Increase and diffusion: early fossil exhibits and a history of institutional culture -- Group dynamics: exhibit meetings and expertise -- Group dynamics: the roots of team frictions and complementarities -- Content development: debates about interconnected processes and static things -- Content development: the roots of interpretive frictions and complementarities -- Diffusion and increase: shifts in institutional culture from modernization to now -- Conclusion -- Coda: the nation's T. rex
Summary
Extinct Monsters to Deep Time is an ethnography that documents the growing friction between the research and outreach functions of the museum in the 21st century. Marsh describes participant observation and historical research at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History as it prepared for its largest-ever exhibit renovation, Deep Time. As a museum ethnography, the book provides a grounded perspective on the inner-workings of the world's largest natural history museum and the social processes of communicating science to the public
