Museums across the globe are now closed because of Covid-19. Some of those shuttered galleries presented the science behind outbreaks like the one we’re living through.
As Raven Forrest Fruscalzo, Content Developer at the Field Museum in Chicago and host of the Tiny Vampires Podcast points out, the fact that museums are closed is an important statement: they trust the scientific information.
In this episode, Forrest Fruscalzo discusses the people that make up public health, how museums can be a trusted source of public health information, and examples of museum galleries that incorporate public health.
Topics and Links
00:00 Intro
00:15 Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World at the National Museum of Natural History (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/exhibits/outbreak-epidemics-connected-world)
01:06 Raven Forest Fruscalzo (https://www.tinyvampires.com/about-1)
01:45 Public Health
02:08 Information Deficit Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model)
03:29 Museums and Trust
06:10 Museums That Present Public Health Topics
06:38 The Ancient Americas | Field Museum (https://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibitions/robert-r-mccormick-halls-ancient-americas)
07:04 Northwest African American Museum (https://www.naamnw.org)
07:40 Visitor Experience at Outbreak
08:40 Museum Closings Because of COVID-19
10:10 Tiny Vampires Podcast (https://www.tinyvampires.com)
11:00 SPONSOR: Pigeon (https://pigeon.srisys.com/museums/)
12:30 Outro | Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago)
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Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS ?
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 78. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.



View Transcript



A few months ago, before reports of a new form of coronavirus now known as COVID-19 started appearing in the news, I visited an exhibit called Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

The exhibit laid out the coordinated detective work that public health workers and many other professionals do as they identify and respond to infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola virus, and influenza. There was even a touchscreen game that invited me to work cooperatively with other visitors to contain an ou