Calliope’s Cabinet: An Exploration of Curious Innovations Through the Ages.
The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation
Calliope’s Cabinet: An Exploration of Curious Innovations Through the Ages.
A video series launched by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, and Emory Libraries, 2022-2023.
New episodes will post throughout the academic year. You may view them individually, or SUBSCRIBE to receive all new episodes.
The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, and Emory Libraries launched Calliope’s Cabinet: An Exploration of Curious Innovations Through the Ages in 2022. This new video series seeks to inspire Emory innovators and connect them to Emory University Libraries resources by showcasing unusual and thought-provoking archival material from deep in Emory’s collections.
“There is a current tendency to equate innovation with technology and entrepreneurship. But it’s more historically accurate, and ultimately more helpful, to understand innovation as the purposeful development of novel and valuable solutions to human needs. This show takes its inspiration from the Renaissance ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ fad, which showcased such human innovations—and a great number of oddities that were thought-provoking but hard to classify through classical thought.”
– Shannon Clute, PhD, Director of The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation.
Each video focuses on a particular innovation, and features an Emory expert discussing when and where it was invented, what problem it was intended to solve, what made it innovative, how it was received, what eventually replaced it, and why it is still of conceptual value to innovators today.
As of October 2022, there are seven episodes focused on the following objects: John Wesley’s personal journal, Victorian yellowbacks, artists’ books, the first accurate book of human anatomy, a Civil War surgeon’s field kit, Martin Luther’s 1522 translation of the New Testament into German from its original Greek, and the history of Graffiti and the Jack Stewart collections.
