WEEK 10 DATA REPORT: Show-and-Tell

Instead of having our normal Thursday lab, on Wednesday of Week 10 we had a Show and Tell where the guest artists from earlier in the term and passerby professors and students were invited to see what we’d been working on in class.

Each of the eight labs was presented by the pair that had written the lab summary that week, and so that meant that I was in charge of presenting wool dyeing. We had seven people come by our station: one artist, five professors/faculty and one student (not including students from our class who wandered by our station and we presented to).

Most other stations seemed to have similar turnouts, with the exception of the cheese station which got a lot of excitement at the beginning as a student presented the cheese he had been aging since the week 2 lab. Most people tried some, with the people who chose not to either having dietary restrictions or concern about the safety of the cheese. There were several different types to try, of varying taste and appearance, and, out of the large number of people who tasted the cheese, only one was noted as having anything bad to say. The general consensus was that this person must have gotten a bad piece. Even the ice cream social participants we were sharing the space with tried some, which was fortunate because their ice cream tipped over quite dramatically partway through.

A lot of the people who came by our station already had background knowledge on the topics, and this was evident in the questions they asked which were different from what the general public might have asked us. There was one faculty member and one professor from history, one professor from archaeology, one faculty from the arb office, one woodworker, and two unknown. We were asked questions about mordants and which part of the plant different dyes came from, and although we tried to be prepared, we were still confronted with some questions we didn’t know the answer to, as often happens at these sorts of events. Overall, though, we had a good time, and it was fun to remember back to all the labs we’d done throughout the term, especially the earliest labs when we knew a lot less about things like data recording and what to be looking for in our experiments.