Blog 20 (Jenna) Visualized States aka please forgive my fuzzy pictures of Sara and Jess...

Like several of my fellows, I too began Election Day by culling information from social media- mainly facebook. When I first checked it, my newsfeed was full of status updates of unsurprising content- my liberal friends, the women in fear for their uteri, expressed hope for Obama; my conservative friends, the Christians in fear for their religious freedom, which I’ll admit still boggles my mind, expressed hope for Romney; the majority just expressed the desire to convince others to vote. Many of my friends discussed the stickers traditionally awarded for voting. Stickers were described as the latest trend, the hottest accessory that all the celebrities were wearing. Many friends were frustrated that the stickers had run out by the time they had voted, implying the only reason to vote was so that they could wear a sticker all day. I was surprised that so many of my friends were fixated on this external symbol of voting, the sticker, rather than with the results of the election itself, but I suppose that in a culture which relies so extensively on visual stimuli and in which the social media touts the act of voting as “cool,” the sticker becomes the object which transfers “coolness” from an action to the visual. As a traditional early voter (this year an absentee voter), I have never received a sticker for voting. After reading so much about them, I suppose I’ve been missing an essential way of participating in Election Day- the donning of the sticker. I’m not sure that the voting sticker is as scriptive of an object as the cut outs for posing in photographs, but they certainly encouraged a very particular type of social behavior on Election Day.

Summit Elementary School: Voting for America's Future (Whitney, Blog 20)

This was my first experience voting in Bloomington. Not that my particular location in Bloomington had anything specific to do with my experience on Election Day, but it did force me to visit a new polling location, after many years in the back room of a church in Niagara Falls, NY and then several years after that voting absentee. I did a lot of things on Election Day this year that could be documented and probably turned into something interesting, but at 9:30AM, after leaving my polling location, I knew that there was nothing else that could capture the day in quite the same way.

When I received my Indiana voter registration card, the polling location seemed a harmless one: Summit Elementary School. I thought nothing of it, noted the address and looked up directions the morning of. When I arrived at the location, I was greeted not by a slew of campaigners and signs, like I’ve come to expect, but by a swing set and an outdoor jungle gym. Entering the doors of the school, dwarfing the obligatory “Vote This Way” arrow sign, were large, colorful posters framing the doorway of a library full of tiny chairs and big paper cutout trees and flowers. Walking down the hallway led me to a large wall of small handprints behind a glass case, beckoning “Welcome Veterans.” The “Vote Here” sign leading me directly to the door of the polling room was positioned directly underneath a colorful street sign that informed me I was on “Caring Blvd.” and would be turning onto “Patience Pkwy.” to vote. Just outside the doorway to the voting room, the walls were lined with colored pictures of the American flag, each bearing a crookedly-written name and grade number. When I walked into the voting room to register, no one told me to turn my phone off. No one said anything as I snapped several photos of the voters in action. And finally, before leavings, when I asked if I could take photos of the children’s drawings along the back wall, the older man at the door responded, “sure you can,” in the same tone he might have used if I had asked to have another cookie.

 

I don’t really know how to improve on this experience in an archive setting. I think it would be hard for anyone to walk through a simulation of my voting experience, with the same handprints and drawings surrounding them, not to have at least some form of strong reaction to the setting. But I do think it might be interesting to simulate this same setting, with perhaps a museum visitor walking through the experience as if he or she was actually voting, and have children present the space. In fact, it might be really fascinating if every person the voter interacted with on her way into the voting booth was a child, elementary school age. Several children outside the main room, just in front of a sign that reads, “Absolutely NO polling beyond this point,” handing out campaign literature, wearing big t-shirts and campaign baseball caps that fall over their ears. Then walking into the voting room, to encounter two children sitting at the registration table, asking voters for ID and instructing, “Please sign on the line here.” Then children at the door on the visitor’s way out, next to the machine that processes the paper ballots – “Please place your ballot in the tray, ma’am. Thank you very much for voting today,” in small, serious voices.

