Humanities Exhibition

Hello zeros and ones on the internet and welcome back to my blog. This blog is about both my Humanities project and the Exhibition we did. So first I will talk about the project and then the process of the exhibition. 

So first of all the project name was “Dulce et Decorum est” which means it is sweet and fitting in Latin. The name comes from a poem about the First World War, so as you can guess our project was about the war. We soon took a trip to a museum so that we could better understand them, why you ask, that’s because we will be making a WW1 museum for this project. This may sound impossible now but don’t worry it’s not a big real museum we are just making our own exhibits. 

So first of all we had to visit a museum and learn from it. We went to the Museum of North Vancouver to talk to the curators and find out how to make a museum flow. We looked at all the exhibits and the different types so we could take inspiration. Here are some photos I have.

 

So after we developed an understanding of how museums work we had to design our own museum and exhibits. But first we needed to know what out topic for our exhibit was. Obviously it was WW1 but that’s too broad so to narrow it down we decided to write paragraphs to show the contrasting narratives of war. I chose the difference between war and propaganda for war. This is the paragraph I wrote.

 The contrasting narratives of war spread from the thought and ideas of the battle to the starvation and rationing done by the average person. During the First World War people perceived war as a fun adventure that they would be home by Christmas but if you know anything of the war it’s the complete opposite. People had this idea because the government wanted to imprint in their brains that the war was fun, and to do so they had methods such as propaganda full of lies that would manipulate the average folk into believing what they wanted them to. Many Canadians joined the war at the start due to being roped in as Great Britain’s ’pet’ because they were still a colony and didn’t have a say, but later on, many of those who joined wouldn’t come back. After some time all the soldiers were dying so the government needed a way to get more troops, they started making posters to manipulate men into joining and serving their country. They also made posters to force women and children to ration as another problem would soon arise. Seeing as people were rationing so much they would think soldiers would be eating feasts but it was quite the opposite starvation was a major problem of the war. Soldiers were running out of food and had nothing to eat, many died and others were traumatized. Another cause of trauma was disease. The trenches were thought of as nice places to live but they were nasty pits of death and decay. Trench foot, trench flu, rats everything was busting with bacteria. Overall the lies and the manipulation of the government were unacceptable and they didn’t value the lives of their men. To conclude the main contrasting narrative of war was it being a glamorous thing that was fun and new, versus the pain and suffering soldiers had to endure.

So now it’s time to craft our exhibits I decided I wanted to make an audio based exhibit so I thought about what our group was, I decided to be in the group about how women and societies view of women changed over the war. So I now had to write a script for it and after writing for an hour I had it. But I still had planning to do. You see I have something I haven’t told you about yet. I know what your thinking “I don’t really care but what is it” well my enthusiastic friend they are none other than real World War 1 artifacts. I know I’m so cool but honestly you don’t need to flatter me. But now I need to think about how I’ll turn these into and exhibit (that won’t be touched by small annoying children). You’ll find out.

So after all the prep we finally came to exhibition day everyone was nervous and I had my exhibit and artifacts. It was very stressful but honestly it went pretty well. The theme of the exhibition was pathways but I don’t think anybody really understood that, we gave people pamphlets that they could get a stamp on for every grade they visited. But I don’t think that convinced people. Well the Tim has com for me to show you my awesome artifacts. Your so excited aren’t you. Here they are. Sorry they are sideways I don’t know how to fix them.

Now the exhibition was over and we had so much cleanup to do but after a long hard 14 hours at school I finally went home and I immediately passed out. Thank you for reading my blog post sorry this one was long I hope you enjoyed it and have a great rest of your day.