GLEN
MUSCHIO
INSTRUCTOR
Glen Muschio is a media producer/anthropologist and Associate Professor of Digital Media, Westphal College, Drexel University. He is the founding director of Drexel’s Digital Media Program and served in capacities as Program Director and Graduate Program Director for over a decade.
DR. WALTER PALMER
&
SID BOLLING
CO-INSTRUCTORS
LEFT TO RIGHT: GLEN MUSCHIO, DR. WALTER PALMER, AND SID BOLLING
DIGITAL CULTURAL HERITAGE
DIGM 308/508
DIGM 308/508 Digital Cultural Heritage introduces students to the use of digital technologies in the exploration of cultural heritage, raising awareness that such efforts can promote greater understanding and lead to greater social justice. The class works from a world perspective while focusing on local cultures. Course participants engage with community activists and cultural experts in class discussions. Past guests have included: Dr. Walter Palmer, an attorney who resided in the Black Bottom and took active part in the community struggle to stop bulldozers from demolishing their neighborhood, and Sid Bolling, a spokesperson for the Black Bottom Tribe, a community organization committed to keeping the memory of the Black Bottom alive.
Julie Rainbow introduced a Germantown heritage project seeking to “Re-discover the Stories, Reclaim the History & Renew the Dialogue” of the Great Migration to Germantown. Dr. Ayana Allen-Handy, School of Education and Ph.D. student Karena Escalante presented work on organizing a community archive with alumni from the old West Philadelphia High School. In this class, students learn how their media skills can be leveraged to produce accessible informative and entertaining media in the service of social change.
PORTRAITS BY DEJAH MCINTOSH
The following excerpt of their talk has been edited for length and clarity.
SITTING DOWN
WITH glen
UnMapping Instructor Glen Muschio met with AmeriCorp Vista Jayla Washington to discuss his digital media course, DIGM 308/508 Digital Culture Heritage, that he co-instructs with Sid Bolling and Dr. Walter Palmer.
Your course is on digital cultural heritage. I just wanted to get an insight of how the course has been so far, since it is running right now. How's it been and what types of discoveries have been made by you, the co-instructors, the students—what's been going on?
I think the students are really into it. I think that it gave them an opportunity to look at the city in different ways. For example, a lot of people had heard about the Black Bottom because of last year and what went on with the townhouses. Turns out one of the students was living right on Warren, which is one of the only standing houses from the Black Bottom. He had no idea. So he was he was very excited about that. Another area we looked at was Chinatown and [there was] a student in the class who grew up in Chinatown, and in fact, went to a charter school. One of the speakers that came to the class, Debbie Way, was the founder of that charter school. So [the student] got to meet the founder of her school, and then we took a trip to Chinatown and she was showing us around her favorite places. We also went to Independence National Historic Park, and that was a different view. At the park, we spoke with Karie Diethorn, who is the supervisory museum curator for the park. So that was kind of an official view of what happened.
Those were three neighborhoods that were essentially part of redevelopment programs. I mean, Chinatown's an ongoing battle—still in the midst of that. The Black Bottom is University City: essentially the setting up of the Science Center, the expanding of the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel campuses. And Independence Park was probably one of the very first urban renewal projects. It began around the same time as the Black Bottom project, but... it eliminated neighborhoods in order to create a national park. So in a sense, the creation of National Park was a destruction of a neighborhood to look at the past, and the Black Bottom was destruction of a neighborhood to look at the present [and] the future in the sense that it was a science and technology center.
You touched on how the UnMapping grant has [aided] in your course. Can you talk about how that's been the case so far?
Well, I, I think recruitment for number one. Unfortunately, our program [digital media] is very industry-oriented students don't really look at the possibilities of using their digital media skills in matters of community engagement. But the UnMapping project helped with recruitment. As a result of that, we had students in the class from computer science, from English, from sociology, from fashion, and also from graphic design—as well as digital media students. So we had a full class of 15 students and one graduate student. Another thing is: I like to have community speakers, but I don't always have the money to bring them in. And I really feel that they need to be compensated for this. I think that's fair. And you know, they're not professional speakers, they're not academics. They're usually dedicated social activists, and the money means a lot to them. It definitely enhanced the class. The thing that I'm worried about is: I don't know what happens next year when it goes back to normal. I think it's great that we got the Mellon grant, but I think it's really up to the university to figure out how to sustain this. Okay, the grant is pointing out the way and that the way is good. Now, what will the university do to sustain it?
That's a great question to even ask. I know that two of your co-instructors are also like community experts: Sid Bolling and Dr. Palmer. Can you talk a little bit about how they impacted the course?
