Recognition

“At two interactive media tables, visitors can take part in activities that deal with diplomacy and the forming of alliances and the tactics and strategies of war. They can learn about aerial photography and camouflage, learn how a Lewis machine gun operated, create a propaganda poster, or take a crack at decoding the Zimmerman Telegram. The infamous German communiqué tried to persuade Mexico to go to war against the US, but served instead to fuel the American public’s anger toward Germany. Extensive diagrams, graphs, and maps throughout the galleries, along with a month-by-month timeline, relate factual information about the war. Animated video panels illustrate major battles.”

“There are interactive exhibits in which flashlights are used like mouse cursors to make selections on an illuminated table.”

“The Museum also has interactive stations where visitors ‘role play both making war and making peace,’ and a theater with a 100-foot screen playing rare film footage from the war.”

“The museum boasts a collection of more than 49,000 artists and uses interactive technology to tell the story of the war from those who lived through it.”

“The museum also seeks to wow the visitor with high-tech image displays and interactive features. Embedded in the curving lobby wall are 10 plasma screens from which the faces of more than 300 people who experienced the war—Kansas Citians and others—fade in and out of view.

In fact, video seems to be everywhere. There are fluid battlescape maps. The developments of the peace conference after the war can be followed on another screen.

Study tables let visitors play the role of national leaders during the war. They can make decisions and then see the consequences of their actions play out on display screens before them.

In other modes, the tables allow users to create their own war posters or memorial friezes, and then e-mail them.”

“In 2004 archival storage space was transformed to help create what is now called the National Archives Experience, which includes a permanent 9,000-square-foot exhibition—‘The Public Vaults’—about the impact of those founding documents. Here, awe is less the point than amazement. Exhibits touch on immigration and space exploration, Oval Office audiotapes and Congressional hearings. The archives provide the substance, but now original documents defer to facsimiles, touch screens, television broadcasts and interactive displays.”

“The museum is filled with interactive displays, and visitors can create their own personalized Bill of Rights and listen to the Founding Fathers detail the behind-the-scenes struggles over drafting documents such as the Constitution...At one display station, visitors can don headphones and listen to snippets of songs that were challenged or banned over the decades, including the Everly Brothers’ Wake Up Little Susie, Olivia Newton-John’s Physical, and yes, 2 Live Crew’s Me So Horny.”

“The museum is filled with interactive displays. Visitors can create their own personalized Bill of Rights or listen to actors portraying the Founding Fathers detail the behind-the-scenes struggles over drafting documents like the Constitution.”

“There is always a theatrical element in forensics, and that’s one of the themes of the show—visible proofs. It’s the idea that it’s not enough to make a proof that’s persuasive in an argument, you have to show it.”

“Almost as compelling as the stories behind the various displays is the manner in which they are presented. A metal table serves as a ‘virtual autopsy,’ with a high-resolution touch-screen displaying a computer-animated cadaver as it goes through the process. A nearby display includes an actual autopsy training video, illustrating the most graphic details of the anatomical dissection.”

“A white sheet shrouds an autopsy table, one of the first things you see as you enter Visible Proofs, a new exhibit that details the rise of forensic science as an authoritative field, with specialized tools for pinpointing whodunit (and when and how).”

“Visitors can also perform a virtual autopsy. ‘It sort of gives an autopsy for one to experience death and to see human remains,’ exhibit curator Mike Sappol said.”

“The interactive displays are where things really get interesting.”

“[T]he top 50 websites and web experiences for 2005.”