I’ve been struggling to analyze and pin down my election day experience at Summit Elementary. On one hand, the setting made me very proud to be voting and taking part in the process of the day. But this feeling, countered with the frustrating knowledge that Indiana would probably go red and my vote couldn’t have as much of an impact as I would like it to have. These thoughts jammed with the brutally innocent reminders of our country’s future surrounding me, and the questions of what state our country will be in one day for the grown-up children of Summit Elementary, made it difficult to vote at all. I was almost paralyzed by my insignificance.

As I grappled with these thoughts while filling in the boxes on my ballot, I was literally facing the signs pictured here along the back wall of the voting room. I was struck by the directions the children had chosen to include, especially since there was only space on the wall for four words. I’m still wondering how the children came up with these words and how much prompting they received. Did the children drawing these posters understand what they were writing or were they just excited to be drawing on big paper? Was there a brainstorming process that resulted in a list of choice words? If so, which words were crossed off the list? Are these signs the result of a successful lesson on American voting practices? What other information was given to the children in class that day and did they draw these signs on the same day they colored in and "John Hancock-ed" their American flags? Did these signs affect any voter's choice? Did anyone taking part in the election at Summit Elementary school follow the children's directions?

Courseblog #20 [Sara] Electioneering and the Electorate

Having grown up in a small rural precinct in Indiana, I have learned over the years that I must develop a strategy for approaching my polling place in order to preserve the integrity of my physical person. This may sound like a bit of an overstatement but, in elections past, I have been quite literally swarmed upon opening my car door by candidates and their children and grandchildren all forcing handshakes and buttons and donuts and t-shirts. There was actually a moment in 2008 where I had stern words with a female candidate running for county treasurer who was particularly aggressive, going to such lengths as to insist that if she touched me one more time that I would not only refuse to vote for her, but that I would take the afternoon off and campaign for her opponent.

Don't get me wrong, this polling place campaigning is not strictly something that I oppose--in small local races there might not be another opportunity for the voting public to even meet candidates running for the smaller offices, and I enjoy the sort of festive atmosphere that the local sherriff's shenanigans can add to the experience, I just fear the ambush, the need to be polite, feeling obligated to say kind words or make promises in the heat of a face to face interaction...  and this is exactly why these tactics work. How can you argue with a 6 year old who asks if you're going to vote for her grandma? Forget about it.

For this reason alone, I put off voting this year until mid afternoon, hoping that I might avoid the worst of the candidate  traffic by skirting the before and after work hours. Much to my surprise, I arrived at my destination just after 2:00 pm to find the following scene:

Republicans cook out within the estricted areas for "electioneering" at Brown County Indiana's Hamblen Township Precinct Three Polling Place.

These signs came as a great shock to me, they effectively fenced off the Republicans to the far side of the parking lot where they were grilling burgers and cooking chili but, nevertheless, at a "safe" distance.

Note: I make mention of the Republicans not because it is them that I am particularly wary of, (though one of Richard Mourdock's female relatives was trying to catch my eye while I took this photo and I had to pretend to be looking for something in my purse for several long minutes until she gave up). No, I mention the Republicans only because they were the only ones toughing it out behind this invisible ethics fence, the Democrats having abandoned their post, their shoes, and a half-full Diet Mountain Dew:

Brown County Democrats in Hamblen Towship, District 3 give up their campaign post in light of the new restrictions on "electioneering" OR maybe they were across the way taking advantage of the free GOP chili? Hard to say.

 I found these new rule of particular interest because they seemed, in many ways, to be a bucking of tradition, a fundamental change to the "performance of Election Day" in small rural districts across America. While I was at somewhat greater ease with the knowledge that I would not be physically approached in the parking lot of my polling place, I couldn't help but remark on the irony of this charade of impartiality or fairness or restraint that seemed to be enacted by the signs. According to the signs, electioneering consists of "expressing support or opposition to any candidate, party, or referendum on the ballot" I respect and admire the election board for going to great lengths to try and protect voters from personal persuasion, but I couldn't help but note the irony of the invisible electioneering that prevailed throughout the location. When I was a little girl, I used to accompany my mother to vote at the local community clubhouse, a sort of rec center where our small lake community held Volunteer Firemen's dinners and Bingo on Friday nights, but when I was able to vote in my first election in 2001, it was after the local Non-denominational Christian Church had petitioned to have our polling place moved to their sanctuary, citing the clubhouse with its gravel parking lot for having insufficient accessibility. Now we in Hamblen 3 vote at the Church of the Lakes, and if you have trouble making the trip out, they'll even come pick you up:

