of, I had gotten grant funding to hire a couple of undergrad students to work with me at the museums as ⁓ research assistants. And their job was to... give me all the visual information and I had a sequence that I things I wanted to ask about and things I wanted to incorporate so that I had the full ⁓ data sheet with information that I know by touch that I know is important that I get by vision and then I had them take photographs of the artifacts and I had them take two of each side of the spear points and that when I got back to my university was a cross check that my dissertation ⁓ faculty could go through and look at and we could cross compare. So it's a lot of planning. It's a lot of understanding how a site's laid out and what information that I need to be very ⁓ clear about designing a protocol to collect. Well, it's fascinating and it was really cool the way you kind of just explained that. ⁓ You know, I'm, you know, talk about like a lot of planning, what you just said there, that kind of lends well to sort of the next question, which is sort of about museum senses ⁓ and the work that ⁓ your company does. And really, that kind of is part and parcel, that it's a lot of planning in terms of getting the right exhibit in place. So talk to us about the services that you provide, and then maybe give us an example of a project that is sort of emblematic of the kind of work that your organization can do. do a couple of different things. The stuff that I love is ⁓ tactile media for exhibits, 3D models or 2.5 dimensional ⁓ drawings if the lines are raised or engraved ⁓ so that they can be felt. And the other thing that I do is basic accessibility consulting and sort of advice and strategy kinds of things. So I can come to an organization and give a training about how to help a guest who is blind or has low vision to understand what information, what you have at the site, what the content is, how to help describe that. And I have done that in terms of historic sites as my network, but I've also worked with art museums and giving people a chance to practice describing what paintings look like and all the visual things. You know, start with the overall summary. You know, what's this painting about? Is it a realistic scene? Is it a family portrait? Is it an abstract? And then go, you know, systematically with the details, foreground to background, left to right, whatever sequence makes sense. So I do a lot of advice and strategy. I have had a good deal of fun at historic sites because historic sites can be very immersive if you can walk into a building and up the stairs or down the stairs or across the tile. know, like this one, you know, some of the tile textures are different, or the stone textures are different depending on what it is. It's very immersive. I've worked with a historic site, ⁓ Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York. They're a revolutionary of fort. And I had a lot of fun with that because part of what I did was tell them about all the things they were doing already that was multi-sensory. So being able to touch the cannons before the cannon demo, being able to, they passed around the heavy cannon balls, being able to touch that. The thing they were concerned about how I'd be able to follow the demonstration. And I found after experiencing it that this technology, the flint loaded cannons is a couple hundred years old. people don't have that knowledge, so they have to explain it to everyone. And that was key for me to understand, okay, you come forward, you ram the rod down, you clean the barrel, you ram the cloth in and the ball in, and then they passed all those artifacts around through the crowd for the demo. And then I only really had one or two questions after about what they did, but I could follow it pretty ⁓ easily. The description in that sense was integrated and had ⁓ a good interpretation and a good hands-on experience. And so that was a lot of fun to be able to tell them, hey, this is a really good multisensory experience. It might be enhanced if you pass this around in addition to that, because ⁓ I had to go up and ask to touch the powder horn. There's a picture of me on my website touching the powder horn, talking to one of the interpreters in ⁓ era uniform. And so that was a lot of fun. And I really enjoy things like that. Because people, when you're working with an institution, it's partly it's what do they have? Can they play to their strengths? So the historic site that does living history can play to its strengths in doing living history and reenactments because they have all kinds of things. ⁓ And they just need a few extra pointers, you know. a little bit more description and maybe one or two extra pieces of encouragement. I was going to say it occurs to me that this makes all interpretation better. this might be, may, I mean, obviously it has the benefit of serving those who are visually impaired, but everyone benefits from- Absolutely. a more immersive experience. I think if looking at it from that perspective, it's sort of just good organizational awareness to think through how your programming works so that they are accessible, but that you're benefiting everyone. what you're describing sounds like a better overall experience, no matter what your visual acuity is. And I have to remind people that a family group is going to have people who, like when I go to museums, especially something like Fort Ticonderoga, it's rural. ⁓ Someone's driving me. So I'm in a mixed group anyway. So the same program to interest both of us. Whereas I don't have to wait to arrange something separately. they can get the same experience that I get because people travel with family all the time. So talk to us about, so that's a great example of Fort Ticonderoga. And obviously, you're based in Maryland, but Ticonderoga is in New York. So you work all across the country. people can bring you in to do that. So that's an example of where you have a program going on. But talk to us about that other piece you talked about, where it's either the raised image or an object or a statue or something like that that's been created to tell a story in a museum. What kind of work have you done there and examples that people might be interested in? Well, this might be a good place to talk about founding fossils. So yeah, founding fossils is an exhibit up at the Peale Museum in downtown Baltimore. And it's a very ⁓ interesting story because it has elements that are art, elements that are science, elements that are history. And I worked with my co-curator is Bernard Means at Virginia Commonwealth University. And he's been 3D scanning archaeology and paleontology collections for years. So he already had some of