{"id":1104,"date":"2019-02-06T16:49:54","date_gmt":"2019-02-06T16:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/?p=1104"},"modified":"2019-02-07T12:45:39","modified_gmt":"2019-02-07T12:45:39","slug":"generating-a-museum-of-the-near-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/2019\/02\/06\/generating-a-museum-of-the-near-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Generating a Museum of the Near Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our second blog is by Dr Joanna Taylor, Presidential Academic Fellow in Digital Humanities at The University of Manchester.<\/p>\n

In March 1991, shortly after Lancaster University had launched their campaign to acquire the Whitehouse Collection of Ruskiniana, the eminent Victorianist Dinah Birch offered a suggestion as to why John Ruskin \u2013 one of the most important and wide-ranging thinkers of the nineteenth century \u2013 had lapsed into obscurity. She thought that Ruskin\u2019s interdisciplinarity was a barrier for the modern reader: \u2018his influence,\u2019 she wrote, both then and now, \u2018was fragmented by the bewildering range of subjects he undertook to write about\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Page from Ruskin’s diary (MS12)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The result, in Britain at least, was that Ruskin seemed \u2018tangential\u2019 to a wide range of subjects: art historians, political economists, literary scholars, historians, geologists, biologists, ecologists and sociologists could all claim Ruskin as one of their own with equal felicity, but no one discipline could aspire to a complete understanding of Ruskin\u2019s polymathematical thought. As Birch concluded, Ruskin\u2019s writing is:<\/p>\n

rooted in the widest definitions of culture. To be read fully, the texts call for knowledge of Greek literature and mythology, Medieval iconography, Milton, 18th-century fiction, the Bible, geology, Italian history, botany, Walter Scott and Dickens, and a very great deal else besides. They ask to be studied on their own terms. There will never be many who are in a position to rise to the challenge of interdisciplinarity on quite that scale. (\u2018Interdisciplinarity\u2019, London Review of Books 13.12 (1991), https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v13\/n12\/dinah-birch\/interdisciplinarity<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Birch is right that, today, it would be a rare lone scholar who could match the breadth and scale of Ruskin\u2019s knowledge. But what was a stumbling block for the twentieth-century model of lone-wolf scholarship \u2013 particularly in the humanities \u2013 might become an enabling force in more recent approaches that emphasise interdisciplinary collaboration.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Brantwood<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So the Lancaster University Away Day at Brantwood, Ruskin’s home from 1870 until his death in 1900, discovered. This event aimed to facilitate precisely the kind of ambitious cross-disciplinary environment needed for the sort of scholarship that can begin to rediscover Ruskin for a new era. With invited speakers and attendees from the University\u2019s principal research centres \u2013 including Digital Humanities, Material Sciences, Data Sciences and Social Futures \u2013 the Away Day demonstrated Ruskin\u2019s potential to offer an intellectual bridge between radically different interests.<\/p>\n

The morning began with an introduction by the Director of The Ruskin, Professor Sandra Kemp. Kemp introduced Ruskin as a figurehead for the Library\u2019s ambition to be a \u2018museum of the near future\u2019. Kemp asked what the purpose of a collection of materials \u2013 a collection, moreover, that surpasses any other for a single author \u2013 is in a campus environment. As she suggested, when understood as the backbone of a forward-looking museum, the Collection offers the basis for using Ruskinian materials and thinking as a springboard for addressing ongoing social, cultural and environmental issues. If we re-interpret the Collection as an active, malleable archive, she indicated, it becomes a valuable resource for research, teaching and public-facing exchange.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Ruskin Away Day at Brantwood<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The following talks all, in different ways, spoke to this vision of a dynamic Collection that catalyses exciting new research in each University faculty. Dr Andrew Tate (Reader in Literature, Religion and Aesthetics) demonstrated how forward-looking interpretations of Ruskin might work in future exhibitions at the library. Professor Judith Mottram (Director of Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts) suggested how Ruskinian thinking could develop creative practice as research that re-evaluates art, not as illustration, but as an active force in engaging diverse publics in socio-cultural, political and academic agendas. Professor Beth Harland\u2019s talk revealed how such a re-evaluation could facilitate creative responses to Ruskin\u2019s work and his wider contemporary relevance that, she suggested, are based on the \u2018critical production of knowledge\u2019. She uncovered Ruskin\u2019s interests in interactive thinking by interrogating what role \u2018conceptual relationships\u2019 might play in future research at Lancaster.<\/p>\n

Between these talks, each group \u2013 each of which focused on a different research agenda (Digital Humanities, Material Sciences, Social Futures and Data Science) \u2013 reflected on how Ruskin or Ruskinian thinking might guide future collaborative endeavours and lead to new research areas. Ruskin\u2019s interests in work, memory, sensation and the details of the world around him offered rich starting points for frequently surprising conversations that began to uncover the power of Ruskin\u2019s thought for developing innovative research questions.<\/p>\n

Brantwood, the site of \u2013 among other things \u2013 Ruskin\u2019s infamous meeting with Darwin, offered the ideal location for this cross-disciplinary brainstorming. A guided walk around the house and grounds with the museum\u2019s Director, Howard Hull, consolidated the morning\u2019s communal discoveries of interlinked research interests. Ruskin\u2019s allegorical garden, known as the Zig-Zaggy, was a particular highlight. This material re-imagining of Dante\u2019s Purgatorial Mount, based on one of Ruskin\u2019s own designs, guides the visitor up the fellside along a series of themed terraces until they reach \u2018Paradise\u2019s\u2019 unparalleled view across Coniston lake to the fells beyond.<\/p>\n

\"\"
John Ruskin, Path at Brantwood, Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The garden offered a focal point for our final list of take-aways from the day. More than anything, this re-imagining of an alternative type of Ruskin text had indicated to everyone present the scope for playful (re-)interpretations of Ruskin. It seemed to encapsulate the day\u2019s aim of taking Ruskin out of dusty volumes on dark library shelves, and into the real, twenty-first century landscape.<\/p>\n

The garden consolidated what the rest of the day had implied: that Ruskinian thought \u2013 as well as his specific works \u2013 might offer creative opportunities for new kinds of research that linked ordinarily disparate parts of the University, as will be showcased in The Ruskin’s launch exhibition on 25 September. What the Away Day ultimately demonstrated is that the man George Eliot called \u2018a prophet for his generation\u2019 is also deeply prescient for our own.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Brantwood garden view<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our second blog is by Dr Joanna Taylor, Presidential Academic Fellow in Digital Humanities at The University of Manchester. In March 1991, shortly after Lancaster University had launched their campaign to acquire the Whitehouse Collection of Ruskiniana, the eminent Victorianist Dinah Birch offered a suggestion as to why John Ruskin \u2013 one of the most … Continue reading Generating a Museum of the Near Future<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1089,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9OdOv-hO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1104"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1119,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions\/1119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/the-ruskin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}