Church of the Lakes - 8844 Nineveh Road, Nineveh, Indiana 46164

Don't get me wrong, the church people are great and the facilities are wonderful and accessible and the whole congregation really goes out of its way to welcome the community, but I'm still amused by the blindness to electioneering by another name:

An interesting juxtaposition of signage inside the front door of the Hamblen 3 polling place, Nineveh's Church of the Lakes.

Volunteers check ID and registrations inside Church of the Lakes' "Harvestland Meeting Place," adjacent to the sanctuary.

We are certainly not the only district to vote in a community church, and most don't give it a second thought, regardless of faith. In fact, I had never much remarked on the potential performance of the space in relations to the election until I was encountered with the electioneering sign this year.

Casting my ballot across from the "Jesus and his Felt Friends" bulletin board in Harvestland. Look, ma, I got to Beta-test our precincts only electronic voting machine this year. Voting with paper and pen is for peasants.

I might have written it off altogether as a particular quirk of white Middle America until I returned to Bloomington around 3:00 pm to discover a new public protest at the St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Parish on East Third Street. As I approached the field of 3,315 crosses planted across the church lawn, I thought that the parish might be erecting a Veteran's Day memorial, but I soon discovered it was an anti-abortion display that, according to an article in the Bloomington Herald Times, was erected Saturday, November 3. According to Father Tom Kovatch, the parish priest who was quoted in the article, the church is “not trying to promote a political agenda or tell people who they can or can’t vote for.” Rather, their role, he said, is to “let people see visually how many lives are lost to abortion each day,  and to encourage them to use their conscience and examine what our church teaches so they can vote with an informed conscience” (Herald Times 6 Nov 2012).

According to Bloomington's Herald Times: "An anti-abortion sign and more than 3,000 white crosses outside the St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church are meant to encourage people to consider the number of lives lost to abortion, and urge them to consider church teachings and their conscience when voting for political candidates."

St. Charles's Church is well within their rights as, as far as my research can reveal, they did not serve as a Monroe County polling place on election day, but in other districts across America, similar displays were erected on the grounds of churches that did serve as voting site. One very similar display marked the grounds of a Colorado polling place and, although many reported finding the display offensive and intimidating, because the crosses were more than 100 feet from the door of the building, they were within the bounds of the law as written.

As a theatre and performance scholar I find this attention to the sort of semiotics of voting spaces particularly relevant to the discussion of fair and equitable voting practice. Even in the absence of the personal, aggressive campaigning of candidates at voting sites it is necessary to recognize that there is still a great deal of very rich performance happening in the interaction of citizens with the very structures in which voting takes place. Outside of the religious rhetoric that overwhelmed the campaign at points still rests very powerful and potentially influential--read intimidating--narratives of bias that masquerade as access, compassson, and conscience. One must draw certain inevitable parallels between the intimidation tactics used against women attempting to enter abortion clinics to these alternately aggressive physical and visual appeals to voters outside polling places. At every instance, the goal is to use a sort of mob mise-en-scene steeped in some semblance of universal emotional appeals whether from a candidate's grandaughter or a picture of an aborted fetus.

As an exhibit, I would be interested in tracing the historical use of religious rhetoric by those not directly affiliated with political campaigns and tracking the evolving opinion of these tactics a both ethical and lawful. It is important, I think, not to focus strictly on the blatant intimidation tactics of some horrendous sites of voter suppression, but rather finding a way to render visible the invisible electioneering that is taking place in the spaces of the performance of voting.

