Industrial Revolution Exhibit

Being a curator during the museum curator project revealed  many important things about the job. As a curator I had to make sure I had a good understanding of how the industrial revolution affected everyday lives. Once I had knowledge about the material in my exhibit, it was important to discover details about each item in the exhibit and also make sure the exhibit would be effective for an audience.

As a curator the analysis process was essential to understanding the topic of my exhibit. Analyzing each document for my exhibit gave me a good understanding of the main topic and the significance of the examples shown in the exhibit. Being able to understand your own topic as a curator is important, but it’s even more important that your audience is able to understand and learn from the exhibit. Me and my group created an exhibit about how the industrial revolution changed peoples life. One source showed a map of Great Britain during the industrial revolution, and pointed out dates and places where inventions were made, many of the inventions changed lives drastically. A picture shows how the environment was effected by some new machines. The picture displays a polluted river with factories blowing out smoke in the background. Another source from our exhibit describes the negative effects of new inventions, saying that rivers during the time of the industrial revolution were murky and brown, and smelt terrible. Although there was some negative effects coming from the industrial revolution another source describes that there were some positive effects of the revolution that came with the negative effects. A chart in the exhibit shows the positive effects in the economy during the industrial revolution. Although the economy was improved many people were left in bad living conditions during that time as shown in a second picture in the exhibit. All of the sources displayed a change in the way people were living in the time of the industrial revolution so my group decided to call the exhibit “Changes to Life Conditions due to the Industrial Revolution”. We hope that our audience will be able to see how the industrial revolution affected people’s lives positively and negatively during that time.

Another groups exhibit about the industrial revolution was called “Fueling Transportation in the Industrial Revolution”. This exhibit described how the revolution made traveling easier because transportation took too long before. It also presented a problem between people who wanted faster transportation and those who wanted to save the environment but said that faster transportation was invented and successfully began. The next exhibit was called “A New Age is Looming Over the Horizon” and it explained how the loom advanced things and created a quicker way to make clothes.  I also learned from the exhibit that the invention of the loom increased the population of London because people wanted to be somewhere with new inventions and advancements but the exhibit explained that families were poor.  The exhibit called “Unlawful Conditions, Dangerous Workspaces, and Mistreated Children” taught me about the necessity of children working at such a young age in order to help provide for their poor families. The exhibit also showed a document with a law limiting the time that the children could work even though they were forced to work barefoot and were often injured because of it. The last exhibit was called “Weaving Slavery into the Industrial Revolution” and it showed that slavery increased during the industrial revolution because of a high demand of cotton and mass production. The poster said that when there was a lot of demand from consumers new machines were created and that led to more advancements during the industrial revolution.

All of the exhibits described some type of advancement during the industrial revolution. Each of the exhibits also displayed some type of conflict or problem that came out of the advancements including pollution, conflict between people, poor families, child labor, and slavery. So like my exhibit the advancements of the revolution had negative effects that came from the advancements.