Museum Archipelago

78. How Museums Present Public Health with Raven Forest Fruscalzo

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 01:06 Raven Forest Fruscalzo 01:45 Public Health 02:08 Information Deficit Hypothesis 03:29 Museums and Trust 06:10 Museums That Present Public Health Topics 06:38 The Ancient Americas | Field Museum 07:04 Northwest African American Museum 07:40 Visitor Experience at Outbreak 08:40 Museum Closings Because of COVID-19 10:10 Tiny Vampires Podcast 11:00 SPONSOR: Pigeon 12:30 Outro | Join Club Archipelago Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦 This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SRISYS Inc - an innovative IT Apps Development Company with its Smart Products like Project Eagle - an agile messaging platform and PIGEON - a real-time, intelligent platform that uncovers the power of wayfinding for your museum, enabling your visitors to maximize their day at your venue. Using SRISYS's Pigeon, the museum's management can gather real-time data for managing space effectively about visitors while improving their ROI through marketing automation. Visitors can navigate the maze of a museum with ease, conduct automated and personalized tours based on their interest, RSVP for events, and get more information about the exhibits in front of them. Pigeon is a flexible platform and can be customized to work for your museum. And because the platform takes advantage of low-cost Beacon technology, the app works offline as well! This means less data transmission costs for the museum and bigger savings for visitors when using this app outside their home territory. Click here find out how Pigeon can help your museum . 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 outbreak before it spread further. Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: So the funny thing about public health and a lot of the scientists that contribute to the knowledge that public health workers use, is that if you're doing everything right, nobody realizes that you're doing it right. It's the opposite of a glamorous job. This is Raven Forest Fruscalzo, a professional science communicator and writer who works as a content developer and production assistant at the Field Museum in Chicago, and hosts the excellent science podcast, Tiny Vampires. Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: Hello, my name is Raven Forrest Fruscalzo, I am the host of the Tiny Vampires podcast and my day job is at the Field Museum here in Chicago. So

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