But how do you make people see the apparatus? I was talking it over with friends who suggested that these messages might be painted on bodies, literally, to show their effect on the human emotional response. Others who suggested rebuilding the polling places up-side down. We might solicit photographs from private citizens who vote and build a wall collage of the images. My boyfriend suggested offering kits to regional offices and allowing them to build their own ideal place and seeing what they choose. So much of this, though, feels like baiting to me and I fear it would only speak to those who are already listening. Maybe it's the latent historian in me, but I'm more interested in the archive. I'm most curious about the laws, local and national, that dictate what voting places look like and the inevitable lawsuits that accompany them. I'm disappointed in myself, because it sounds dreadfully boring, but I think it is only through reading about the fights already fought that people might look around them and notice the details, for that is really the matter at the heart of it, not that we need to regulate those details but appreciate what is keeping voters away and what is unfairly pushing them while they're there.

[[Edited to add: So, apparently, my photo-taking at Chruch of the Lakes was a cause for concern and the Republican candidates that I was trying to surreptitiously avoid ended up calling my mother to say that they were very alarmed that I was taking so many pictures and wondered if anyone had done anything to offend me, that they were restricted that year because of complaints of harrassment in the past and that they wanted to be sure that no one harrassed me that day. Short answer, no, no one harrassed me while I was at the polling place that day. But someone did call my mom later and she's been harrassing me about it ever since.]]

Course blog 20 (Andrea)

Like many of us, my election day experience was primarily based around social media. I am a compulsive Facebook checker to begin with, and people's election statuses and posts kept me coming back more often than usual. I also read news stories, headlines, and commentary from my Twitter feed. I even watched the coverage of the results that evening via Youtube's live streaming from several different broadcasters.

In the middle of this media binge, however, I was a passive participant, reading without posting or commenting. Part of the reason I kept silent was because of how politically polarized my Facebook feed is. Most of the posters from my hometown are Republicans, and most of the posters from undergrad and especially Bloomington are Democrats. Among the Republicans are most of my family members and some close friends, and while I often talk politics with some of them, I have learned that with others, confrontation isn't worth it. I'm not about to reveal the extent of my leftness to some of my new in-laws, for instance, especially right before I visit them for Thanksgiving.

Here are a few of the Republican Facebook posts on my feed to give you an ethnological sampling:

I'm now hiding all posts about the stupid election. I'm done with it. We are stuck in a nightmare for 4 more years and I do NOT want to be reminded of it every 5 seconds.

I am scared for our country. I am worried for my children's future. However, God is in control over EVERYTHING AND EVERYBODY! So, I will place my trust in Him alone and ignore the fact that the democrats think sin is ok, that we have a national debt that rivals no other is ok, the fact that a majority of Americans can barely make ends meet and are soon to be met with higher taxes, higher groceries and I'm sure higher gas costs are ok. 

Here's my election night map. Romney wins. Romney 270 / Obama 268 electoral votes. #wsjmap http://t.co/PjkrShyc via @wsj

Calling it for Obama. Oh well...

Welllll... On the bright side, I baked some delicious Nutella cookies tonight...

Other people have already posted suggestions for how to curate this kind of social media experience in a museum, so I will focus on the polarization aspect of my election day. I would like a museum display to show a little about these two environments: the conservative rural small town and the liberal college town, places within easy driving distance of each other. Visitors to the museum would enter through a common space or passageway that would display some of the public representations of political belief: Facebook, Twitter, political TV ads, yard signs. These would be accompanied by short descriptions of why these public demonstrations are socially significant and politically influential  in the election cycle. From this public domain, they could move through two different doorways leading from the passageway--one to the right and one to the left. The room to the right would contain a reenactment of a scene from the conservative small town, and the room on the left would contain a reenactment from a more liberal environment. The goal would be to show a more nuanced view of both sides than their public personas can reveal, just as Iris hoped to do with her interlinked status updates and comments, and also to show a little of the different environments that form these polarized views. 

Prompt 20 - Curating My Election Day (Derek)

Here is some pictorial evidence of my election day. After the photos are some suggestions for curating some of this at a history center like the one we visited in Indy.

