The thing was done in the library: Animating an early eighteenth-century murder mystery

摘要

In this article we explore Who Killed Sarah Stout? A Participatory Exhibit as a case study exploring how a multimodal approach to publishing special collections may facilitate dynamic engagement with historical evidence. Stout's murder in 1699 remains unsolved; framing the exhibit as a murder mystery, we consider several key goals: promoting critical engagement and use of primary source collections, advancing curricular and cocurricular learning, developing multimodal exhibitionary practices, creating learning opportunities through hybrid exhibitions, leveraging technology to generate new knowledge, and gaming as a mode of scholarly inquiry. The findings proved almost as interesting as the case itself.