It's one thing to read about the Black Bottom in a new publication by Laura Wolf-Powers. The [students] read a couple of dissertations about the Black Bottom, but to have Dr. Palmer, who grew up in the Black Bottom, who's a social activist and a lifelong activist speak to the class firsthand, I think makes that really powerful. Real. So the students are not only reading about it--they're getting an eyewitness who's dealt with the with the consequences of essentially losing a neighborhood and having over 5000 people displaced. Sid Bolling did not grow up in the Black Bottom, I don't believe, although he's from Philadelphia. But his family is from the Black Bottom, and he's interested in keeping the idea of the Black Bottom alive—because while they no longer have a neighborhood, the survivors and descendants (the survivors now are probably in their 70s and older, some are over 100 years old), but the descendants are still in Philadelphia. And they feel like a community, and they still believe that they're a community, even though they're dispersed around the city. One of the things that the Black Bottom Tribe Association and other groups do is they hold an annual reunion in Fairmont Park. That was a thing that became real because of those two speakers that spoke to the class.
And then, and then we went out and took a walk [around] the Black Bottom, some of the areas in the Black Bottom that extended onto the Drexel campus. And we also went into the neighborhood along Lancaster. Surprisingly, some of the students had never been there before. We also went to see where the old high school was and to look at the buildings that are there now, the new charter schools that are there and the nursing facility and the park called “the Lawn.” So they got to see what's gone on. I think it's really hard to imagine what was there [before]. I think it made it clear that these things have changed, and whether for the better or not--you can argue about that. The University of Pennsylvania is conducting some archaeology now behind the Community Education Center, and that's right off of 36th Street, and they're looking into remnants of the row houses that were along Warren Street.
“I think it made it real…you get that sense of loss. That these are things that are ongoing. They don't just end, they just... just kind of continue.”
—glen muschio
Exactly. That's real. How do you feel like courses like this could better inform the “newness” of what is now University City? Do you feel if we had more courses that exposed us to the histories that the trajectory of Drexel could potentially change to a more positive direction? What's the impact of a class like this?
I think it's the courses and it's the technology. These things that we have (smart phones and the potential they have for augmenting the physical world with information about the past) are incredible tools, and they can bring the past to the present so that we begin to understand that it's a continuum and that our decisions have consequences. I'm hoping that perhaps through the UnMapping program (I don't know that it would be possible) but essentially create sequences of classes. What can you accomplish in 10 weeks? We raised awareness about these 3 communities--we raised awareness about what's possible, but we don't we don't have the time to actually produce something. So the final project is to design a digital cultural heritage project for one of the three neighborhoods. We're designing them in this class—it would be fantastic if we could have additional classes, where [students] take up the designs and actually produce them. And I think that's how we can change people's attitudes, not necessarily through the course itself, but what the courses can produce.
... That’s the power of this. But at this point, it's more aspirational because you just can't do this in 10 weeks. I also like the idea of going beyond just digital media students and bringing people from other parts of the university to get them involved. Once we have a cadre of people, then we could go out in the community and continue to work with people like Sid Bolling and Debbie Way and Dr. Palmer and others. I think it's a long road, and I think this was just a step on that long road.
You put that really beautifully. We've been talking about how this section of this course is really unique this time because of the different perspectives. So how do you think that this section of this course specifically could help change and evolve?
Basically it's a spark. I'll give you an example. Walter Palmer and Sid Bolling spoke in class. So did Debbie Way. We found out that Walter Palmer has really been a social activist in the city. And he has often helped Debbie Way--he's participated in those protest movements that stopped the development of the stadium, and that fought against the convention center, and now the building of an arena on Chinatown's border. Debbie Way [told us] that she was is a consultant to the Philadelphia school district and they were really interested in doing an oral history with Dr. Palmer. I mentioned that I'm working with a group at Drexel and our partners the Black Bottom Tribe Association, Dr. Palmer and the Science Center that received a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts grant to do an augmented reality treatment of the Black Bottom, and I would love to have that oral history of Dr. Palmer too. So Debbie Way [is going to] conduct an interview with Dr. Palmer, an oral history, and with part of the grant we hired Dragon Productions to record the interview in the digital media department next week. That was something that wasn't intended, that just happened because of the course and the UnMapping program making it possible to bring these people together. And although they weren't physically in the room at the same time, we were discussing these things. As an outgrowth of that, we're going to produce this oral history.
It's a great opportunity. It's also an opportunity for faculty to meet other faculty. We meet once a month and we get to talk to each other. I'm also talking with Monica Harmon, who is a part of the group who's interested in collecting data: oral histories of the Black Bottom. So we're talking about how we might be able to go about doing that.