Documenting the Day
I woke up at six AM, and went back to sleep until about ten-past seven. I got up, checked email and Facebook, replying to my cousin's post.

Figure 1. Facebook posts

I recalled The Daily Show's "moment of zen" in which they played the YouTube clip of the little girl crying about the election.

Then I drank coffee and showered. When my housemate Jost came out of his room into the kitchen to make breakfast for himself, I asked him if he'd voted already, and he said yes, at home the previous week. I said that I'd also voted already, but by absentee ballot. Then I left for campus. There was still frost on the ground as I rode my bicycle through my Bryan Park neighborhood. For the thousandth time, I noted the tangle of political signs sprouting weed-like on lawns from Walnut to 3rd Street. The photo here does not do justice to the tangle on the lawns of other houses.

I reached Ballantine Hall around 9am and went to browse the GSAC book sale. Some grad students there already had "I voted" stickers on their clothing.

I put in a couple of hours as a volunteer at the book sale. One grad student AI who bought a large stack of books commented that she was embarrassed to carry all of them like that to class for fear of looking like a dork in front of her students, to which I felt compelled to reply "No, you look scholarly!" Later, upon learning that I was volunteering for GSAC, Whitney said to me, "Look at you, getting involved." After my hours were up, I picked up a few newspapers on my way out of Ballantine Hall.

Then I returned a Hitchcock DVD collection to Wells Library. Posters hung on the main doors telling people that tonight the media wall would be showing the live election results broadcast. Next I ate lunch at Tudor Room. After lunch I went to Kirkwood Ave to get a haircut, where I learned a little about the 6pm drinking law. As I crossed the street to enter the barbershop, I saw a line of elementary school students marching west down the sidewalk, some with sandwich board placards, chanting something inaudible but enthusiastically. Their backs were to me and they were far away, so I don't know what they were marching for, but I imagine they were either reminding people to go vote or they were advocating on behalf of one of the local races--I recall that one of the local races has to do with an education-related position.

After my haircut, I went to the bikeshop to get a new chain and to fix the shifter. I arrived home at 3:30pm and studied at my desk. At night (maybe around 9pm) I went over to Lauren's house to watch the election results with some other folks. We had some food and conversation about voting. Two of the lads declared that they had abstained from voting. This was a point of contention about which we had previously argued, so we did not get into it again at this time, it now being a moot point for this election.

Lauren told me that earlier in the day, "the young people were upset the campus voting place ran out of stickers!" I thought that was cute. By "young people", she meant the undergraduate residents of Global Village, where she works. We started watching the election results as reported on Nate Silver's blog, mostly because watching the streaming video of the news channels was annoyingly full of banal chatter. However, the vote counts that were being displayed online were often in flux and unreliable, and also stressful for me, since they showed Romney winning.

To escape the stress of watching the election returns, we started watching Netflix videos of Louis CK. We all laughed and relaxed. But even as we did so, we had another laptop on and refreshing Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog--but at least that way we could check it on our own terms. We were all relieved when the totals swung in Obama's favor, and then once he won we were quite happy. Around that time, it became 11:00pm, and we switched to the live stream of The Daily Show.

Unfortunately, The Daily Show wasn't as funny as I had hoped it would be. The Colbert Report was a little better. After that ended, I went home, posted on Facebook, and fell asleep.

Curating the Day

The exhibit would be focused on election day in Bloomington through an IU graduate student's milieu. The day might be curated using a mixture of media and live reenactments, as at the Indiana History Center in Indianapolis. 

Media
One part of the exhibit could use touch screens to allow visitors to browse a collection of photos and video that show scenes from Bloomington city and the university as people went about their day. Examples of photos: houses with campaign yard signs, polling booths and buildings, people picketing/demonstrating, volunteers on campus telling folks where to vote, as well as scenes of everyday life unrelated to the voting, including the Mother Hubbard's truck, homeless folks in People's Park, college students scurrying across campus, students studying. As for video, there should definitely be a variety of the campaign ads, including a special segment on negative campaign ads and a different special segment on the impact of SuperPacs. Another special segment should focus on video clips from satirical shows such as The Daily Show, SNL, late night talk shows. Another special segment would be all about YouTube videos. Finally, a special segment showing clips from news programs covering both the election and other events that were happening simultaneously--some of these should be about the referendums that legalized marijuana and gay marriage. 