the models, but he certainly has the technology. And he and his students, ⁓ one of his students was an artist and she produced a graphic comic book to tell this particular story. Apparently the Revolutionary era, some of the people, ⁓ Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, were really interested in prehistoric fossils and things like that found in the Americas because there was a French scientist who thought that animals got smaller and weaker in the Americas and were less weaker than the European versions. And so they wanted to prove as a matter of national pride, no, we've got big fossils here too. And there was an excavation of a mastodon. Mastodon is an extinct elephant, and it was done in upstate New York, and it was done by Charles Wilson Peale, who was in Philadelphia, and his son Rembrandt Peale founded the Peale Museum in Baltimore in 1814. So when I read about my colleague at Virginia Commonwealth University about the comic book, about the story of, they called it founding monsters, how the American ⁓ forefathers were so into prehistoric mammals. And I reached out to him and I said, I know the perfect museum to put this up because this is one of the stories that the Peale family was involved with and the Peale family founded the Peale Museum. So we proposed an exhibit and we contacted everyone at the museum and it was a go and it took us a little over a year and a half between design and installation because We had to fundraise for it. So he had to apply for some university money To create the 3d objects and we had to do some other things but the premise from that exhibit was I wanted to have an exhibit that from day one we're thinking about what we can make tactile. We're not doing it at the end after the design has been done. We're not scrambling. It's inclusive at the step one in the design. And we started talking about the comic book and each of the pages and most of the pages we figured out a object, a touch object to associate with them. So, and also the paintings. There's a painting of Charles Wilson Peale Museum. And so in front of that we have prints of the ⁓ mastodon, the ulna and the tibia. So the big long limb bones. And the nice thing about working with a university makerspace is lots of student labor. So Bernard's students, he sets them up on these long tables because I visited his lab in Richmond, painting, they paint artifacts to match the 3D printed replicas, they paint them to match the artifacts, the colors. So these replicas, that yes, they feel a little plasticky, but they are painted to resemble ivory. And then one of his students, Anna Carter, took ⁓ modeling clay and sculpted the bust of Charles Wilson Peale that you can see, his face and his bust in the painting, and she sculpted it. And then he scanned that in as a 3D print. And so the tactile is the two bones and the bust and the painting is on the divider wall behind it. Now there are some other things there. I did have to explain, and I was taking guests through that, you know, there's a curtain and there's some other things that you can see in the background, but the main key elements are the bones and Charles Wilson peel. And so we did a similar thing with the rest of the pictures. And then we needed perspective. So we put in a model mastodon, which is about 18 inches. So scale the proportions for the head, the tusks, the feet, the back, the tail. So I have taken some friends of mine who were blind through and I start them at the mastodon model. And then they get a chance to touch it and make comments about the proportions of it. And then we go a couple steps and I say, this is a live scale tusk. So they reach the bottom of it and then it's mounted upright and they reach the top of it and that's 38 inches. And they go, ⁓ my gosh, that's big. And I say, yeah, that's big. We can't put a life-size mastodon in this room. It will take up the whole room. couldn't do anything else. And they really get that aha moment. And that's a lot of fun because it's intuitive. It goes there, direct observation. It'd be something if you could make that observation if I described it. But there's something about touching it that makes it just come alive, just pop. Now, I'm curious, ⁓ which is just it sounds like a fantastic exhibit and people can see this at the Peel. We'll put links in the show notes so people can find out how to get there. know Cheryl said the exhibit has been extended, so there's an opportunity to continue to see it. ⁓ But, you know, It obviously we meant we sort of touched on this idea that improving this sort of interpretation, know, rising tide lifts all boats. just makes it better for everyone to visit. So I can imagine, you know, a young child really enjoying this kind of experience to get hands on. But I'm curious, do you think that has it increased the amount of guests that have, you know, visual impairment thinking, hey, I should go and visit a place like that? Does it get sort of within that community, ⁓ sort of a sense of like, is a safe place. People can come here. They're putting on exhibits for us. ⁓ Talk to us about that. If you put this work in, how do you market yourself that way? You have to really kind of tap into the community. And I can help organizations with that. Because I have done, I did a newsletter blurb for the Maryland Library for the Blind. ⁓ There's a couple of other listservs that I've popped it in on. The people that I've taken through are friends of mine. There are other folks who have said, you've got to get people to come down, but the knowledge is there. I've made sure to populate that. It's a piece that museums often ⁓ need help with, and that's one of the things that I can do. ⁓ My colleagues at Fort Ticonderoga, when... One of the things I did for them was give them their local organizations. I had to touch base with them and see how that went. They're seasonal, they're closed now in the winter. So I don't know how it went, but that is one thing that I do try to help with. it's a slow, because it takes a while, because we've been excluded, people have been excluded from museums for a long time. And you have to really be. remind people repeatedly that this is what you're doing and this is how you're doing it. And we are working on that. It's always a work in progress as you know, community engagement can be. Yeah, absolutely. No, but that's I think that's a fascinating piece and kind of leads me to the next thing, which is as people are listening to this and they're thinking, OK, I run a historic site. have a house museum or maybe a small museum or maybe a large museum for that matter. And we should be doing a better job of this. where do they even start? So they're just thinking, OK, we've