Provenance Project for Museum Studies

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: In her Introduction to Museum Studies course, Leah Niederstadt has students conduct research on the provenance of items held in the Wheaton College Permanent Collection. The assignment involves students compiling detailed research on the objects themselves and on their previous owners before they each create a “StoryMap” that chronicles the “provenance narrative” for their assigned object. For the Fall 2015 iteration of the course, students used StoryMap JS for their projects. The application is simple enough that minimal student training was necessary. Earlier iterations of the assignment in this course and in a first-year seminar used Google Earth or Omeka, but StoryMap JS was a more desirable option for its functionality and design options