Emma Bornstein was “poking around” in the Bishop Museum library’s database and came across a photo of a woven hat. Reading through the accompanying background information, she found that it “was made out of wood shavings from Iolani Palace.”
“I was like, ‘Whoa, what does that mean? How did that happen?’ ” said Bornstein, a digital humanities specialist at the museum. “It kind of led down this rabbit hole, like when was this made, and that it wasn’t (from) the current palace, it was the original palace. … That’s how a lot of these stories go, it’s going down those rabbit holes.”
Now, thanks to a new digital project at the museum, members of the public can follow along as museum staff, curators and resource specialists burrow further into the rabbit holes of its vast collection. The project, called Mau ka Leo (roughly translated as Collective Voices), will bring to light countless untold stories that they’ve been aching to tell.
“The potential array for stories is just endless,” said museum historian DeSoto Brown, who has been with the museum for nearly 40 years since volunteering there as a teenager. “We have a sense of how many stories there are in the collections here that nobody knows, and it’s just because there’s (been) no way to get these stories out.”
Mau ka Leo is the most visible part of a major technology upgrade at the museum called the Digital Futures Initiative, which aims to eventually put the museum’s huge collection online in an easily accessible and informative way. It will open up the collection on a scale far exceeding anything that could be on display at any one time. The museum’s collection includes some 3 million cultural items such as archaeological artifacts, photographs, artworks, recordings, books and manuscripts, and 22 million biological specimens collected in Hawaii and the Pacific.
“If the public were to come on campus right now, they’re seeing less than 1% of our collection. So how do we make it really known that we actually have 25 million items in our care?” said Melissa Tulig, who as the museum’s director of informatics is overseeing the technological aspects of the initiative. (Informatics is an area of computer science that focuses on storing and retrieving data.)
Mau ka Leo, which the museum calls “a digital storytelling space,” recently went online at bishopmuseum.org/maukaleo. Throughout its various pages, it displays photos and brief stories grouped by theme. About 100 have been posted, with entries devoted in subject matter ranging from historic people, places and events; cultural artifacts like royal featherwear and implements; and traditional attire such as kapa or equestrian clothing worn by pa‘u riders. Museum staff expect to add new entries at least once a month.
The bite-size presentations bring a casual, almost “talk-story” quality to the collection, purposely eschewing the dry recitation of dates and names often found in museum displays. For example, the hat that caught Bornstein’s attention appears in an entry titled “Royal Hats from a Royal Home.” It includes three pictures, two of woven hats and one of the original Iolani Palace, which was made of wood and served as the royal residence from 1845 until the mid-1870s, when it was demolished to make way for the current brick-and-concrete palace.
The accompanying text, written by Bornstein, who has a background in library sciences and creative writing; Marques Marzan, the museum’s expert on fiber; and Brown, begins: “How do you wear a palace on your head? For two ali‘i wahine, this puzzling idea was achieved through a fusion of unique crafting and a deep connection to the past.” It then explains the significance of the hats as connecting the past with the owners of the hats, the Native Hawaiian princesses Bernice Pauahi Bishop and Ruth Ke‘elikolani.
There are no apparent criteria or framework dictating what items will appear in Mau ka Leo, other than that the museum has images and a good story to tell about them. Brown has taken a special interest in highlighting some of the museum’s color photos. “There are people who don’t react to black-and-white pictures because they look too old,” he said. “So if we can mix in color, all the better.”
He is working on one entry based on some color photos of people gathered at Waikiki on March 1, 1952. Until recently, he thought it was a generic crowd shot, but then he noticed that there were piles of snow among the people. He’s since found out that the local Lions Club held the event in an effort to have a ski resort built on Mauna Loa. The snow was flown in that morning from the Big Island and used in a snowball fight on the beach, with the proceedings broadcast worldwide on the “Hawaii Calls” radio show. The museum also had black-and-white photos of the event, he said.
“I was able to go online, and read the stories in the newspapers at the time to put it all together,” Brown said, “so this is one crazy story that I’ve got five pictures for to explain all this craziness.”
Relevance to present-day events is also taken into consideration. Brown recently came across several train tickets from the Oahu Railway and Land Co., which ran from 1889 to 1947, and found a fun connection between the old and new railways on Oahu.
“Three of the OR&L train stations used place names which the current Skyline rail is using,” he said. “They’re place names that aren’t familiar to us now because they haven’t been used very much. But I find it fascinating that there’s this continuation over 100 years later.”
Kamalu du Preez, a cultural resource specialist who has a particular interest in kapa, worked with Bornstein to put together an entry on ohe kapala, the carved bamboo strips that were coated in dye and pressed onto kapa to create patterns. Some of those patterns are being used by local fashion designers.
Du Preez sees Mau ka Leo as a way of presenting such items from a variety of perspectives, depending on who can chip in with some interesting information about them.
“When you take a piece of kapa, you’re looking at a thing that has so many different layers of knowledge,” she said. “So say a piece of kapa is maybe worn as a skirt, and you talk to someone from botany, they can talk about the actual plant that it’s made from. Or when we talk about the way that things are worn, we can respond to people in the hula community. … For me, kapa is exciting because if you’re looking at the community, kapa is something that has been worn in traditional times, but there’s a lot of relevance in the fashion community now.”
Her latest interest is in the kapa collection of Seth Andrews, a medical missionary who came to Hawaii in 1837 and eventually owned a large number of unusual kapa pieces. “They’re very different from some of the classical pieces that we see,” du Preez said. “They’re beautiful, but they’re different and so what does that represent? And how did he get that? Were people in the community giving him kapa as gifts, or was it to pay for medical treatment?”
The project, and the Digital Futures Initiative in general, is in keeping with a trend in museums to make their collections more relevant to the community, Tulig said. Public input about Mau ka Leo is welcome and expected as the number of entries grows and people find a personal connection with the items displayed.
“We’re actively trying to get all of our information centralized so that we can make all of it available to the public,” said Tulig, who prior to coming to Bishop Museum had overseen a similar project at the New York Botanical Garden. “Mau ka Leo is kind of a project where we’re not quite there yet (with) getting our collection online — we’re in the process — but it’s giving our public access to a piece of it to show the public where we’re headed, and how powerful that will be.”
