For my final outreach project for LIBR 548X Social Media and Digital Outreach, I promoted The WunderCabinet (2011) by Barbara Hodgson and Claudia Cohen, one of the many fascinating items in the University of British Columbia Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) holdings. For the project I had to select an item from RBSC and then write a digital exhibition entry, a researched blog post, and five tweets promoting The WunderCabinet.
As a bonus to our individual final projects, my peers, our professor Dr. Erik Kwakkel, and I put together a RBSC exhibition promoting all of our selected RBSC items. The exhibition ran from April 15th, 2019 to the end of May 2019. It comprised of four displays, each with a different theme. These themes included: "Science and Pseudo-Science," "Wonder, Art, and Function: The Relationship between Content and Design," "Managing the Complexities of Domestic Life," and "The New World... and Beyond! Travel and Migration in the 19th Century." The WunderCabinet was part of the "Wonder, Art, and Function..." display.
For my individual project and the group exhibition, I:
- Wrote a concise yet descriptive and factual exhibition entry that was used in the RBSC exhibition
- Created a exhibition setup for The WunderCabinet that worked with the exhibition entry to guide the viewer's eye
- Researched and wrote an entertaining and educational blog post on cabinets of curiosities and The WunderCabinet for a non-expert audience
- Constructed a series of five creative tweets, which cater to the audience, features, and tone of Twitter as a social media platform
- Collaborated with peers and Dr. Kwakkel to brainstorm keywords for each of the 20 selected items from RBSC which resulted in the creation of a four-theme exhibition that included all student-selected items
Below are photos of The WunderCabinet in the RBSC exhibition with my exhibition entry and the theme description (written by a peer). My final project containing my blog post and my five (unpublished) tweets can be found here.
