The History of Science Society

Vol. 38, No. 4, October 2009
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The front page of Making visible embryos (www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos).

Making Visible Embryos: Making a Virtual Exhibition

Electronic media and the Internet have dramatically changed academic publishing and communication across numerous disciplines, including history of science, technology and medicine. Journals are on their way to becoming exclusively electronic; jobs and conferences are advertised through discussion lists; societies communicate with their members through electronic newsletters and Web sites; groups collaborate using wikis. Now, with the expansion of digitized museum, library and archival collections, research practices have changed as well. Electronic books are not yet standard, and Google’s monopolistic and commercial library digitization is a problem as well as a boon, but convenience of use and accessibility are continually attracting new readers. Funding bodies are fond of the visibility the Internet brings to a project. Yet for all the expansion of the electronic content as well as the increasingly sophisticated and user-friendly technologies, historians of science overall are putting little effort into designing material specifically for the Web. Blogs, such as Biomedicine on Display, have acquired faithful audiences, as did the instructive podcast series The Missing Link. But investing time and effort into exclusively Web-based forms of publication and communication is still rare. Here I draw on a recent personal experience of creating an online exhibition to discuss the historical and current issues surrounding the production of Web-based content; the online HSS Newsletter seems an especially suitable place for this.

Pioneered in the early 1990s, the online – originally “virtual” – exhibition was an attempt by museums and libraries to showcase their work to wider audiences and engage with the then-new medium of the Internet. The Library of Congress’s collections of files and images from the exhibitions 1492: an ongoing voyage, Scrolls from the Dead Sea and Revelations from the Russian archives could be seen as the first, although in those pre-Netscape days they had to be downloaded from a FTP server. The National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health, which in its 1986 Long Range Plan foresaw the era of digital images distributed over high-speed computers, was especially committed to communicating history of medicine in this format.

Early on, attempts were made to define the online exhibition and delineate it from another heavily image-oriented web-based genre, digital collections. It was argued that objects had to be tied together by a narrative or in another relational form; and while collections often had a common theme too, the connection was never as tight (1). Others defined them as “online, World Wide Web-based, hypertextual, dynamic collections devoted to a specific theme. (2)” As new projects of this type followed, it became clear that any one exhibition rarely respected all the rules, whether of tight narrative link, extensive hyperlinking, or frequent updating of content. Many were no longer attached to a physical exhibition but existed on the web only. Other projects, such as The virtual laboratory, combined the elements of virtual exhibitions with digital collections of images and texts into larger, looser, more open-ended entities. By the mid-2000s, virtual exhibitions had built up a tradition and achieved a certain level of recognition, but the rules of the genre were more fluid than ever. For my purposes, defining it as a web-based, structured presentation consisting of text and images will do.

In 2004, Nick Hopwood, a lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and I, then a Ph.D. student there, first discussed the idea of an online exhibition about the history of embryo images, Nick’s long-term research area and a theme linked to my interests in anatomical disciplines and in the visual. Images of human embryos today surround us everywhere, in clinics, classrooms, laboratories, family albums, newspapers and, not least, on the Internet. Debates about abortion, evolution, assisted conception and stem cells have made these representations controversial, but they are also routine. Our aim, in the absence of any survey of this field, was to show how, over the last two and half centuries, embryo images were produced and made to represent some of the most potent biomedical objects and subjects of our time. The exhibition was funded as the main public engagement activity under a Wellcome enhancement award in the history of medicine that the Department has used to build expertise in history of reproduction. (It recently gained a higher-level strategic award in this field.) By using the format of a freely accessible online exhibition, we hoped to circumvent the temporary unavailability of local gallery space, to reach a wider audience in what was becoming the dominant medium for displaying embryo images, and to do so at relatively low cost. The last point was essential: the budget covered a one-year salary for a postdoctoral researcher-cum-designer (me), a modest budget for images of about £2,500, a computer, a scanner and a digital camera.

Aristotelian epigenesis in Jacob Rueff’s midwifery textbook (www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/s1_3.html)

Ernst Haeckel’s controversial and canonical grid (www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/s4_2.html)

The first test tube baby in Time
(www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/s8.html)

We initially intended to complete the exhibition by 2006 but it took twice as long. While much work was invested in the 36,000-word text, which was supposed to communicate major themes as well as support and explain the images, we gave images pride of place. The low cost of the web space allowed us to reproduce 125. For each of the eight chronologically arranged sections, study of the existing scholarship (listed in the Resources section), was followed by the often much more difficult quest for the right images and the information about them. Sometimes the choice was clear: for instance, of Samuel Thomas Soemmerring’s pioneering developmental series in Icones embryonum humanorum (1799); Ernst Haeckel’s controversial and canonical figures from the 1870s bringing human and other vertebrate embryos into the same frame, and Lennart Nilsson’s vivid and widely reproduced photographs that since the 1960s have become political weapons in abortion debates. In other cases choices were more open – especially on the variety of premodern representations of the unborn in the opening sections and on the interventions of the last thirty years in the closing section. Along with now-iconic images, we wanted to show those considered representative, standard or widely used—an early modern midwifery textbook image, an encyclopaedia illustration, an embryo model, an ultrasound scan—and to demonstrate how these images were produced, who made them and who saw them, in which settings. The big image databases, such as Wellcome Images and the commercial Getty Images, were a great help, but we obtained many of the most interesting representations through correspondence with scientists, artists, professional societies and curators, as well as research in libraries and archives, not least the Carnegie Institution of Washington Archives collection. Explanations of how early ultrasound machines worked or of the artistic and editorial decisions behind the Time cover page that announced the birth of the ‘first test tube’ baby simultaneously made the work on the exhibition fun and the final product fresh.

