WPI Students’ First Week: BM, London & Online Exhibitions!
Hello, ITP Fellows!
This is the Worcester Polytechnic Institute team, and we’ve finally arrived in London to start our seven week project developing online exhibitions for the ITP. You might remember our introductions from our previous blog post, and we’re super excited to spend the next two months working with you all.
This Friday marks the completion of our first week at the British Museum. It has been a great start to our time here; the staff has been fun and inviting, and the museum itself has been amazing to experience. One of the coolest parts has been seeing the scale of the British Museum, it’s much larger than we expected! Seeing all the exhibits that the British Museum has to offer really puts our project into perspective. We particularly enjoyed seeing the Ancient Egypt exhibits and then meeting the curators behind them. It’s amazing to walk through the offices and see all the hard work that goes into the creation of an exhibition.
When it comes to our project, we’ve found this week super productive. We spent the first day getting ourselves acquainted with the museum and setting up the major technical aspects for the online exhibition we are creating. We then chose the template for our site and have since begun development on our first prototype. We’re excited to show it off, and will hopefully be done with the first draft this coming week! Our tutorial is also being developed, and we’re already finding plenty of useful information to share with everyone.
We have also been lucky enough to have the opportunity to interview some of the curators within the museum about exhibition creation and the curation process. In addition to curators we talked to other museum workers such as exhibition managers. We had no idea just how much work goes into the creation of an exhibition! Getting their insight into how they select and present their content has been incredibly helpful, and we’re grateful to all the BM colleagues who took the time to speak to us!
Outside of our work in the British Museum, we have done a lot of exploring around London. We have visited The Millennium Bridge and London Bridge and plan to visit many more attractions in the coming weeks. On 25 March we have arrangements to visit the Houses of Parliament. We are excited to see the London Eye, the Tower Bridge Exhibition and the London Transport Museum. It seems as if there is almost an endless list of places to visit in London!
One of our favorite parts of our exploration so far has been the food. Rebecca Horton (ITP Coordinator) was kind enough to give us a list of great restaurants and pubs around the museum, and we’ve been taking full advantage of that list. The one we’re looking forward to the most is BubbleDogs; it will be fun to see how UK hot dogs stand up to the ones at home!
Matthew, Michael, Jacob and Cormac