Knowledge Creation and the Conversation

As a Historic Preservationist, specifically the storyteller of historic buildings, I really found the idea that artifacts “are not knowledge but rather things that result from a knowledge activity” very interesting.  I have always believed that artifacts have a story to tell and we, as people, just need to take the time to read the artifact to know the story.  The statement that artifacts are not knowledge pretty much takes this belief that I have had since a child and turns it upside down which I think is a good thing.  I was looking at the knowledge being recorded in the object not in myself.  I like what Dave’s says “knowledge is resident in humans not in inanimate objects.”  It took a specific mind set for a farmer to build his barn and house and because of my knowledge I can see what the farmer was thinking as he built his farm.  The farm does not hold the knowledge the farmer did and I do hold that knowledge and the farm is just an object that helps the farmer speak to me through time.  I like this idea so much better than my original idea that artifacts are story’s waiting to be read.

This new perspective of how knowledge is not held by the artifact by held by the people who hold or talk about the artifact just empowers me even more in my belief that through teaching and talking we, the public, have the power to change trends, outcomes and/or people.  I like how Dave says “grounding libraries in knowledge, we gain an inheritance not of quiet bookishness but of explosive power to shape how people see the world.”  I feel that if I am in the role of Historic Preservationist or Librarian or both at the same time, I am a vehicle for change.