But writing the text and collecting the images is just part of the work: developing and designing the exhibition represented an equally demanding task. Everyone knows what books look like and what they do, but rules for the new digital genres are much less firm. We decided that a chronological–thematic organization was best suited to convey the sense of historical change. We also wanted the images to be reproduced as well as possible, while keeping the pages uncluttered and the site light to load. These requirements were fulfilled by using a horizontal, left-to-right menu bar with titles of sections and pages, and by formatting images into small thumbnails that upon clicking opened into separate windows each containing an enlarged – and sometimes zoomed-in – image with an accompanying legend. Overall, the design was kept simple, mainly because notwithstanding the generous assistance of family and friends with professional IT experience, I am a self-taught designer.

The exhibition was launched in October 2008, first through discussion lists and then through press releases. It was quickly picked up by blogs, online magazines and various other Web sites. Useful tools such as Google Analytics and social bookmarking collections showed us that some visitors came from parts of the world that an academic book probably would not reach – or certainly not so fast. Initial worries that the general audience might find the exhibition too dry or too difficult were dispelled by enthusiastic comments in places we had not expected. For instance, the acute remarks by the writer for the highly popular Jezebel, a Web site on “celebrity, sex, fashion for women” generated several pages of discussion on Lennart Nilsson’s work and the use of his images in abortion debates. New Scientist used images from our exhibition to build a slideshow in their Galleries section. Some readings surprised us, and those were especially useful as an insight into the extent to which knowledge seen as standard in scholarly circles is accepted outside academia.

Now, almost a year later, we can ask what we have learned. What are the advantages and disadvantages of an online exhibition compared to the more traditional forms of publication? Was it worth producing, and did it fulfil our expectations?

One disadvantage is that while a good virtual exhibition may require as much research as a book, the rewards are fewer and less certain. An exhibition may be based on extensive research, have a tight argument and attract numerous reviews, not to mention vastly more readers than most books, but it will not help an academic career in the same way. There is no compulsory peer-reviewing, and lifespans can be short. This last concern, based on the (short) history of the Web, is valid, but recent initiatives for archiving at least some Web sites for posterity, such as the UK Web Archiving Consortium and the U.S. National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program might alleviate this fear. Finally, for all the immediacy and accessibility of the Web, for some people and some purposes it is more convenient to work with a book.

Many of these problems are not specific to virtual exhibitions or indeed web-based content, and are shared by academics engaged in producing other non-traditional genres such as films and TV material. Yet the ubiquity of the Internet makes them more common and more visible, and may be the reason why change is on the horizon. Less than a decade ago scholarly journals were reluctant to review online books published within the Gutenberg-e Project, a prestigious joint scheme of the American Historical Association, Columbia University Press and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Between 1999 and 2004, the scheme simultaneously promoted electronic publishing and helped junior scholars in need of a home for their first manuscript. In contrast, our exhibition had been reviewed in several HSTM journals and in Nature within a year of the launch.

Issues around intellectual property are another minefield. Some owners of images generously waive license fees for academic use, but many charge hefty rates, often higher than for print publications. This is presumably partly because the moment these images appear on the Web they are copied and used elsewhere. Easy access also makes it easier to plagiarize content. The extent to which an exhibition should hyperlink to other Web sites is another tricky issue, related to the short average lifespan and lack of permanence on the Internet.

Possibly the biggest problem lies in the fact that producing virtual exhibitions (and Web-based content more generally) requires general and more specialized skills that historians – especially those who did not grow up with the Internet – in most cases do not have. Even if they do, they may not have the time. Elisabeth Green Musselman ended her podcast project because each episode took 40-60 hours to produce. Yet while academics are commonly aware of what it takes to make a highly illustrated book, and of the design, printing and publishing networks behind it, the costs of designing a Web site are still far less obvious – just as they were to us at the start. For many less experienced users – including some reviewers – the simple fact that certain technologies exist is enough to expect them in a university-based project on a slim budget; yet they would readily accept that books can be popular without high production values. In a post discussing the reasons for the end of the Gutenberg-e scheme, Cathy Davidson has warned that early expectations for cheap production of Web-based content were over-optimistic, and that deceptively simple Web sites depend on extensive professional teamwork.

Yet there are ample compensations. The breadth of readership is wonderful. So is feedback at speeds that leave the usual modes of response, especially in the humanities, far behind. We found that, while writing for the Web is different from writing scholarly articles, it is possible to make moderately complex arguments and to take historical specificity seriously. Some readers plan to use the exhibition in teaching and it will be interesting to see, as the academic year begins in much of the world, how this goes. The academic response indicates that Web-based publishing is on its way to acceptance. The technical demands of production remain an obstacle, but new publishing platforms (for example Wordpress) might alleviate, if not entirely remove them. Overall, the reception met and even exceeded our expectations; personally, I learned a great deal.

- Tatjana Buklijas
Liggins Institute
The University of Auckland, New Zealand

1- Kalfatovic, Martin R. Creating a winning online exhibition: a guide for libraries, archives and museums, Chicago: American Library Association, 2002, 1-3.

2- Silver, D. “Interfacing American culture: The perils and potentials of virtual exhibitions.” American Quarterly 49(1997), 825–850 (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_quarterly/v049/49.4er_folklore.html).

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