As for live reenactments, the two sites that most lend themselves to recreation are the house and the barbershop.

The IU House in Bloomington
Going down the hallway in the history center, you would see the painted exteriors of a house with actual campaign signs posted outside, recreating what you'd see when passing through the Bryan Park area. Enter the "house" and you enter a living room with a dining room beyond, which also contains a small desk. There's a couch, chairs, big TV, dining table, and a couple of laptops. Live actors within the house would be aged 21-37, some students, some not. They would be able to answer questions about how they experienced the election day and the events leading up to it. Perhaps the election day itself could be depicted, so the election day itself might unfold during the hours of operation in the museum, and the actors would react to news on the TV or to Facebook posts and engage each other in conversation. The actors would portray people of varying political persuasion and ages, some of whom could speak with experience about watching the 2000 election and how they were worried about similar shenanigans happening again. Others would be Leftist anarchists who boycotted the polls. One would be a moderate Republican. History Center visitors could interact with all of these actors.

The College Town Barber Shop
After entering the barber shop, you could interact with a wide array of characters, male and female, young and old. They could be of various political leanings and have insight into not only the campaign and issues of the day, but also the mechanics of voting and the laws surrounding it--such as the no alcohol before 6pm law. Someone might mention the parade of elementary school children that walked down Kirkwood holding signs and chanting. Newspapers published that day could be available on racks for visitors to pick up and read, the papers performing as scripted things that visitors would want to interact with. The mix of people in the barbershop might allow for both national and local community politics to be discussed, since not all the folks would be from Bloomington, and some patrons (e.g. me) might have had significant amounts of time overseas, thus allowing for international comparisons to be made.

Voting Records
The research library would have polling data, voting records, and district maps, which researchers could peruse. These could be comparable to national averages and other results from Indiana counties.

Course Blog 20: AdWorld (Jennifer)

I documented my day on my personal blog, so you can view the non-event of being an absentee voter there. What I will most remember about Election 2012 is the inundation of images, stories, ads, and editorials that were in yards, in my mailbox, on my television, in phone conversations, etc. Since I wasn't voting in person, I only saw this detritus without seeing the civic event itself. This means that for the past six months, while I've felt immersed in the drama, the actual day seemed rather anticlimactic. Therefore, rather than focusing on the day of the election, I'd like to shift attention back to where most of the action happened: the race.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, as part of her list of descriptors for today's museum, says that it can be an "artifact to be displayed in its own right, along with its history, operations, understandings, and practices." Therefore, I want to preserve an important artifact: the targeted advertising. Since advertising is becoming increasingly important and diverse, I anticipate Disney will create an AdLand park in the near future, one element of which will dedicated entirely to political advertising, with a special exhibit for Election 2012.

Image of Disneyland's theme park (as edited by me to add AdLand) originally from a teacher's blog. 

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett also mentions the trend, as we saw in the Center for History's living photos on Prohibition and the polio vaccine, of "experiential" exhibits. As an instructor, I've found that the more active and invested students are in their education, the more they learn and enjoy the process. Therefore, I am happy to jump on the experiential bandwagon. One of the trends I've noticed in museums lately have been what I'm going to call "self-identifying" exhibits. For example, Kohl's Children's Museum has an exhibit called "All About Me," where you can "find out more about your likes and dislikes, your abilities and qualities, and find out what makes each visitor special and unique." Children can record their own voices, see themselves from various angles, and build bodies onto a skeleton. I remember that one of Chicago's large museums also ran a similar exhibit, but with more of a tech angle. The IUPUI's Advanced Visualization Lab showcased a four panel 3D screen, which would be a perfect way to integrate these various pieces into an exhibit about the targeted advertising campaign of the 2012 election.