Course Description

“It belongs in a museum!”… Sure, but why? Museums are often represented as cavernous, inaccessible warehouses where precious objects go to be locked away forever, gathering dust in the name of “preservation”. The truth is far from this – these carefully curated repositories of objects not only maintain the historical record of the research that led to the objects’ collection, but also multiply the utility of the objects manyfold by storing their metadata and allowing their use to answer other questions, often entirely beyond that which their original collector envisioned. The questions that museum collections can be used to answer are often only limited by the vision of the researchers looking to study them. And yet for all their wonder and mystique, museum collections, often disciplinarily ringfenced, remain an underutilized resource. 

In this class, in collaboration with an NSF-funded interdisciplinary group of graduate students, we will take a look at a number of the incredible museum collections on campus at UNM, learn why they were collected, and spend time pooling our collective expertise and imagination to develop completely new, interdisciplinary research projects to answer unthought of questions from these repositories of objects. You will learn a range of skills and ways of thinking from each of the disciplines whose collections we will study and then think about how to apply what you have learnt to collections from other disciplines: How can the way we think about connecting data in a collection of fish genetic data provide insight into a collection of potsherds? You will also work throughout the semester to develop your own interdisciplinary research proposal in a style suitable for submission to an external funding agency!

One of the most exciting aspects of this class is the opportunity to bring all of our different expertise together to solve problems that none of us could individually. The interdisciplinary nature of this class means that *no one* is an expert on everything we will discuss, and *everyone* has important ideas and insight they can bring to the table. While the collections we will focus on from UNMs museums will be science-orientated, as will most of the instructing faculty, we are excited to see what ideas students from anywhere on (or off!) campus have to ask novel questions of these objects. The more diverse the points of view we can bring to bear on these collections, the more exciting the class will be!

Texts

Your instructors were not able to find a single textbook that captured all the topics and ideas in this course. Consequently, there is no required textbook. Instead, we will provide book chapters and readings from primary literature.

Requirements

The class will start with three modules where you will collaborate with other members of the class to develop new avenues of research for existing amazing collections of museum objects on campus, summarised in a short proposal pitch, called a "1 pager". The main part of the course is a 8-10 page NSF-style funding proposal for an interdisciplinary collections-based research project of your own, developed throughout the semester.

About the Instructor(s): Jason Moore

Jason has been working at the Honors College for nearly 10 years, using palaeontology and geology to teach the key skills behind science and research. He has a 25-year history of creating and working with museum collections (primarily vertebrate fossils), but this program has opened his eyes to some of the myriad of things that he didn’t do with all those specimens!