got some exhibits coming or we don't even have money for new exhibits. We just have our existing things. Give people a sense. mean, obviously they can reach out to you. We'll put links in here so that they can reach out to you and they could hire you to do some of that work. And we would encourage them to do that. But even just to get their board to think about it or maybe making the first step, what are some like pieces of advice you would you would sort of pass on to people listening who who want to be ⁓ good partners in this kind of effort. Find out who your local community members are. Figure out what the organizations are. There are several organizations in the blind community and some are national and have regional chapters and some are very local. ⁓ Ask around, find out schools are sometimes okay places, libraries. Find out who your community members are. Figure out who your partners are. Where are the makerspaces? Where are the artists who has an interest in doing these kinds of things? Figure out who you can collaborate with. And it also starts with just providing examples to your board members and your leadership. What have other museums done? We're actually a couple of us are actually doing a presentation at a conference to talk about that and partnership and. kind of figuring those kinds of things out because that's usually where people get stuck is they think they're doing this big lift all by themselves. And you won't fix it necessarily the first time you send an email, but you'll start a conversation and you'll start to kind of get the wheels turning and just kind of figure out where you're going. I have a colleague who suggests starting with programs rather than exhibits because programs are one-offs. So if you have a particular demo, just make sure all the items from the demo are on a table or are passed around. If you have a particular speaker, ask what they can bring in. If you have a particular artist, ask what they're comfortable having touched. Just you have to ask the question and begin to build partnerships and resources. Yeah, I think that that's, you know, obviously just being mindful and talking to people in the community. I mean, I think that that's It's something that's overlooked. I people sometimes overthink all the different aspects of this work. Just start with an honest conversation and ask, how can we do better? I think that will lead you in that direction. But as you go to plan a big exhibit, is that when you would encourage people? Obviously, I'm sure for your own business, you would encourage them to go and hire you. But really, seems like if you're going to invest time and money in putting a big exhibit together... you really should have a consultant. You wouldn't go into it without an exhibit design consultant. you wouldn't go into it, Ben, if you were being serious about this without somebody who's sort of thinking about accessibility. And obviously, we're talking about visual accessibility. But then there's also hearing impaired. there's ⁓ people who have sensory issues and different ways of sort of addressing those. And I know that there's different strategies for all those things. So talk to us about that. mean, is that when you would encourage people to step in and hire a consultant? For areas that are things that I know about, but they're not my direct experience or my research experience, I usually will provide resources and then encourage people to. ⁓ There's certain networks that I belong to. There's ⁓ leadership exchange, arts and disability, the lead conference. have a lot of, I might see if I can find you that link. ⁓ they have a lot of resources and a lot of ⁓ listservs and contacts. And so sometimes it's, I think you should talk to so-and-so or let me find out from so-and-so what a good resource will be. And just knowing where to pool resources is key. There's also folks that have worked with this. ⁓ toolkit called Making History Accessible that I was an advisor on, that it was a project with the Intrepid Museum in New York City and the NYU Ability Project. I have a research relation up there. And we have case studies and things like that in that too. So I'm going to get you that link as well. Yeah, that sounds great. So Cheryl, what are you working on next? mean, you've tackled mastodons where you headed after that. ⁓ I was asked by a community member to help curate an exhibit at the Peel for tactile art. So at the moment, I'm going through portfolios of artists, you know, the Baker portfolio site for local artists. I'm going through and also by referrals, figuring out who's comfortable having the work touched and what characteristics would make good touch objects. So that, if all goes according to plan, may open next year. That's the big one. ⁓ I've got a couple of conference presentations and I've got a research workshop on tactile media coming up. ⁓ I've got, I always find things to do. would love to find more things to do. ⁓ but really, cause a lot of what I do is raise awareness. And so I do a lot of these presentations and speaking and things like that. Well, you do a great job of it and people. I think should take note of this work. It's important and ⁓ it's a way that we can serve every member of our communities. And I think that's an important part of preservation and passing these stories along. ⁓ Before we go, we always ask people if they have a favorite historic place or site. And I'm curious what your answer is going to be. I'm excited to hear it. Well, I've been thinking about that because, like I say, I listened so I knew this was coming. I still fall back on archaeology and growing up in the Southwest and college years. And going to the Clift wellings and Mesa Verde in Colorado and going up the ladders into the clipped dwellings I granted it's a park service and I had to reconstruct the ladders. So it's two by fours But climbing up into the cliff dwellings was really cool. Very very immersive Yeah, I was gonna say that's a good example and a good way to cap the conversation because what an immersive experience to do that too So, well, Cheryl, it's been a pleasure having you on. Let's get you back next time you've got another exhibit to tell people about, ⁓ and we'll talk to you next time on Preservecast. Thanks so much. All right, sounds great. Thanks for listening to Preservecast. To dig deeper into this episode's story, head over to Preservecast.org for show notes and our collection of previous episodes. Don't forget to engage with this podcast by subscribing, commenting, and leaving a review. Follow along on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at Preservecast for even more. 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